Anime Spotlight #40: Date A Live

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Animeister

Today, we're talking about Date A Live, a light-novel (though you wouldn't know it from the short title) written by Kōshi Tachibana that received a sequel, five spin-off manga, roughly five video games, and a five-season anime (because this series likes the number five, apparently) with two movies. I recently watched the final episode of the anime and decided to break my "I don't wanna read television" rule so I could give the movies (which still do not have dubs after all these years) a fair shake as well.

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To start with, here's my brief review of the first two seasons FROM June 17, 2018 (Anime-BAW #3: Harem Genre (Part 2)):

Average: Date A Live (II)--This series is what Cat Planet Cuties should have been. Instead of alien cat girls, there are extradimensional beings (scantily armored, super-powered female warriors, of course) called "Spirits," whose presence and energy output on Earth cause highly destructive "spatial quakes." The series protagonist is a common high school boy named Shido Itsuka who just happens to have the power to neutralize Spirit energy by getting the Spirits to fall in love with him and kiss him. Similar to Cat Planet Cuties, the protagonist's sister and classmate are (of course) secret government agents tasked with protecting the city from spatial quakes. And similar to Cat Planet Cuties, the series' logic and physics are laughably insane, but more tolerably so simply because Date A Live has better character development, a stronger harem element, better writing, better humor, and better just about everything else. There is an OVA (Original Video Animation) that I haven't seen yet, but given what I've read about it, this series still needs a third season to wrap up the loose ends with Kurumi. Because of the series mechanics, Shido cannot choose a girl or he risks alienating the other Spirits and destroying the world when they all Invert from sadness, and is therefore perpetually stuck in a speed-dating loop of harem tropes until he dies. At least it's clear who he would choose if he could, and his choice not to choose is a consequence of the series' structure, not because he's a noncommittal asshole.

For some elaboration, the Spirits from the first season are Tohka, an initially unnamed girl with dark hair, purple armor, and a huge sword (her Angel, Sandalphon); Yoshino, a shy child with ice powers who wears a green bunny hoodie and prefers to express her true feelings through her rabbit hand-puppet, Yoshinon (her Angel); Kurumi, a ruthless time-traveler who dresses in gothic lolita attire and dual-wields a musket and flintlock pistol that allow her to focus the time-manipulation powers of her Angel, Zaphkiel, and because of her cloning ability, she cannot yet be sealed by Shido; and Kotori, Shido's adoptive sister with uncontrollable fire powers. In her normal form, she runs the secret government organization, Ratatoskr, that uses dating sim mechanics to help Shido seal Spirits. In Spirit form, she manifests something like a shrine maiden outfit, and seems to lose control of her personality and powers, so after she's sealed, Kotori relies more on Ratatoskr's resources than her own Spirit powers.

Also somewhat important to the first season are Origami (an undercover government agent bent on killing Spirits because of a tragic event from her past that she thinks Kotori was responsible for, and she has...unusual romantic feelings for Shido), Mana (Origami's comrade on the Anti-Spirit-Team, who is also secretly Shido's biological sister despite their last names being different), Reine (a soft-spoken Ratatoskr technician who calls Shido "Shin" for some reason) and Ai, Mai, and Mii (who provide the series' catchphrase gimmick for the first two seasons before it drops off in frequency in favor of a tonal shift and a greater focus on story).

In the second season, we're introduced to a villain organization called D.E.M. with as-yet-undefined plans for the Spirits, we learn what Kurumi's ultimate goal is (to kill the Spirit Of Origin), and we get some new Spirits to add to the harem: Twins named Yuzuru and Kaguya (the latter voiced by Brittany Karbowski in the dub) who cause windstorms when they fight each other, dress in bondage-like armor, and can combine their weapons into a bow-and-arrow Angel called Raphael; and Miku, a pop idol with siren powers who likes girls (because if Shido kissing the clothes off an underage girl and his own stepsister in the first season wasn't Japraved enough, let's add a cross-dressing date into the mix). The season finale introduces the concept of Inversion (a Spirit experiencing something so traumatic that their Angel becomes a Demon Lord and they get new Spirit armor and lose their memories, effectively becoming a new character) and reveals that Isaac Westcott (the leader of D.E.M.) may know the reason behind the whole Shido/Mana/Shin/Takamiya name thing.

Date A Live: Mayuri Judgment: Just when I thought I was done with Moonfall, I watch this movie, wherein a new spirit (the titular Mayuri - which is Japanese for "pea-hen") arrives and a mysterious, giant ball appears over the city, which only Shido can see and it seems to be made of the combined energies of the six Spirits he sealed in the first two seasons. So, Shido must speed-date them all one by one to resolve their subconscious jealousies (because that totally makes sense), with Mayuri witnessing the outcomes of each date and the orb gradually losing energy...until Mayuri's own subconscious jealousy activates her biblically accurate Angel anyway and Shido and the girls have to fight it. Also, it's interesting that Reine seems to know this orb is an Angel called the Cherubiel protocol, even though this movie isn't really canon. Basically, it's a short feature-length episode (like, maybe a two- or three-episode arc minus commercials) with increased production values and your typical, "the final boss fight is never over" third act with Tohka getting a new form from the power of friendship and cutting Cherubiel really hard with her two big anime swords. I like the new characters' designs, and though I usually skip musical interludes in things like this, I was impressed at the opening Miku concert being hand-drawn (with some CGI background elements) instead of relying on visibly incongruous 3D character models to handle the intricate dance choreography. Not hard canon, but the story is decent, the comedy and action are on or above par with what the first seasons had to offer, and the runtime didn't overstay its welcome.

I didn't watch the first two seasons at the time they came out, and the review for them had been sitting on my hard drive for a few years before I published it on here in 2018, but I still had to wait a while for a third installment (the real-time release gap was five years). Here, FROM March 23, 2019 (State Of the Ticketmaster Address, 2019), is my brief review of the third season:

Date A Live III, the third season of a harem anime that I previously gave the BAW treatment to last year, is the opposite of the two harem selections above, in that it's more indulgent in Japanese depravity (comic relief nudity and relationships that involve considerable age gaps, pseudo-relatives, and yuri fanservice pretty much covers it). But the extent of said indulgence does little to take away from the series actually having a good plot, decent character development arcs, epic fight sequences, and good overall pacing. The second arc of this season is my favorite, as it pretty much ensures we will get a DAL IV, relies on character-driven action rather than harem shenanigans, and puts focus on Kurumi, the series' bloodthirsty, time-manipulating antiheroine who so hooked me in season two.

The age gap problem is back in the third season, with a new Spirit named Natsumi who has shape-shifting powers and looks like the typical, "overdesigned slutty witch with sombrero-sized witch hat" character you see in a lot of fantasy and isekai anime...but she's just a shy, insecure child like Yoshino, so it's gross that the series spends at least four episodes on Shido trying to seal her. Things really get interesting in the second half of the season, as we see "Phantom" (a glitchy Spirit who is also the Spirit Of Origin that Kurumi has been trying to kill) turn Origami into a Spirit. The truth of her parents' death that was hinted at in Kotori's arc from Season 1 is revealed in a convoluted but engaging plot that involves time travel (which is where Kurumi's much-welcome return comes into play), alternate realities, and the second Spirit Inversion in the series. But then the season "finale" totally shits the bed by having Shido's absorbed Spirit power turn him into Emo Peter Parker, so the girls have to speed-date him to seal him back to normal.

I think there was a plan to do Date A Live IV in 2021, but for obvious and diplomatically unstated reasons, it was pushed back to 2022, and the extra year shows in the quality, even though there's slightly less emphasis on action this time in favor of telling a compelling story. We get two new Spirits this season: a mangaka named Nia who went missing when she was kidnapped by D.E.M., and is revealed to be the "captive Spirit" Kurumi had spent part of the last season looking for. I like how Shido and the girls' efforts to seal her don't come down to a typical date, but instead involve the gang creating a manga of the first three seasons of the show to give Nia a 2D version of Shido to understand and fall in love with because she's super-devoted to her craft and her time as a D.E.M. prisoner didn't leave her with a positive impression of real-world people. As a subversion of expectations and an escalation of threat level, Nia reading about Shido and the girls ends up triggering her PTSD and causing her to Invert...which was all part of Westcott's plan to gain access to her Demon Lord, a book called Beelzebub that gives the wielder omniscience and foresight (and the ability to later create artificial Spirits from Beelzebub's pages and trap the girls in an alternate reality where 2D Shido has to rescue them, which was some pretty clever batshit), turning him from just another anti-Spirit faction leader into a legitimate threat who requires strategy and teamwork to circumvent. And that's way more plot (and longevity) than anyone could have expected from a harem series about a guy who kisses women's clothes off. Because of her omniscience powers (even though they're limited now), Nia knows the name of the Spirit Of Origin (Mio Takamiya!) and that all Spirits, even if they believe that they are pure Spirits, were once human. Oh, yeah; one more Spirit, and she's gone to the one place that hasn't been korrupted by kapitalizm...SPAIEZE! Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's hands-off for D.E.M. so the scale of the season's first big effects-heavy action setpiece (aside from the spectacle of Nia's Inversion) is on a Star Wars level, but also with a heavy reliance on CGI spaceship models in between the character moments with Shido, the girls, and the new Spirit, Mukuro, whose Angel is a Kingdom Hearts-sized key called Michael that lets her lock and unlock memories and abilities and manipulate physics (specifically the rotation of the Earth, which somehow makes the fourth season of this trashy harem cartoon from Japan have more compelling stakes than half of Roland Emmerich's filmography). Moreover, we get a cool resolution for the Mukuro arc that involves the alternate timeline Origami from last season, the return of Inverted Tohka from Date A Live II, and a tragic backstory that pretty effectively grounds Mukuro from the physics-warping, mind-manipulating space deity she was introduced as, and for once in the history of fiction, I don't mind the nerf that much. Speaking of making characters relatable, it's Kurumi time! We learn that her series-spanning mission to acquire Shido's power and kill the Spirit Of Origin began when the Spirit Of Origin (a.k.a. Phantom, the glitchy Spirit from Date A Live III, a.k.a. Mio Takamiya) made her into a Spirit and tasked her with hunting down "monsters" (Mio's failed Spirit-creation experiments), one of which was revealed to be Kurumi's childhood friend, Sawa (remember that name for later). At some point during over two hundred loops (or branching timelines?) of trying to stop D.E.M. from killing Shido so she could kill him herself, Kurumi fell in love with him and found a different reason to keep him alive. Also, major cliffhanger reveal if you don't have the benefit of hindsight or keep forgetting that this trashy dating sim-inspired harem anime has lore to keep track of, but surprise! The Spirit Of Origin has been Reine the entire time! And there are two of her!

Date A Bullet might be my favorite piece of Date A Live content. It's an hour-long "movie" split into two half-hour episodes, and as the title suggests, it's Kurumi-focused. Specifically, it's Schoolgirl Kurumi, the clone who was killed in the first season (and again in the "Kurumi Star Festival/Encore" OVA because she survived being shot and pushed off a roof somehow). We know this from her inner monologue and dialogue with a memory of Sawa, wherein she mentions wanting to return to the real world and reunite with the one she fell in love with. After waking from this dream, Kurumi finds herself dropped in the middle of "the Neighboring World," a sort of afterlife where pseudo-Spirits (presumably Spirits who were made from humans) who died on other planes of existence fight to the death for the opportunity to be granted a wish. These new, movie-only Spirits range from generic ninja with ponytail and schoolgirl with giant sword to frilly psycho princess and over-designed Queen's Blade extra with giant Resident Evil meat-tenderizer axe. But the important ones are under-designed, timid sidekick girl, mysterious cat, and Queen (a Spirit with similar powers to Kurumi who uses a sword and dresses like Communist dictator Weiss from the RWBY: Ice Queendom anime, making me want to see a Death Battle - yes, that's coming back, too, apparently - between Kurumi and Weiss). I didn't entirely understand the "Queen is the part of Kurumi she abandoned" aspect of the plot, and if you get how foreshadowing works, it's way too easy to figure out the twists of who's who at the end. But the opening instrumental is banger-level rock, the action is simple but beautiful (which helps the almost non-stop pacing of Date A Bullet not feel like sensory overload), the canon mostly makes sense, and in around an hour of runtime, this franchise does the death game genre proud where countless entire series have failed.

And now, it all ends. No more new Spirits, and no room for generic harem comedy shenanigans (though we do get a final "Line 1, Line 2, That's so lame" - or simply "Gross" in the original English-subbed Japanese because the word for gross has three syllables - from Ai, Mai, and Mii). If you forgot the cliffhanger from last season (and who any of the big D.E.M. characters were) like I did in the two-year release gap, the dramatic irony of Shido and the girls finding out that Reine is the Spirit Of Origin, and the "reveal" that there are two of her will hit differently than it probably should have. I spent most of the early episodes here with my brain on catch-up mode and my eyes rolling back in my head at the laughably cheap-looking RWBY Volume 1 with no facial outlines CGI models that get used here to save time and money on animating Shido and the girls in group conversation shots. As for the story, there are four things of importance to talk about. First is the "all is lost" sequence where Reine and Mio (because there were two of them) reunite as the Spirit Of Origin and spend several episodes no-selling the pseudo-Spirits' attacks and killing them one by one to reclaim their Sephira (Spirit energy crystals) into herself for reasons that I will talk about shortly. Next is the flashbacks. Through the course of the season, we learn that Isaac Westcott is an ancient, sociopathic wizard who hates humanity for wiping out his people, so he and the other future co-founders of D.E.M. summon a Spirit Of Origin to replace the world he hates with a new one. Westcott falls in love with her, but she rejects him and escapes into the new world where she is taken in by Mana Takamiya and her brother, Shinji, who looks and sounds like a young Shido, and they give the Spirit the name of Mio Takamiya, with Shinji and Mio eventually developing feelings for each other because we haven't done the pseudo-relative romance angle in three seasons. But Westcott soon locates Mio, and Shinji is killed in the crossfire when D.E.M. tries to capture her. So she remakes the world again, creating Shido from Shinji's corpse and turning him into a vessel for her power so that she can revive Shinji some day, which is why Reine calls him Shin all the time, how she knew about Mayuri's Angel in the first movie, and why she has been the only prominent female character to never become a Spirit: she already was one. Next is the Kurumi stuff. Original Kurumi finally joins the fight, giving even more final stakes to the final season's final fights...finally. Although she dies when Mio does a Cronenberg chestburster out of her, Kurumi Prime's final act of defiance is to kiss Shido, passing her Angel to him so that he can go back in time and take Reine on a date to seal her powers...which doesn't work because she loves the fragmented ideal memory of Shinji too much and she's pissed that Shido tricked her into a power-sealing date. The original timeline's events start to repeat themselves, with Mio trying to take back the girls' powers. This leads to the return of Schoolgirl Kurumi (hinting that she managed to kill her way to the host of the Neighboring World's death game and claim her wish after the events of Date A Bullet), Nia getting her full power back from Westcott, and the long-simmering reveal that Tohka (the first Spirit Shido ever sealed, the first one to Invert - because of Shido's presumed death, by the way - and the only Spirit he ever had to name) is a direct descendant of Mio rather than a human made into a Spirit like the others. Which brings us to the Big One: Mio allows Shido to kiss him, and they enter an alternate reality where Reine, Mio, Shinji's remnant, and Shido attempt to reconcile their feelings, buying a defeated Westcott enough time to cast a spell binding himself to their domain and transforming himself into an Inverse Spirit Of Origin. In an enemy of convenience alliance, Mio joins forces with Shido and the Spirits to defeat Westcott with the Power Of Friendship and a big, shiny punch in the face, in a sequence that does a good job of showcasing what the girls can do to enhance each other's abilities when everyone is working together for once. But Westcott has one last, world-ending contrivance to pull out of his ass-sleeve, forcing a one-on-one between him and Mio that ends with one of the best "you're not my type" shutdowns since the last time I watched the Fishman Island arc of One Piece (it's a big-longy like Marineford, but slower paced so it'll be awhile before I finish it, let alone have a Multi-Piece post written about it). Shido comes to her aid after the finishing blow and kisses Mio, sealing her powers. We see in the closing credits that all the girls are back to being normal humans and Shido is with Tohka, meaning that all is right in the world and it is possible to end a harem series on a definitive, committal note without the threat of it reverting to a world-ending meteorological pattern of trope episodes, accidental sexual assault, miscommunication, propriety-repressed feelings, and genital-crushing slapstick comedy...or accidentally on purpose fucking one's own sister. Please don't demonetize me.

I never expected to invest this much time or energy into...this, but I have no regrets. Date A Live is one of those franchises that can surprise you with its depth and scale by growing with its audience from a generic, trashy harem action-comedy with no regard for logistics or physics and slightly more regard for taste, into a time, space, and reality-spanning romantic tragedy with even less regard for logistics and physics that learns to play with its formulaic roots and establish and maintain engaging lore and stakes for the world and its characters alike.

All I have left to say is Kurumi will always be Date A Live Best Girl, Tohka will always be second, thank Mio there's a satisfying ending, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder because my omniscient book knows you haven't already, leave your dating advice in the comments at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so my wallet doesn't invert from emptiness, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive up-to-Date news on my Spirit-sealing content.

Animeister,

Out A Live.