Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? IV Part 2

ダンジョンに出会いを求めるのは間違っているだろうかⅣ深章厄災篇 (Dungeon ni Deai wo Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka IV: Shin Shou - Yakusai-hen)

8.3(160,525)

MAL Score

Ranked #376

Popularity #944

Action
Adventure
Fantasy
Gore
Mythology

Episodes: 11
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Jan 7, 2023 to Mar 18, 2023
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

A calamity Cassandra Illion had foreseen finally comes to pass when Bell Cranel is plunged into the Dungeon’s depths. Injured, separated from his gear and allies, and cut off from his party, Bell is left with only Ryuu Lion at his side—equally stranded and battered. Hunted by a monster far beyond either of them, the two can do little but press onward, searching for a safe, monster-free refuge even deeper within the labyrinth.

Above them, Bell’s companions face a crisis of their own: a floor boss has returned without explanation, and far sooner than it should have. With both groups forced into desperate battles, the Dungeon’s merciless nature reveals itself as harsher and more relentless than ever.

Otaku Consensus

DanMachi IV Part 2 is the franchise’s strongest-reviewed stretch because Hideki Tachibana and J.C.Staff turn Yakusai-hen into a tightly paced survival chamber piece, with Bell and Ryuu’s emotional arc giving the season a sharper identity than the series’ earlier harem-adventure reputation. Fans and critics singled out the darker direction, higher-stakes action, and character payoff as a major level-up, while the recurring complaint is that some plot turns can feel engineered or predictable rather than organically earned.

Why You Should Watch

Watch DanMachi IV Part 2 if you wanted the series to shed its lighter harem-comedy baggage and commit to dungeon fantasy with consequences, trauma, and attrition. It scratches a similar itch to Re:Zero’s pressure-cooker suffering and the harsher expedition mood of dark fantasy adventures, but keeps DanMachi’s party-based RPG grammar: floors, roles, bosses, gear, recovery, and the terrifying math of running out of options. The 11-episode cour is especially rewarding for viewers who value payoff over reset-button adventuring, since earlier worldbuilding about the Dungeon’s rules is weaponized into tension rather than lore decoration. It is also the Bell-and-Ryuu season: less ensemble flirting, more character definition under stress, with Saori Hayami’s Ryuu performance becoming one of the arc’s biggest fan talking points.

Key Characters

B
Bell Cranel(VA: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka)
Bell is treated less as a lucky shounen climber here and more as a tested adventurer whose optimism has to survive physical exhaustion, strategic failure, and a Dungeon that no longer feels forgiving.
R
Ryuu Lion(VA: Saori Hayami)
Ryuu’s stoic elf persona becomes the emotional center of the cour, and fan reception often frames this arc as the moment her history, guilt, and bond with Bell fully justify her popularity.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
J.C.Staff’s production leans into a darker action-horror texture than many earlier DanMachi installments, matching the AniList tag profile where Gore is marked at 69% and Mythology at 65%.
2
The season’s structure is unusually focused for the franchise: only 11 episodes, with Part 2 acting as the concluding half of Season 4’s dungeon crisis rather than launching a new reset-style adventure.
3
Original author Fujino Oomori is credited not only for the source story but also for series composition alongside Hideki Shirane, giving this cour unusually direct source-creator involvement at the script-structure level.
4
The arc is widely treated by fans as a franchise turning point; review excerpts repeatedly call it the best DanMachi season, praising the shift toward character damage, survival pacing, and payoff for long-established dungeon rules.
5
Its reception metrics reflect that jump in esteem: the cour holds an 8.26 MAL score from 160,030 votes, an AniList score of 82/100, and 2,991 AniList favourites.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: This cour aired from January 7 to March 18, 2023, making it a compact winter-season run of 11 episodes rather than a full two-cour broadcast.
Fun fact 2: Hideki Tachibana directed the season, while the visual identity connects back to Suzuhito Yasuda’s original character designs and Shigeki Kimoto’s anime character design work.
Fun fact 3: The main voice pairing is especially notable for anime fans: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka voices Bell and Saori Hayami voices Ryuu, two high-profile performers carrying a cour that narrows its emotional focus around their characters.
Fun fact 4: The art pipeline listed for the season includes Jeong-Ryeon Kim as art director, Tomomi Andou on color design, Shingo Fukuyo as director of photography, and Kentarou Tsubone on editing.
Fun fact 5: On MAL, Part 2 ranks far higher in score than its popularity placement suggests: it sits at rank #374 while its popularity is #944, indicating a sequel cour watched by a narrower but highly satisfied audience.