Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 3
After a horrendous second season, Shield Hero is back, but I can’t decide if it’s fully bounced back. Right of rip, this season already has better animation and fight scenes than the last season, but that’s not really saying much to be honest. Season 3, although I guess being better written overall than Season 2, feels directionless. You see, the first season mainly focused on Naofumi’s revenge storyline, while the second was devoted (partially) to the Spirit Tortoise and Kizuna’s world. This season doesn’t have the same kind of focal point for the writing to hone in on like its predecessors. If I were topiece together whatever connective tissue there is in this season, it’s that Naofumi and friends have to bring back the other three Legendary Heroes so that they can prepare for the Phoenix (whatever that means). Yeah this season is basically just a bunch of side quests with Naofumi’s party so they can add more characters to his slave harem. By the way, this show still is trying to justify slavery, and even goes further with Naofumi gaining even more slaves to run his village. Yeah, that’s pretty fucked up.
As for the other heroes this season focuses on, I guess we get some depth to them, which is good I guess. The same can be said for some of the new supporting cast in this season, however I wouldn’t say that these characters are interesting at all. However, what made this season so hard for me to sit through has to be the dialogue. I don’t know what happened, but some of the lines in this season made me lose faith in storytelling in general, such as “everyone has their own sense of justice”. Lines like that, toppled with the fact that there were some episodes that got really preachy, made it difficult for me to finish a newly aired episode in one sitting. But the one thing that really brings this season down a lot is the fact that the show constantly name drops something called the “Phoenix”, which I guess is meant to be some world-ending threat that the 4 Legendary Heroes have to defeat together, however I have no clue what this Phoenix is. The anime keeps name dropping it but doesn’t even bother to tell us what it even is. Like I genuinely have no reason to care about this potential threat. Besides the trash dialogue, the actual writing for the smaller plotlines are better than the entirety of last season, but there’s less direction here. Again, I’m not sure if Shield Hero really recovered from Season 2. I’d say Season 3 is better, but not by much.