It has been a little over two years since the second season of Dog Days have aired. I have to admit that the sequel improved every aspect of the first season. Instead of focusing on melodrama that felt out-of-place, it introduced another kingdom into the war games while bringing Nanami and Rebecca into the mix. To me, the second season was an improvement since it had a lot of enjoyable moments.
Although Seven Arcs announced a third season, we didn’t hear much about it until last year when they announced that it would air in 2015 during winter. With that, did it live up to the two-year wait?
The story continues several months later in fall when Shinku, Nanami and Rebecca returns to Flonyard as promised. However, something unexpected happened to Shinku and Nanami that causes them to get thrown off course into an inhabitable area of Flonyard called the Dragon Forest, an area that is responsible to maintain nature’s balance. After being saved by a horse girl named Sharu who protects the forest, they find out that the demons were responsible for the destabilization in the forest. In addition to the battle to protect the Dragon Forest, Adel’s past and the Sky Whale also gets touched on along with some side stories mixed in.
From the overall focus of the third season, it seems that the director wanted to focus more on the demons that were mentioned from one of the episodes in the second season while expanding on the world of Flonyard. Of course, this also means that Adel’s back-story finally gets revealed on the demon hunting she did with Fi (the former and deceased ruler of Pastillage), how she met Hina and Isuka and Valerio becoming the demon king. Also, four new characters were introduced which includes Sharu, Leaf, Aria and Faris to the ever expanding cast.
While I find Flonyard’s world building, demon hunting and Adel’s side story rather interesting, the third season was slightly disappointing. It seemed that it focused on these aspects too much that it completely forgot about the war games from the first two seasons. Not only that, there are fewer shipping moments with Shinku and the girls in his harem, which is kind of disappointing, especially since Sharu seems to show some interest for him. Thankfully, the third season maintains the lighthearted feeling instead of going all out with the melodrama like it did in the first season.
Overall, while there are a lot of enjoyable moments in the third season of Dog Days, I felt that the story focused way too much on expanding the world, thus leaving no time for war games or even allow Aria and Sharu (which is one of my favorites out of the new characters aside from being voiced by Uesaka Sumire) to explore the kingdom and experience the games for themselves. Moreover, Éclair who seems to like Shinku, but denies it hardly got any screen time as well. In other words, the third season felt like it ended too early.
Since the fourth season of Dog Days is going to happen in the near future, it’s safe to say that it will be more like the second season now that they already addressed the demon problem and showed more of Flonyard. Aside from the flaws, I still enjoyed the third season and of course, it’s still better than the first season.
Overall Rating: 8.3/10, B, Good ¶
Eh, Dog Days is one of those shows which are entertaining as I watch them, but I forget most of it in it’s entirety after some time has passed, lol. I remember I definitely still had some fun watching season 3, so I guess I will check out season 4 when it comes out.
Yep given that the story is not that deep, but light hearted stories like these are always the easiest to enjoy… given the timing, probably the next season will air in fall now that they already aired ones in spring, summer and winter.