Review of Food Wars! The Fourth Plate
The Fourth Plate was not only the hardest challenge for our heroes, but also for the writers. It is THE gauntlet arc, comparable to the Tournament of Power in Dragon Ball Super, where every encounter matters, as any setbacks will have lasting effects on the overall mission. Since the title of this anime is "Food Wars", although "Fourth Plate" played out very differently from the previous seasons, due to the context, everything before has been building up to this moment: an entire season of Food Wars, back to back, to back. Did they deliver? Well, the show is still extremely hilarious, and epic in it'sdirectorship, giving this season a 9 in the Art and Enjoyment categories. I have not read the source material myself, but I will go out on a limb and say that they truly brought to manga to life, which sounds obvious, because it's animated, but let me explain. In certain manga, since the shots are still, faces can be exaggerated to convey more emotion to compensate. In the anime, characters like Soma are allowed to occasionally walk around with the same silly and exaggerated faces, which makes it feel like he is a 2D element in the 3D world, which works well because of the comedy.
Secondly, during the erotic taste-reaction scenes, in a manga there would be a still page that you could look at for a while if it really caught your eye, and the anime played with this idea as well. There were moments when the camera would drag down to the bosom of an overstimulated judge, pan back up to her face, but then slide right back to the real meat of the scene. Tongue-in-cheek for sure!
However, Fourth Plate really struggled to integrate all of the new characters, and tried to give them all compelling backstories instead of focusing on the food. In the past, we were able to learn about a chef's cooking by seeing their training in the kitchen as they worked to express themselves with their final dish, but in Fourth Plate, the level of cooking is so high, unfortunately this factor was taken for granted. Dishes were just expected. Through the flashback scenes, we merely got the new character's past on the plate, but it wasn't a a gift in the present.
To make matters worse, even the original cast weren't supplemented well through this season. Character development was either minuscule, or outright foreign or contrary to what was previously developed for the character. This would all be excusable if the ending bout was juicy enough, but in fact it felt so rushed that it made beefing up the other characters pointless. Since there were so many battles with so many dishes, none of it was very memorable in the end. Fourth Plate is a blur of food, flattening it's Story and Character scores to a five.
The opening/endings aren't that great either, but the music in the show is still quite saucy, landing it a 7 in the sound department, and with all the other scores in tallied up, the fourth season of Food Wars gets an average of 7 as well, which I must round down to a 6 since my enjoyment of the foodgasm scenes might be inflating the real score. In a nutshell, still hilarious for the fans, but not one you'd want to show to your friends.