Fruits Basket The Final Season includes two Blu-rays and two DVDs that include all 13 episodes of the third and final season of the Fruits Basket reboot anime. The set includes both an English dub and the original Japanese audio with English subtitles.

Fruits Basket The Final Season
English Publisher: Crunchyroll
Format: Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Release Date: November 29, 2022

The story in the final season of the Fruits Basket reboot anime ups the drama and revelations over the course of its 13-episode run. The tension builds very quickly, and the “feels” really start to hit in the third episode and build over the next few. For me, those “feels” were the strongest in the episode where Tohru starts realizing that Kyo is replacing her mother in her heart and Kyo has the talk with Tohru’s grandfather and learns more about Tohru’s life after her father died.

This final season is also important, because we see the zodiac members’ bonds with Akito breaking. It was interesting to see the reactions of the zodiac members whose bonds break first, because their reaction isn’t what I would have necessarily expected. At first, their reaction is a little puzzling, until some of them verbalize the fear that they’ll lose the connections they’ve made with the other zodiac members.

With the breaking of these bonds, Akito starts descending into madness, and some of the things she tries to do to cling to her bonds with the zodiac members are surprising. But this madness leads Akito to Tohru, and a startling event serves as a kind of “wake up call” for Akito, as well as for Kyo.

This third and final season establishes the various couples that have been hinted at over the course of the series, but some of these relationships still remain vague at the end. Unfortunately, since there were only 13 episodes, there wasn’t enough time to include everything from the manga that would help explain the relationships that still felt vague at the end.

Even with that complaint about some of the couples’ vague relationships, I still thought the Fruits Basket reboot anime did a great job of bringing the entirety of its original manga source material to life. It’s not perfect, since some scenes near the end had to be cut in order to fit the story into 13 episodes, but it did as good of a job as it could have for an adaptation. Anime-only viewers who want additional information can chase down the manga if they so desire.

For the Blu-rays in this release, they have 1080p High Definition 16:9 (HD Native) video. For audio, they have Dolby TrueHD: English 5.1 and Dolby TrueHD: Japanese 2.0, while the DVDs have English 5.1 Surround and Japanese Stereo. I had no complaints about either the audio or the video quality of this release.

The main bonus feature included on this release is “The Final Season: A Fruits Basket Voice Actor Panel.” It runs around 40 minutes in length, and features Caitlin Glass (the voice director and English voice of Machi), John Burgmeier (the English voice of Shigure), Ian Sinclair (the English voice of Kureno), Jerry Jewell (the English voice of Kyo), Colleen Clinkenbeard (the English voice of Akito), and Eric Vale (the English voice of Yuki). Caitlin moderates the panel, which was done virtually on Zoom (or some kind of program like Zoom). The panelists talk about their characters and their evolution over the course of the final season. They also talk about characters other than their own that they liked and followed, as well as the most intense scene that their character had during the season. While all of the panelists were engaging, I thought that Jerry Jewell’s answers were the most interesting, especially when he talks about how he analyzed the series. I appreciated how he phrased it in such a way that this is what he saw, but it may not be what the creator had intended. His answers during this panel really made me think and look at some aspects of Fruits Basket in a different light. In addition to the voice actor panel, the set also includes textless versions of the opening and ending credits as bonus features.

If you’re a fan of the Fruits Basket reboot anime and already own the previous two seasons in your anime home video library, this release of Fruits Basket The Final Season should be acquired in order to own the whole series on home video.

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