Beastars Final Season Part 2

I've been a fan of the series ever since I started watching it on October 2019, it's really sad to see it end 6 and a half years later.
Even though the 1st season was the best in terms of pacing and storytelling, all of them were good and entertaining, I did preferred the changes made to the storyline and ending for this season compared to the manga version which had some poor questionable ideas in my opinion.
Still, It's sad to see that there's no other show or movie like it with such an unique concept (yeah I know there's stuff like Zootopia, but it's ... lacking the dark/mature storytelling of Beastars and its unique Japanese flavour).

As a fan I feel empty inside after having watched it end after so long, at least I'm happy to see it was successful enough for Netflix to commission Orange to fully adapt the manga into 4 full seasons (it's called Final Season for marketing purposes, but we know it's technically 4 seasons).
I mean, there are thousands of animes being released every year which barely get 1 or 2 seasons at most, at least Beastars managed to be fully adapted which was helped by the fact that it had Disney-like talking anthropomorphic animals as protagonists which is something that it's popular in the West, otherwise if it had your typical generic human anime protagonists it would've flopped for sure.

Here's hoping the show continues to have at least decent streaming numbers for years to come, and we eventually get some sort of sequel or OVAs for it.

While I didn't disliked the manga's original ending, I felt they had a chance to fix it (since most of the problems with the original manga's ending were results of Paru being rushed to end the manga) and specially with some changes I saw in the first half of the Final Season, I was really hopeful, and... I was sorely disappointed;

While the first episodes of this half were pretty strong, the moment I saw I was on episode 8 (or 20 of this Final Season as a whole) and we weren't even touching in some of the bits of the manga, I feared they would ... rush through it, and I was right in a sense. Not only they removed a whole arc of the final stretch of the manga, a lot of plot points seemed to come out of nowhere, and were solved uncerimoniously either by convenience, or by straight-up explanation dump;

The whole bit at the end of the final episode of many plot points being tied up in a narration during the credits also didn't sat well with me. As I said, I liked some changes in the first half, but in this one those were either underutilized, same for some changes added in this half, or came out of nowhere and were solved as blunt and anticlimatic as they were introduced;

I felt a lot of plot points that were anime-only also were left unresolved, like they were there just for "flavor" but weren't actually developed well enough. So yeah a bit of a letdown, specially for a series who had such strong previous seasons, and a somewhat strong start on this final season's second half start.

4.5/10

Beastars Final Season part 2 is incredibly frustrating. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a train wreck of a final act, but there was definitely a derailment at some point that eventually led to a giant clustermolest of an ending. Several characters, Legoshi in particular, start taking stupid pills in order to make mistakes that conveniently send the plot in the direction that’s most beneficial for an epic climax, there are so many concurrently-running plot threads eating into each other’s screen time, with only one or two of them getting any sort of acceptable resolution, and it even resorts to breaking its own worldbuilding rules in ... order to construct scenes that seem cool on the surface, but just feel kinda dumb if you think about them for more than ten seconds.
There were some bright spots of characterization and thematic intrigue, especially regarding Melon, his upbringing as a mixed-species individual, and how the circumstances of his birth led him to becoming a self-hating psychopath. I also still love a good chunk of the worldbuilding and the extreme attention to detail in creating a unique and believably vibrant world with its own sets of cultures, belief systems, and communities, and the cinematography and animation are just as strong as they have been for this show’s entire run, though this final installment did seem to lack some of the more abstract flourishes of previous seasons. I fully understand the destination that this story was attempting to arrive at, but the final stops on the way there were so egregiously jarring and disappointing that it ultimately sours the entire experience. I still love season 1, and perhaps it might still work as a standalone entry despite having so many mysteries unsolved, but I don’t think I can wholeheartedly recommend the entirety of Beastars knowing that its grand finale is so nonsensical.