RWBY Volume 4 (Review)

By: ZelyhonSo, at the time of this writing, RWBY Volume 4 has been finished for about a week.  I needed some time, before writing this review, to sift through my thoughts on the series and go rewatch some parts of the series.  The reason for this is that, at the end of the final episode, I was left with a feeling of “Wait, that’s it?  That’s the season finale?”  Thus, I needed some time to review what actually did happen this season.Volume 4 comes right off the heels of the fantastic and exciting end to Volume 3, which brought so many elements that the first three seasons spent building up to a head in a massive confrontation.  We ended that volume with our title characters scattered to the four corners of the globe.  That’s exactly where we pick up this Volume.  Weiss is in Atlas, dealing with her family’s squabbling and the increasingly isolationist tendencies of the Atlas government.  Blake has gone south to Menagerie, where she is hiding after everything that happened with Adam last season.  Yang is still at home, also dealing with the repercussions of Adam’s actions.  Ruby herself, meanwhile, has taken to Mistral with Jaune, Nora, and Ren, to try and protect Mistral from a similar attack the destroyed Beacon last Volume.That, I feel like, is part of why this season feels so incomplete to me.  We’ve got four different major storylines that all need to be told, but the time spent on them is nowhere near equal.  Weiss and Blake, in particular, feel very short-changed.  I did enjoy seeing both of them get very different reactions from their parents, but it just felt like they were interesting little stories that should have been followed up by something a bit more meaty.  We get some focus on Weiss powering up and learning how to make use of her summoning, but then the season ends before anything can be done with it.  She didn’t even use it in the escape.  Blake fares slightly better, since we really didn’t know anything about her family other than that they were old-school White Fangers, who were there before the current violent regime took over.  Thus, the information we get that Papa Belladona was formerly in charge of the White Fang before it took a violent turn was interesting worldbuilding.  However, the main part at the end of the season was just essentially Blake regaining her will to confront the White Fang head-on instead of running away.  It’s good development, don’t get me wrong, but again feels like there should have been something more to it.Yang’s storyline also doesn’t get as much time, but feels a bit more whole to me, though it’s a bit hard to discuss without some spoilers for the end of Volume 3.  So, from here on out, there may be spoilers for last Volume.  Yang seems to have much more direct trauma than Blake after her encounter with Adam last season.  As predicted by a sizeable portion of the fanbase, she did get an artificial arm to replace the one she lost.  I liked seeing her and her father spar after she put the arm on, as well as the moment when she pulls the motorcycle out of storage.  The motorcycle speeding through Mistral is a good closing for this story, though I guess it could be argued that this also lacks something of the moment I was waiting for from Blake and Weiss.This leaves us with team RNJR and their long path to Mistral.  This is definitely where the bulk of the storyline was focused.  We get more interesting details about the world, character backstories, and the two major fights this season in this storyline.  Probably my favorite part of this storyline was the evolution of Jaune from where he was the past three seasons.  While he’s still not a fighter on the level of the other huntsman/huntresses-in-training, he’s certainly getting there.  We get to see his drive in the wake of Pyrrha’s death last season.  He continues to train under the regimen she designed for him previously by replaying the videos she apparently made for him.  There were also some interesting hints that she might not be completely out of the story, based on what woke Ruby up in the second episode, the silvery sparkles around that scene, and the fact that we still don’t know much about the Silver-Eyed Warrior powers.  This was powerful, quiet, development that I quite enjoyed.The rest of the team’s journey was more of a mixed bag.  We got Nora and Ren’s history, which was good, but not necessarily great.  It felt like they were setting up this grand threat of the horseman Grimm as a larger threat.  This was a Grimm responsible for the devastation at Shion village as well as Ren and Nora’s backstory, so one might think that it would be a more major element going forward.  However, it gets taken down two episodes after we see it in shadows in Ren’s flashback.  That felt like either a bit of a missed opportunity or a bit rushed.  Our only other major fight scene this season was against the new antagonist Tyrion, another follower of Salem.  We actually got to see Qrow going full(ish)-power against an upper-tier enemy, which did not disappoint.One of the major revelations this season involved another element of Salem’s plan being revealed to the viewer.  The four Relics that she seeks is, on one hand, an interesting justification for why she wants to destroy the academies beyond simply crippling the ability to easily train more huntsman, but feels a bit too similar to the Maidens from last season.  I realize that the series kind of has a “4” theme going (4 member teams, 4 academies, 4 maidens, 4 main henchmen under Salem), but something about the relics just felt repetitive, almost.  It will depend on how they are used in the future storyline, of course, but it did leave me with a feeling that we’d seen that before.The new characters are, by and large, pretty good.  I like to hate Weiss’s family we meet this episode and like to like Blake’s family.  Those two elements make for a fun contrast with each other.  Personally speaking, I love a good group villain shot, which this season delivered on right away.  However, the only one we get introduced to at any length is Tyrion, who might be the least interesting on account of apparently being one-note psychotic.  I’m much more interested to learn about Dr. Watts and Hazel going forward.  Finally, Oscar seems to have some interesting possibilities as well.  He’s another one that hasn’t yet had much time to shine, but with Ozpin in his head, we could get some good things from him going forward.  Finally, while she was first seen two seasons ago, our first full introduction to Raven really has me interested at the possibilities.The new animation style is very impressive.  It took a bit of adjustment at first, since it’s such a dramatic improvement over the first three volumes, but I really like it a lot.  Things feel smoother and not quite as stilted.  When the characters normally move or act, it doesn’t (usually) break immersion and look odd the way certain other things did in past seasons.  The action setpieces are still very well designed and interesting.  The last fight in Kuroyuri, while I may have issues with how we got to it, was still a very gripping final action piece.This is already longer than I intended to write about this season, so I’m going to wrap this up before I ramble on longer.  Upon repeated viewing and consideration, RWBY Volume 4 felt like a good first half of a season, but not necessarily a full season in its own right.  It is the type of story that needs to happen to transition from the more direct buildup that the first three seasons had into something new going forward, but on its own felt lacking in places.  I will probably like this season more once we get Volumes 5, 6, and on, but for now, it feels like it needed to be part of a longer season than a season in and of itself.  Still, it lays some interesting groundwork for what will happen once our main team(s) are all back in the same place come next volume.