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Look, I came here for the ideas it brought in the first episode, a hard sci-fi about the nature of thinking machines and how they would be treated by a society who already treats humans badly. Instead of focusing on the interesting ideas of "what is the legal status of AI people" and "how does a society treat a new class of people" it wants to go through what ifs and not develop them.
The show has one or two good ideas that I really liked, the episode where a dude makes an AI version of his high school crush for sexual reasons is a ... good idea, but is not taken to the terrifying extent that "the most extreme version of revenge porn" could be. I feel this is an apt metaphor for the show, some good ideas without the ability to engage with them.

While not as much of a masterpiece as the first season this still is better than most of the things coming out.

I could make this review negative, talk about the issues I had with the overall plot, the way it twists itself with new information to solve problems instead of having setup, the way it expands its scope from this deep character driven narrative to a broad plot to its own detriment. But I am not going to do that because this is still heads and shoulders above everything else that I see coming out.

I have a habit of taking things I should ... love and breaking them down cause I hold them to a higher standard: I tear last of us 2 to shreds when it is heads and shoulders better than whatever skinner boxes are coming out from other companies; I often critique berserk for its use of sexual assault while letting manga with far worst thematic intentions slide; and I do this to anime that have artistic integrity, anime that try and I am harder on them because they are trying. I give most things 8's cause I judge them on their own merits, 86 is not trying to be all quiet on the western front so I judge them differently in the name of a false fairness in critique. This leads to me being harsh on things that are better cause they are not the best.

I am not going to do this for this show, this was good, this is better than most things coming out right now. So I am going to recommend it if you watched the first season.

I am sorry if you wanted a more substantial review, where I break down how I felt the narrative was and how it uses its medium to help communicate that. But I dont think that is necessary cause me doing that will only cause me to be more negative on this good thing.

This is not where I thought Danmachi would go, but I do like this direction.
For those who are reading this review without context, Danmachi was known for two things in the wider anime ecosystem for its last three seasons; cheesy characters and cheesecake. Not that their is anything wrong with that, I frankly feel the boob ribbon was a genius invention and whoever came up with it should be awarded some kind of prize, but this does mean the series often lacked depth. The previous seasons had Bell, our Shonen good boy, do the most lawful good thing he could do at the time. ... Even though the good of this was often challenged with the innocent woman becoming a sex worker or a monster in later seasons so that his lawful good actions could be questioned a little bit. It always feel to the classic formula: this good boy is becoming stronger and getting more women to fall head over heels for him because he is such a good boy.
This season changes things by putting Bell into actual hell with a vengeance fueled nihilist as his only companion and forcing them to really on one another in a scenario where the only feasible way they can make it out alive is for him to give up on his morals and allow someone to sacrifice herself for him, or for the nihilist to accept his bullheaded view that they can both make it out with the power of friendship, something that she does not think she is worthy of nor does she think work. All of this puts the two of them into an interesting survival scenario where they need to trust and accept one another to survive. The most surprising thing about this setup is that it works, it leads to their contrasting worldviews coming head to head as they both need to compromise for survival in tense scenes as they try and find any way out of the place they find themselves in while they are hunted by an honestly scary force of nature.
The only critique I have about this narrative is that the show often feels the need to cut back to Bell's inane friends and what they are doing to try and find him. I get the purpose of this being used to show how much he means to them and to set up how he will find his way back, but I feel it cuts the tension of the intense other half and dulls the razor sharp focus of the show.
On the technical side this is fine in all aspects, where I don't see anything noticeably bad with the sound, editing, or animation but nothing stands out either.
Overall, I like this more than the other seasons and hope the show continues to put its main characters in scenarios like this and not fall back into its roots as a harem comedy.

I hate that this anime is so bland.
This anime feels like the most boilerplate Japanese fantasy I have ever seen with all of the hallmarks of the genera, and it really did not need to do this. I was begging for this anime to do fish out of water things or to explore how he was discriminated against as a human in the demon relm or for him to use organizational skills and not raw strength to help the village he ended up in. This anime does not do that bare minimum and in fact seems completely uninterested in any of its characters emotions ... besides the all important mutual crush that he shares with the main heroine. The fact that this character has a kid and it does not meaningfully change him proves that this show is just trying to go through the motions.
I will give this show praise for a couple of things, I does have characters with wants, flaws, and needs and that is standout in this type of show. The main character at some points does things based on his own understanding of the situation which do not paint him in the most flattering light. I also liked this version of the mutual crush where it slowly develops and then, instead of having some level of misunderstanding or never committing so the all important waifu collection can grow, the two of them admit their feelings to each other and move into a long term, committed relationship. It is basic and some parts feel rushed, but I personally liked it.
The rest of the show is fine. I do not think that anyone wants to go through and read in so many words "the sound design was fine" so feel free to just assume that all the aspects not mentioned here are going to be listed as okay in my book.

This does not feel like an anime, this feels like something a high school English teacher would put on so that people can analyze a novel without reading it.

For those who do know this is an adaptation of a Japanese fantasy novel which from what I can tell from quick googling is considered good modern fiction over there, but something to point out is that this is an actual high school English-type book, not some light novel or manga, a full-on high concept piece of genre fiction. All of this led me to be excited, I loved last year's Hike-Monogatari which is in the ... same vein being a classical Japanese novel translated into animation, I hoped this would be similar to animation bringing out the book's imagery and adapting it to animation.

I was dead wrong. This became a mess quickly because of the quality of the animation. Don't get me wrong, I am the type of pretentious hipster who loves avant grade techniques but the choices here were clearly made for budgetary reasons, not artistic ones. This is most seen with all action animation being replaced with Berserk '97 style action stills, without the interesting watercolors nor the unique compositions, and a lot of emotional scenes aping the style of Ang Lee's Hulk for some reason with different characters being cut out into comic book style panels and placed next to each other in reused animation.

All of this pales in comparison to this show's main sin which is a little thing I like to call the Fate/Extra problem which goes as follows: A show can either tell a complex story with simple artistic decisions or a simple story with complext artistic decisions. I feel this can be viewed on a matrix, and because weebs reading this are not likely to want to hear my pretentious ramblings on why I call this the pre soviet russian literature scale and why Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy prove this without the shadow of a doubt, I will use anime to prove my point in a nice matrix to show examples of this:
Complex Story Simple Story
Simple Medium: Fate/Zero Naruto
Complex Medium: Fate/ Extra Monogatari Series
What this schizophrenic meltdown is trying to show is that trying to portray complex information in a complex way is confusing and often leads to people losing track of the plot in the medium of the show. This show commits that sin and the really interesting story of the novel is buried under baffling artistic choices that only hurt the adaption.

The reason why I said what I said in the first sentence is that this reminds me of a showing of the glass menagerie put on an old CRTV in my high school English class about half a decade ago so we could analyze it with the works we actually read and watching it I felt like this was the worst way to experience the text cause I was looking at a shitty recording of a community theater production of great work, which I feel is the best way to describe this show.

I do not hate this anime because it is mediocre, I hate it because it somehow forced mediocrity into what, in all rights, should have been something good.
I think this is a prime example of ruining a good core concept. Fundamentally the plot is that a group of people who are distrustful of society are forced to fund their own vices through dangerous work that forces a level of trust they are uncomfortable with. This is put to the wayside by episode 3 when they all are more or less friends with some odd hobbies. It takes what could have been an interesting story ... about how people are forced to trust each other in dangerous situations and how these pruned characters are forced to deal with those feelings of starting to trust again into a generic boilerplate fantasy show.
On that level of genericness, from the large number of clues we are given through the show, we are quickly driven to realize this is not medieval fantasy but in fact, is post-apocalyptic. This could be interesting ascetically but instead, the show insists on keeping the generic anime fantasy look that plagues this genre. There are no people living in the ruins of what once was, there are no towering beams of ancient times becoming dust, instead, it is just an excuse for the show to have idol concerts and cool future swords.
All of this is to say that this show does not think, it just acts on the worst instincts of modern fantasy anime.