[ShyGuy]

Kind of conflicted on this ending. On one hand, I really liked everything with Aruto and Horobi for the first half of the episode. And I give most of that credit to their actors more than anything else. It truly felt like they were just exhausted of all of this conflict, and while both of them wanted to just stop, they kept fighting because they didn't know how else to process their grief. And the way it ends with them finally accepting it and choosing to just move on is something I liked a lot. Up to this point of the episode, it really is something extremely different from past seasons in the way it resolves its final conflict.

After that though, it feels like it's just rushing to give half-baked conclusions to everyone else who's not Aruto or Horobi. Yua's is fine, but Fuwa's and Gai's are strange and it's not quite clear where exactly they go from here. It doesn't really feel like either of them got a real conclusive ending to their characters. I feel like one more episode could have helped with the pacing here and developed this a bit more.

As for Izu, I'm not too bothered, but it is kind of weird, and seems like a very unhealthy thing for Aruto to be doing? Kind of flies right in the face of the whole "learning to move on" thing from earlier. But honestly I don't expect this to stick anyway, it's almost inevitable that there will be some movie or special where they come up with some silly plot device to restore her back to her original state with all memories intact.

So overall, while I really liked everything with Aruto and Horobi, the rest of it fell kind of flat for me. Zero-One in general is a series that, for me, has been pretty up and down. At its best I thought it was top tier Kamen Rider, but it couldn't maintain that consistently enough. It's a show that I still ultimately have positive feelings towards, and rate as one of the better seasons I've seen, but I can't help thinking about how much potential it had to be more.