Taiho Shichau zo: Full Throttle

This is, so far, the final season of You're Under Arrest! And it wraps up the series wonderfully. Every episode feels important to the story and character development, unlike the previous season. We continue this season with more episodic buddy cop action, but the subplots all drive toward a singular purpose.

The last episode is a little bit of a let down, but if you count the second to last as the last we get perfect resolutions to the important plot points with no useless information attached. We get some kind of resolution to the Miyuki/Ken OTP drama, and a solid crime solved. I personally would ... like a more resolute ending in some of the aspects of the show, but the vague endings add to the appeal of the show overall.

I watched a marathon since the first OVAs, continuing to the first season, then the movie and second season. I really loved the series, however, it seems they mutilated a couple of two nice characters. One of them was "reassignated" to another department, the other was literally vanished, like he never existed.
The characters' complex emotions and struggles left a lot to be desired, the animation was downgraded, all the season seemed like a filler on its own. Why bother drawing them if it would lead to this?
It would have been better to just conclude the series with 4 OVAs comprising the first two chapters ... and chapters 21 and 22.

Feels like a non-canon spin off... with many key characters removed, pasts altered, and some personality changes. So if you enjoyed the First and Second season I personally would recommend you to skip it because in my case this season (Full Throttle) does left a sour taste in my mouth and kinda tainted my overall enjoyment of the Taiho Shichau Zo series; if you are a casual enjoyer just want something to fill you mind, "Full Throttle" is not unwatchable per se but can be boring sometime so certainly there are more better shows that will worth your time out there.

Firstly talking about how ... actually is "Full Throttle", that it contains about 20 of 24 episodes (episode numbers for Taiho Shichau Zo on MAL is kind of a mess) of filler stories, some of them are good but none of them made much of a dent to the series, and if you have watched the 1999 5 episodes Taiho Shichau Zo Special you know what I mean, this is basically a 20 episodes of that, they are just meh like chewing a piece of gum that has already been chewed out of flavor. The only pro on top of my mind is the animation quality, the technologies for animation definitely improved in 2007 than 1994 with the help of computer animation the action scenes are smoother and more lively than before.

The elephant in the room for me is most key side/background characters from the previous seasons are missing, and instead of making some excuses such as 'they have moved away' or 'they are busy' the "Full Throttle" decided not to mention them and any past events they have involved in at all, it almost feels like "Full Throttle" trying to pretend they have never existed. Which made it even worse are in some occasions where the mentions of those characters/events are almost unavoidable due to the curtail parts they have played for the protagonist's character development, the "Full Throttle" bypasses them with out of place obscure dialogs or forcefully pretend those events never happened... It is so intentional which drives me mad... ironically some of the 'ignored' characters does showed up... in the very last few episodes... like at least be more consistent since they were erased for the whole season!! Changing the pasts and erasing the characters breaks the canon which is my biggest criticism towards the "Full Throttle".

All on screen characters which including the protagonists has their personality slightly altered in "Full Throttle", which resulted in Over all the flat/one dimension characters and less dynamic relationships. As for protagonists the major traits are still there but different which feels like freshly built character with the old characters frame, especially for me just off the First and Second Season the strong disconnection of personality and characters are really obvious. Besides, all the support characters become more one dimension and fallen to stupid and useless teammate type of role and less interesting and more annoying. Small segment, the animation art style in "Full Throttle" that mentioned previously may also contributed to the personality change a little, cause the new animation used made male characters actually looked and vibe-ed differently from previous season. Further more, the characters perorated in "Full Throttle" are more 'serious' and 'formal' (less playful and less grounded), the amount of 'formal' administrative big talks use in this season alone are longer than the previous 80-ish episodes combined. Could be just bad writing but either way the personalities are non canon and flat, and relation dynamic is pretty much not exist, which made the only 2 non-filler stories feels short.

Upon writing this I realized the non canon factors, which triggered me the most, are probably just because of bad writing, but also there are few interesting filler episodes... Well any way I do not recommend this season to anyone just enjoy the previous season and I wish this season was never been made.

(*I intentionally did not check the stuff list while write this review and upon checking indeed all the directors, story board etc. were different)