I hope this is truly the end, the thought of an American version makes me sad.

Season 3 is definitely the weakest season but it's not terrible. You go in with a lot of questions and they leave you with even more unanswered, but this is the kind of show and lore where you're not supposed to know 100% what's going on anyway. People were worried that S3 was gonna undo the events of S2, and ruin what most consider the perfect ending for the show, but thankfully it does not, well, not entirely. The reasoning for some of the characters' actions is not easy to understand, and the need for Usagi to go back to the Borderland is such a lazy plot device. It felt like the show expected the viewer to just accept that she wasn't super happy at the end of S2. The games this season were surprisingly creative. It truly felt like they took the ones that people liked and combined them to make them extra gruesome and both heart and mind breaking, you really don't know what's going to happen. The characters were surprisingly good (excluding Ryuji) and won me over half-way through the season. I didn't expect to end up liking them so much. In some instances it can be pretty obvious which ones are going to live based on how much of their personality we see, but I didn't find that to be a big issue. I read that some people thought of this season as a spin-off but to be honest, I don't think it is, because what kind of spin-off would have the main characters. The ending does hint at a potential spin-off set in another country though. So following the rating of Trakt as I usually do: Season 1: 8/10 (Great) Season 2: 8/10 (Great) Season 3: 6/10 (Fair) EDIT: Upon watching more reactions to S3 I decided to lower my rating from 7 to 6.

Didn’t need to happen but overall enjoyed it. I think the way they took the story makes sense with the lore we learned in the finale of season 2.

If you enjoyed Seasons 1 and 2, I'd honestly recommend not watching Season 3. Even if there's a Season 4 and it's somehow good, you won't miss anything by skipping this one. It should be noted, the original source material ends when S02 ended. Most people assumed the show was over. It's safe to say, their writing team does not have the talent to craft unique stories. As usual, the 1/10 ratings are moronic and those people shouldn't be allowed to rate things, but I would accept anything in the 3-6 range as accurate. This is right on the threshold of being so bad that I actively regret watching it. For context, I loved S01 and S02.

Season 3 of Alice in Borderlands needed to find a way to continue the story after such a definitive ending in Season 2. It chose the wrong option in my opinion. It centers again on the same characters instead of trying to focus on a new set of characters. This hurts the story in two ways. First, there is really nothing left to mine from these characters in terms of backstory and depth. Second, it makes it harder to have a natural continuation and motivations. Due to this, we get a very unsatisfying premiere episode that spends most of its runtime just trying to set this all up, and it doesn't do it well. Honestly, the entire background plot is so pointless and boring that I was tempted to skip ahead at times. The real draw of this show has always been the games. This season, I felt like most of the games were just okay. The one in the middle of the season was overtly convoluted. The side characters for most of the season aren't very compelling either, which has never been a strength of this show; however, it's just glaring when compared even against a weak Squid Game season 3. There are a lot of negatives, but this season redeems itself slightly with its final game which felt genuinely unique with real stakes. It does drag on a bit too long, but it is one of the stronger games in the entire show in my opinion. Unfortunately, the show again goes back to dealing with all of this dumb world-building plot and an overtly long epilogue similar to season 2 that feels so unnecessary because it feels like an epilogue to the prior two seasons, not this season. It also again tries to set up future seasons and maybe a spinoff, which feels like it is straight up just copying Squid Game. I would say that over half of this season's runtime is not even centered around the games, and that's honestly this show's strength. It never had amazing characters (though they were better than this), and the plot was always paper thin. However, the games were intricate, tense, and creative. It's a shame this show loses sight of that. It should have just gone with the spinoff idea to start with.