Classroom of the Elite Season 4 Review – Not Quite Perfect

Article at a glance:

• After the previous seasons left light novel fans crying over rushed pacing and chopped content, Season 4 turned out to be an incredibly pleasant surprise. It’s far from perfect, but giving the complex Season 4 a rare 16-episode runtime gave the series the breathing room it desperately needed.
• If you told anyone back in the Season 1 days that Classroom of the Elite would eventually feature beautifully animated, fluid hand-to-hand combat, they would have laughed at you. Yet, Season 4 delivered exactly that, bringing the absolute “rule of cool” action scenes to life.
• Instead of drowning the audience in massive, confusing text walls of complex exam rules, this season brilliantly used clear on-screen visuals. It makes the cutthroat, multi-faction strategies infinitely easier to follow while perfectly juggling multiple high-stakes plotlines at once.

Classroom of the Elite Season 4 was a nice surprise after the previous seasons being a total mess compared to the LN. I won’t pretend that Season 4 is perfect by any means, but it is a significant improvement for sure. If you told me we would have some smoothly animated fights in CoTE back in the Season 1 days, I would’ve laughed at you. But then Season 4 actually did give us exactly that. All the fights in this season were really damn good. So yeah, Classroom of the Elite Season 4 is a curious case to review.

I understand that it is a little hard to adapt an LN with as many moving parts as CoTE into anime, and I feel like Lerche is finally starting to get the hang of things. I know it is a bit late, but it is good to see them do this arc at least some justice. Again, I went into Season 4 with really low expectations, and Lerche managed to surprise me. So props for that at the very least.

But that’s enough yapping. Welcome to another review, and today, we are talking about Classroom of the Elite Season 4. So let’s get right into it.

Plot

First and foremost, the pacing is a lot better. The increased episode count really did wonders for the overall pacing. Especially since the exams are a lot more complex in Year 2. Well, more so that there are more factions to monitor in each exam. So that extra bit of time they get to flesh everything out really does work out perfectly. Yes, I know, the first few episodes are a bit slow because of all the set-up. But that’s how Year 2 was at the beginning in the LN as well. It took its time introducing all the characters and establishing the new status quo.

Another improvement Season 4 makes is that a lot of information is presented visually. In the LN, exam rules can get rather hard to follow because you’re just reading through them. Previous seasons also just had a whole ass exposition dump just talking about rules. But Season 4 supports the explanation of all the rules with visuals. This makes them a lot easier to understand and easier to keep track of things in general. And again, the anime does a great job of managing all the parallel plot lines, especially in the Uninhabited Island arc.

Now, the biggest criticism I have, and I had this issue with the LN as well, you really have to stretch your suspension of disbelief at times. For example, there’s no reason for Hosen and Tsubasa to just BE that physically strong. They were not raised in a specialized environment like the White Room kids. And then obviously, there’s no way you can just walk away after literally attempting to kill someone with a knife. And of course, in the end, Kiryuin, who should be a “normal” third-year, was able to hold on that long against Shiba. But you know, rule of cool.

Characters

Even though the beginning of Season 4 is kind of slow, it really does a great job of establishing the new batch of characters and the new status quo moving into Year 2. So let’s start with the new characters.

The Freshmen

All three of the important first years, Hosen, Tsubasa, and Amasawa, are amazing additions to the cast. Tsubasa and Amasawa have a personal connection to Koji as well, which makes things all the better. Amasawa is such a chaos gremlin, and yet, she’s by far one of the scarier characters in the show, putting Kushida on her ass in her very first fight. And then handling Ibuki and Suzune at once while injured. She has a weird obsession with Koji because she was raised in the White Room, always chasing his insane records. So it is a weird form of love in her own way. It is easy to see why the CoTE fandom LOVES her.

Tsubasa doesn’t stand out that much in terms of her personality, but her backstory was really well done. And Hosen, of course, the brute force of the first years. Easily handling Ryuen multiple times in a one-on-one. All three of them really do spice things up overall.

Ayanokoji

It is nice to finally see Ayanokoji taking things into his own hands. He is no longer hiding his capabilities and doing things as he sees fit. Also helps that this season has some of his coldest moments. And I think this season does an amazing job of showing just how unfeeling he really is. Ichinose just confesses to him, and his expression is still blank. In fact, he looks mildly disappointed, like she chose the wrong dialog option in an RPG.

I really wish they kept more monologues from the LN because the LN does a LOT more to flesh out Ayanokoji than the anime. But still, Season 4 understood Koji better than Seasons 1 to 3 did combined.

The Others

Yeah, the others didn’t really have much to do this season. Important characters like Horikita and Sakayanagi didn’t really have that much screentime. Sure, Horikit had a few good moments, but overall, she didn’t really do that much. And of course, since the anime is a lot more compressed than the LN, we got a lot fewer character interactions in general. So while the anime did the main characters well, it kinda didn’t do justice to a lot of the important side characters.

Production

I think I made it pretty clear at the beginning of the review that Classroom of the Elite Season 4 has improved a lot over the previous seasons. And yeah, that includes the production as well. As I mentioned, the increased episode count was a huge blessing. The animation quality itself hasn’t really gone up that much compared to Season 3, but the direction is a lot better overall. And they just animate things better in this season. So while it is not better in still frames, the animation is a lot smoother, and they actually animate fights now.

Like, yeah, it is nowhere close to as good-looking as the LN or even the manga, but at least the animations are smoother now. Aside from that, good voice cast as always. And of course, I gotta mention just how good the new opening and ending themes are. Especially the opening theme is such a banger both in terms of the song and the art. I never once skipped the opening and ending throughout the 16 episodes lol.

Summing Up

Here are my final review scores for Classroom of the Elite Season 4

• Plot – 8/10
• Characters – 8/10
• Production – 8/10
• Enjoyment – 9/10
• Overall – 8/10

So yeah, as you can see, far from perfect but still a damn good season. It is such a huge improvement over Season 3 that it actually makes me excited for Season 5 because I hope they continue improving like this. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. I will take my leave here. See ya!

Also, check out my thoughts on Second Prettiest Girl in My Class here!