Kimetsu no Yaiba S4 – 1 [To Defeat Muzan Kibutsuji]

Welcome back everyone, to the 4th season of Kimetsu no Yaiba! It’s been a while. Gotta say, with a title like “Hashira Training Arc” I’m not that excited for this one. I’ve covered every other season of the show though, so I’ll be damned if I miss this one just because it’s lining up to be the worst entry yet. Anyways without further ado lets dive into a 45 minute double feature of an episode!

Diving into things, initial signs for this arc are… not good. As per the title, the whole thing is framed as one big training arc. We have no idea how many episodes this will be, 6? A full cour (12)? Two cour? No idea. The sad thing is that there is no right answer here either. It doesn’t matter how long the arc is if it’s nothing but Hashira training, that’s going to get old fast. The only good outcome for Kimetsu no Yaiba is if the title of the season is a lie and it covers far more than the training arc. Maybe it could cover some of the side stories or novels to fill out the season? I don’t know, the only thing I’m sure of is that if this entire season is just training arc, it’s going to suck.

As for what we actually got this week, the double-length episode, completely unnecessary by the way, kicked things off with a decent bit of action. I have to admit, I do still like the pretty colors. I get that they aren’t diegetic, that the other characters can’t see them and that they aren’t real, but the vibrant colors do a great job of breaking up otherwise darkly lit scenes. The way Shinazugawa’s green contrasted against the demons he was fighting looked great. Combine that with some pretty rad compositions, Shinazugawa standing in a rain of blood as it pours down around him was pretty cool, and it’s a solid way to open the episode. Should get people back in the swing of things really quickly. The only issue is that, as usual, the narrative doesn’t support it properly.

Take this first bit for example, what exactly does it do? We don’t know the lady, nor the relevant demons, so it’s a given this is going to be a blowout by the two Hashira. Neither of whom we’ve spent any time with, so they’re just faces and designs, not actual characters just yet. You could say it shows us that Muzan is preparing his forces, and I will admit the Infinite Palace or whatever it’s called is always cool. But that’s undermined by Yaiba telling us exactly what Muzan is doing like… 4 more times later in the episode. Not to mention how misleading this opening may be since this is a training arc. What I’m getting at is, if you wanted an awesome action scene that both sets the tone for the season and develops the characters… Why not just have them sparring each other?

And that’s kind of the issue with the episode as a whole? There’s not enough actual content for the 45 minutes of anime we’re given. It feels like a single episode, maybe even less than that, stretched out across 45 minutes, all for the showmanship of having a double-length premier. Yet they couldn’t even commit to that since a good 10 or so minutes is dedicated to Tanjiro filling us in on what happened last season and catching the viewer up to where we are, a flashback and reminder section. Do you trust your audience that little? Hell, as much as I hate them I’d have rathered a 2 minute recap at the very start so the rest of the episode could just be new stuff. It’s not hard Yaiba, trust your audience to remember things. If their invested enough to still be watching, they will.

As for the new stuff we do get, it’s mostly going over the marks and how Kanroji and Tokitou unlocked them, as well as how the rest of the Hashira can as well. It’s a pretty standard power up in preparation for the final arc, My Hero Academia will have similar stuff this season once we get to it. I’d say the most interesting thing to come out of all of this was Tomioka and his attitude, the way he refuses to interact or befriend any of the other Hashira. Really anything that gives us more character development from this lot would be welcome. Yaiba tends not to do anything with them, to make them characters, until right when they are needed by the narrative for a big fight. So what little we can get prior to that is good.

So yeah, all in all this wasn’t the best way for Yaiba to start a new season. A single 20 minute episode of content spread across 45 minutes, complete with recap and grating screaming from Zenitsu to boot. There’s some cool action and character bits here and there, so it wasn’t a total loss, but it would have felt much tighter as a regular length episode. Overall I’d say I’m not very excited for this season. From the season name, “Hashira Training Arc”, to the declining narrative of the past few seasons, I don’t see any anything to be hyped for. Maybe Yaiba will prove me wrong, maybe it has something in mind to make this interesting. I wouldn’t hold your breath though.