Yuki Yuna is a Hero: The Great Mankai Chapter (season 3)
What a disappointment. Yuki Yuna had two stellar seasons, with the second seeming to end the overall story in a conclusive way. So where does the story go from there? It backpedals and retcons in some side-stories. Rather than describe the plot in detail, I'll cover the structure of the season so you can get an idea of how jumbled it is.
This was a really confusing season to follow because it was hard to grasp when certain events were taking place at first. I was a bit suspicious that the opening recap only covered season 1, but it wasn't until episode 4 that I realised these events were happening parallel to the Hero Chapter in season 2.
After spending some care-free downtime with the regular cast in episode 1 (probably the most entertaining episode of the season), we suddenly switch to a new set of characters for episodes 2-4. If the Heroes (ie. magical girls) from the first two seasons are like special forces, then the Sentinels from these episodes are the rank-and-file. They're sent out en masse against overwhelming odds, armed with weapons that only give them a fraction of a Hero's power. Their missions were tense affairs because it looked like it could turn into a bloodbath at any moment (I won't say if it does or not). While this could have been a good arc, it ultimately goes nowhere because it's happening alongside the established events of season 2 that the Sentinels can't change.
Just as we're getting used to the new cast, episode 5 cuts back to the original cast (again set during season 2). This just acts as a framing device though, because we then jump back
300 years to
another new cast of characters, this time the first ever team of Heroes led by Wakaba Nogi. This next prequel arc is, by far, the weakest part of the franchise to date. Earlier seasons of Yuki Yuna expertly rode the line of the tragical girl subgenre without turning into grimdark murder-fests, but the Wakaba arc tumbles off that line in the wrong direction. The problem is that it's trying to cover too much ground, too quickly, ends up using some ineffective shortcuts in its rush to brute-force us into caring. A brief montage skips through the apocalyptic events that set up the main conflict of the whole franchise, wasting the chance to show us these new characters bonding while the world falls apart around them. Instead we meet them once the new status quo has been established, in the aftermath of a disastrous battle that left half their team dead. It tries to make us care about these strangers after the fact by flashing back even further (yes, that's a flashback within a flashback within a flashback (flashbackception)), but it's all so abrupt and jumbled that it doesn't work. Meanwhile it uses laughably over-the-top visual shorthand to show the effect the girls' armour has on their bodies. There has always been a cost when a Hero powers up in this series, but without taking the time to show how those side-effects impact their lives like previous seasons we're instead shown a graphic display of blood squirting out of the girls from all angles as they fight. It's basically this:
It gets worse. One of the girls has a complete psychotic breakdown for reasons that the story can't decide upon. There were two or three different causes, and it all ends up a jumble. The show stops just short of her actually going on a killing spree, but it rides right up to the edge. After another big battle, this attention-deficit season loses interest in Wakaba and co. and switches back to the Sentinels plotline in episode 9. Since we have only spent three episodes with the Sentinels so far, and were introduced to a whole other cast in the intervening four episodes, I'd forgotten who most of the Sentinels were by this point. We rejoin them for another couple of episodes in a plotline again running parallel to season 2, which again doesn't feel like it adds much to the overall canon.
Then we come to season 3's greatest sin: episode 11. This is literally just a re-edited version of the final episode from season 2 with a couple of new scenes from the perspective of different characters and some new music. Reusing climactic scenes like this robs them of the impact they had the first time around. Season 2 built to this moment through a desperate and emotional arc of several episodes that slowly ratcheted up the tension. Without any of that, simply replaying the last few scenes of it and expecting the same effect just doesn't work.
At least the season ends on a high note with an episode-long epilogue that clears up what happens to everyone after the paradigm-shifting events that ended season 2. It makes for a satisfying capstone to the story as a whole, but I don't think it was worth the messy season of chopped up side-stories it took to get there. The most frustrating thing is that this season could have worked much better if they had just copied the format they used for season 2, giving us two six-episode arcs instead of splicing everything together in a haphazard order.
6/10