Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon? Season 4 Part 2 Review

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? currently has its fifth anime season on air, which should have finished already but is still airing slowly due to production delays. In the meantime, Season 4 has been making its way to home video and today I’m here to review Part 2 of those releases. Let’s take a look!

Part 1 of Season 4 left us on a terrifying cliffhanger as we watched Bell and Ryu plunge into the depths of the dungeon during their fight with the Lambton. Originally they were on the 27th floor of the Dungeon, which was already filled with terrifying enemies but now they’ve fallen to the 37th floor. With little in the way of equipment and badly injured from their time on the 25th-27th floor, this is a very bad situation for the two to find themselves in.

Not only is the 37th floor home to powerful monsters the likes of which Bell has never faced before, but when the Lambton brought them down here, the Juggernaut followed and that’s an enemy that neither Bell nor Ryu want to run into again. Even with a party of top-tier adventurers, trying to take down the Juggernaut seems near impossible. Still, if they don’t keep moving, they know the enemy will track them down so Bell and Ryu wander through the Dungeon in the desperate hopes of finding the stairs that will allow them to return to the upper levels and reunite with their teammates that have been left behind.

These 11 episodes all adapt a single volume of the original light novels, Volume 14. Not only is it a long book, but capturing the atmosphere of it is of utmost importance to depict the breadth of emotion contained in Fujino Omori’s writing. So, I’m glad that studio J.C Staff decided to dedicate the entire run to this book as it has come out all the better for it.

Bell and Ryu are completely alone down on the 37th floor with no hope of being rescued, so they have to fend for themselves. But with both being injured and exhausted, this causes their anxiety to swell. And things aren’t much better for Bell’s party who have powerful enemies of their own to fend off before they can even consider trying to rescue their beloved leader.

Ryu at least has some understanding of the area they’re in and the fearsome monsters that roam, so she can at least give Bell advice but she’s struggling to even defend herself, let alone protect him from harm. And that’s the worst possible situation for Ryu as someone who’s already lost her entire familia due to powerlessness. Bell puts on a brave face, but he’s out of his depth. Still, he won’t let Ryu die down here and he’s willing to put his very life on the line to ensure that doesn’t happen.

In some ways, this is the darkest DanMachi has ever been as it explores the anxiety, fear and sheer desperation that Bell and Ryu are going through. Given the series continues, I knew Bell at least wasn’t at risk of being killed off, but despite knowing that, the anime does a good job of convincing you that absolutely anything could happen and that keeps you on your toes as you go through each episode.

Credit to J.C Staff here as they went all-in on ensuring the readers felt these emotions as strongly as the light novel readers. Compared to prior seasons, the art direction changes subtly to make use of darker colours that better portray the severity of the situation. There’s a real sense of terror surrounding the Juggernaut too as it’s often heard but not seen, striking fear into the hearts of our heroes. Of course, the action scenes still look fabulous as well, although I don’t feel the climax of the season is as good as fights we’ve seen before or have recently seen in Season 5.

Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (Kirito in Sword Art Online, Inosuke in Demon Slayer) and Saori Hayami (Shinobu in Demon Slayer, Yor Forger in Spy x Family) play Bell and Ryu respectively. Both actors have always done a great job with their characters, but this arc depends on rawer emotion for the two as they struggle with keeping their mental health stable in the face of such overwhelming odds of survival. Both Matsuoka and Hayami deliver some of the best acting we’ve seen from either of them throughout these four seasons, ensuring we understand and sympathise with Bell and Ryu. There is an English dub present for this release as well, but having never watched DanMachi dubbed, I can’t particularly speak to the quality of that.

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Season 4 Part 2 comes to the UK thanks to MVM Entertainment who have released it as a standard Blu-ray release. As stated earlier, Season 5 is currently airing in Japan so there are no home video releases for that yet in the US or UK, but given the popularity of the series hopefully, we’ll see that within the next year or so. In the meantime, you can watch it on HIDIVE.

Overall, this half of DanMachi Season 4 is some of the best content in the entire series as our heroes find themselves in such an unforgiving situation. It has been brought to life wonderfully by the cast and crew, so both anime-only fans and those familiar with the light novels will enjoy watching it.

Our review copy was supplied by MVM.