Those of you who have been with RWBY right from the get go know that the story is about many lovable characters who are attending Beacon Academy for hunters and huntresses. Everything is fun, bubbly and only gets serious for brief moments during the series where Ruby Rose and her friends must combat some upstart trouble makers. This season however follows a much darker path and the time for being kids must be set aside in order to combat the growing threat hidden away in the shadows, until now.
The start of the series begins much as you would expect it to as Ruby and her team prepare for the Autumn festival and compete with classmates as well as other cools in competitions that test their skills as huntsmen and huntresses. This whole ordeal capitalizes on perhaps the most captivating aspects for the show and that is it's fight scenes. A Pokemon style battle arena is brought forth and the stages vary with each and every match up so you will see beach levels, mountain levels, forest levels and all of them coming with their own environmental challenges to face while the teams are fighting one another. All the fights themselves are spectacular and show off the skills the Ruby, Weiss, Blake and Yang have all acquired since they joined the school and became teammates. Their teamwork being one of the best parts to see as they combine all of their skills to make excellently choreographed attacks against the opposing teams.
This setup also sets the stage for many characters to appear from team RWBY's respective pasts. Ruby and Yang's Uncle Qrow (pronounces Crow) makes his first appearance and despite his outward drunk/smart ass behavior, he will be a major player in revealing all of the evil activity going on behind the scenes for the past two seasons. Weiss also gets an unexpected welcome from a former family member when her sister Winter comes to Beacon alongside of General Ironwood and his massive army of robot soldiers. She is just as cold as Weiss was when viewers first met her but later it is revealed that she left home just like Weiss did and followed an unorthodox path, in their father's opinion anyways. Lastly, we learn a great deal more about Blake's past when the White Fang makes their own moves on Beacon this season. Their leader Adam having a long teased history with her that now has come back to haunt her.
While this all may seem like great editions to the story that will drive home a much more serious plot line, many of the ideas get muddled along the way as all of this information tries to be crammed into the story in progress. Qrow is not just in town to see his family as I said and he in turn reveals what Cinder Fall and the rest of her cronies have been trying to achieve. The end game seems to be nothing but true chaos for Cinder but in order to get there she needs more power, even more the impress amount she already wields. This ends up coming from a bizarre story about four legendary huntresses that were thought to be nothing but an old fairy tale. It would seem that it was anything but that however and when it comes time for it, an ultimate sacrifice must be made by one of the shows main characters in order to acquire this power. The real issue with this turn of events though was how quickly it gets thrown into our story and then must be accepted as fact.
There are more signs of these thrown at the wall ideas when Qrow reveals more about Yang's history. It would seem that somehow he can speak to his sister (Yang's mother) who was presumed dead and yet must be in some other plane of existence? It really makes no sense and little time is spent exploring what this could all mean for Yang's character down the road. It seems very crucial to question this because by the end of this season Yang has gone through quite the ordeal, she no long is the same smiling ass kicker she has been this whole time and its hard to see how she will recover after everything that happens to her. Other instances of thrown around ideas are all too common, between Winter revealing a hidden power she and Weiss possess and the odd abusive love story between Blake and Adam and Ruby possess some hidden power herself too by the end. There is truly just far too much going on this season and far too little time to get through it all properly.
What remained rock solid thus far was the overall story that was established after last season with Cinder and her team preparing to unleash all out war on Beacon. Her plans devastated not only Beacon but our main characters too and in almost George R.R. Martin fashion, all bets are off. Cinder effectively causes untold despair for just about everyone which is what attracts a massive amount of Grimm to the city in all shapes and sizes. This includes the biggest Grimm we've ever seen to date but the overall tone shift proved to be an interesting one to say the least. It offered a new layer of depth that I didn't expect to come from a show with such a light hearted feel to it, heck other shows like this don't even go this dark when it comes to the world being taken over by some evil force so it's truly something to be admired.
By the time RWBY 's third season comes to a close there is a great deal of information to digest and that isn't necessarily a good or a bad thing. There are plenty of new ideas floating up in the air but none of it is really concrete by the end of the story. However, Cinder Fall and the rest of her team have proven to be a force to be reckoned with after causing untold death and despair for our main characters, offering up a different experience for this season that I did not see coming from an anime like this. So overall the future for RWBY can truthfully go down a very solid path if all the ideas brought up this season get more time to grow and develop, but only time will tell if that will happen.
Good:
- A much darker plot line than I ever thought to come from RWBY
- Top notch fighting scenes remain throughout
- Solid trademark humor the show is known for
Bad:
- New plot lines are all over the place
- Interesting ideas but so much left unexplained or ignored on the way to the end
Scully Rating: 6.5 out of 10
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