New World Part 1

Dr. Stone: New World is the third season of the Dr. Stone anime. After the original season, there was Stone Wars. And after Stone Wars, there was the Ryuusui OVA. New World comes after the OVA. And in case you’re wondering, yes, the OVA is canon.

If you don’t watch the Ryuusui OVA before New World, you’re going to be a bit lost. The OVA introduces two new characters, one of which is very important. And, it sets up what’s going to happen in New World. Think of it like New World Episode 0.

So, what happens in New World? A portion of the Kingdom of Science’s citizens set out on an adventure. And there are three things they’re looking for.

1. The origin of the petrification beam.
2. The origin of the “Why Man” radio signal.
3. The Soyuz space capsule.

This search leads Senkuu and his companions to an island that may hold all three. But, is that a blessing or a curse? If this island is the source of the petrification beam, its inhabitants may be enemies. However, the Soyuz capsule might also contain the materials needed to save the world.

Now, there’s one thing I’ve glossed over so far that you may have noticed in the title of this section. This season is only Part 1 of the arc. Unlike the previous seasons, the arc doesn’t get wrapped up within these 11 episodes.

There is good news for Dr. Stone fans, though. You won’t have to wait long for New World Part 2. It’s set to air in the fall of 2023. So, while this part focused mainly on the setup, the next part should be better. It should give us the answers to our questions.

New Characters

There are five new characters in this season. Two are on the side of the Kingdom of Science. And three are part of the enemy nation. I’m not sure if that nation has a name that we know. But, whatever it’s called, they’re the bad guys.

Soyuz is the first new character. He’s actually a member of the Kingdom of Science and one of the Ishigami villagers. But, it turns out that he’s not originally from the village. He was born on the island Senkuu & Co. are heading to. And, as you may have guessed, he was named after the Soyuz capsule.

Amaryllis is the next new character. She’s an inhabitant of the island. But, she’s part of a rebel force that wants to overthrow the island’s leader. So, it was only natural for her to team up with the Kingdom of Science.

Ibara is a high-ranking official on the island and the main antagonist. He doesn’t actually do much in this season. But, he’s clearly the bad guy. His job is to gather the prettiest girls from the island and present them to the island’s leader.

Mozu is one of the two strongest warriors on the island. Ibara is the brains of the operation and Mozu is the muscle. If someone’s not complying with Ibara’s orders, Mozu gets involved. He’s also very interested in cute girls, which sometimes puts him at odds with Ibara’s job.

Kirisame is the other strongest warrior on the island. Like Mozu, she serves Ibara and enforces his policies. However, what makes Kirisame unique is her use of a petrification device. She has a device that, when thrown, emits a short-range petrification beam. Unfortunately, we don’t know how this technology works or why Kirisame was chosen to wield it.

Mystery of the Petrification

Obviously, Kirisame having petrification technology is a big deal. Does that mean this island is where the original petrification beam came from? That seems pretty unlikely. The petrification beam supposedly came from the other side of the world (the Americas).

So, how did the islanders get their hands on this technology? Did they somehow develop it themselves? Did someone give it to them? Neither answer makes very much sense. After all, we know that the islanders are the descendants of the Soyuz astronauts. That means their ancestors had nothing to do with the petrification event.

So, if someone gave the islanders the petrification technology, it happened later. It must have happened after the deaths of the Soyuz astronauts. This is because they would have recognized what the petrification beam was. That’s why we know it must have come to the island at a later date.

There’s another piece of evidence pointing toward the petrification beam being a gift. If the islanders developed this technology themselves, why does only Kirisame have it? Surely, others such as Mozu and Ibara would have the ability to petrify people, as well. Since they don’t, we can assume this technology is rare.

And, the technology being rare is actually a good thing. It means that if the Kingdom of Science can destroy it, it’s gone for good. The islanders won’t be able to reproduce it. Also, it’s not like the Kingdom of Science needs to keep it intact.

Senkuu has no need for the petrification beam. Using it on people would go against the mission of the Kingdom of Science: to revive all of humanity. And he doesn’t need the beam’s technology to figure out how to undo the petrification. He already knows how to accomplish that with platinum.

Conclusion

Dr. Stone: New World is a 6/10. I’m a known Dr. Stone hater, so if you think it’s better than that, fine. But, I thought this season was pretty okay. I didn’t dislike it quite as much as the previous seasons. And part of that may be because I was interested in the mystery this time.

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Season Overview

Dr. Stone: Stone Wars (ドクターストーン STONE WARS) is the second season of the Dr. Stone anime series. Compared to the 24 episodes of the first season, this season is considerably shorter, at only 11 episodes. But, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Spoilers Incoming

The Stone Wars season covers the “war” between Senku’s Kingdom of Science and the Tsukasa Empire, lead by Tsukasa, of course. The only thing is, it’s not really much of a war. It’s a single attack by the Kingdom of Science on the Tsukasa Empire that lasts about 1 episode.

You may recall from the first season that Senku’s plan for defeating the Tsukasa Empire is to use information warfare. If Senku can create a radio with which to contact Taiju and Yuzuriha, he can outmaneuver Tsukasa’s forces and win the war without bloodshed.

That’s what this second season is all about. The entire season focuses on the construction of a two-way radio, sneaking one of the radios into the Tsukasa Empire, and then using it to bring Tsukasa’s allies over to Senku’s side.

This season also features some new characters who I wasn’t all that impressed with. To be fair, I don’t really care about any of the cast. But the newer characters in particular felt a bit out of place.

For example, Tsukasa’s trying to create the ultimate army of useful people, and one of them is just a fangirl of a singer. Maybe there was something else to her character, but I honestly can’t remember what. And another guy was just a former prison guard with nothing special about him. Yet, these are some of Tsukasa’s elite forces.

The Same, But Slightly Worse

The reason I think it’s good that the second season of Dr. Stone is less than half the length of the first season is that it’s basically the same thing, but slightly worse. One of the biggest problems is that Stone Wars is very linear, as I alluded to in the previous section.

In the first season, there are a lot of detours along the way to Senku’s relatively minor goal of taking down Tsukasa. Things go wrong, and Senku is forced to adapt and go down a different path temporarily. But, these detours still end in inventions that will further Senku’s ultimate goal of reintroducing modern technology to the stone world.

This type of storytelling framework was good because it kept the story progressing while also not falling into a predictable rhythm. The second season basically throws that away in favor of a direct route to the minor goal.

Unfortunately, the linear nature of this season is also what leads to the second issue. Despite the fact that a lot of the science in Dr. Stone is dumbed-down, or flat out wrong, I will admit that Senku using this “science” to invent things was probably the most entertaining part.

But there’s not much of that in the second season. Senku still does invent some things, like paper armor, but nothing exciting. You could argue that the radio he makes is exciting, but the explanation is so simple that it’s not satisfying.

To be fair, my expectations for this series are probably too high. It’s just a generic shounen series. It was never going to have a great story, characters, or complex topics. So in that regard, I guess Dr. Stone is exactly what it’s supposed to be — easily digestible entertainment you can put on and not pay much attention to.

The Ultimate Twist

Something that a lot of these anime with “extremely smart” characters do is that they pull really stupid plot twists out of thin air and pretend like the protagonist, or whoever the smart character is, figured it all out. This is a major complaint I have with Death Note, for example.

Dr. Stone has its own version of this trope, and it was just as bad as any other, if not worse. Without any lead-in, it was randomly revealed that the reason Tsukasa is doing everything he’s doing is that he wants to save his younger sister who’s never been mentioned before.

When this is revealed, the viewer is supposed to be surprised by Senku’s genius. After all, he was able to figure out Tsukasa’s true motivation when nobody else could! But there’s one problem. No matter how smart Senku is, this isn’t something he could ever figure out with the information at his disposal.

There’s absolutely no evidence to support Senku’s claim. I don’t remember the exact “evidence” he gives since this was weeks ago and Dr. Stone isn’t important enough for me to remember all the details.

But basically, his evidence was that Tsukasa is a “protector.” So, therefore, he must have been wanting to protect someone important to him, such as a younger sibling. And why does his younger sibling need protecting? Because she’s been in a coma for (thousands of) years.

You can’t get from “Tsukasa is actually a nice guy who protected me when we first met” to “Tsukasa has a younger sister he’s never mentioned who’s in a coma and he murders people in order to save her.” There’s very obviously a huge gap in that logic.

Conclusion

Although I do think that Dr. Stone: Stone Wars is worse than the first season of Dr. Stone, I’ve ended up giving it the same score: 5/10. It’s worse, but I still think it’s “average,” not “bad.” I dislike it, but that alone doesn’t make something bad.

What I will say is actually bad, though, is the OP for this season. The Stone Wars OP is very bad. The song doesn’t really match the visuals, and the visuals are garbage. I’m sorry if you like the OP, but it’s just not good.

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My review of Dr. Stone: Ryusui is available now.

Overview

Dr. Stone (ドクターストーン) isn’t one of my favorite anime. I’m sorry to everyone who loved this series, but I need to mention that right from the start so you don’t get your hopes up. And from what I’ve experienced, those of you who love this series are extremely opposed to evidence of its shortcomings.

But, hopefully you’ll take the time to actually understand what I’m saying in this review. And if you disagree with anything I say, or have questions about why I said the things I did, I’m more than happy to have a discussion with you in the comments or over on Discord.

And with that said, it’s not like I hate Dr. Stone. This series had a good premise, but unfortunately wasn’t able to live up to that premise for a number of reasons. I also recognize the fact that this is a shounen series, which means I’m not the target demographic.

So, for everyone who hasn’t seen Dr. Stone, what is it about? Basically everyone on Earth gets turned to stone during some sort of petrification event. Then, 3,700 years later, our protagonist breaks free from the petrification and sets off on his plan to rebuild the world.

And one major part of this plan is to “revive” everyone else who was petrified. Senku is similar to most shounen protagonists in that regard. He doesn’t just want to rebuild the world — he wants to save everyone.

Like I said, it’s a good premise for an anime, and it would allow for a lot of historical topics I’m personally interested in to be explored, but the series falls short. Instead, what we get is a series which at some parts feels like it’s ripping of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and at other times is teaching children semi-correct science.

Characters

Rather than going through individual characters, let’s go through them in groups. The first group is Senku (the protagonist) and his friends from school, Taiju and Yuzuriha. While Senku is the brains of the operation, Taiju is the brawn. Together they make the perfect team.

But then we throw Yuzuriha into the mix, and even after watching the entire first season I’m still not sure what she brings to the table. As far as I can tell she’s just the token female character of the main trio.

The Tsukasa empire is the next group, which is the antagonistic group of the series so far. I’m guessing at some point the Tsukasa empire has to be defeated and the series won’t end there, but I’m not entirely sure. This group is dedicated to being “anti-science,” and no, there’s not a good reason for this to be the case.

Basically, they don’t want the entire world to be revived from petrification. And since Senku does want that, and is also very much into science, the Tsukasa empire takes an anti-science stance simply because it’s the opposite of Senku’s stance.

The final I’ll just refer to as the stone village, because the name of the village isn’t actually revealed until later in the series. This is a village made up of people who were born and raised post-petrification event. They don’t really know anything about the world of 3,700 years ago.

This village is also where we spend the majority of the series, and some of the notable characters are Kohaku, Chrome, Kinro, Ginro, and Suika (I guess). The most important is Chrome, because although he doesn’t know what science is, he’s a scientist at heart.

Science

I’ve discussed the issues with the science in this series at length in my episode reviews. So instead, let’s discuss how the “science” of this series actually diverted the series from the premise it laid out at the start: which is to rebuild and save humanity. And yes, this section will include spoilers.

Dr. Stone sort of advertised itself as this science x history series which was going to go through all the major scientific developments throughout human history. However, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t actually going to happen, which is a shame because it seems a lot of people, myself included, were looking forward to that.

But that in itself isn’t really an issue. Just because a series isn’t how I wanted it to be doesn’t make it a failure.

It didn’t take long for Senku to reinvent gunpowder, which would make taking down Tsukasa relatively easy. However, that would also eliminate the major conflict of the series, so that obviously can’t happen. To prevent this, we get some mental gymnastics on the part of the author.

It goes like this: Tsukasa figures out that Senku is making gunpowder (because apparently he’s also a super genius). Then there’s a weak excuse for why Senku can no longer make gunpowder. And then Senku decides to build a whole bunch of other inventions to take down Tsukasa in a roundabout way.

However, none of his new inventions will actually take down Tsukasa. He still needs either gunpowder, or the talk-no-jutsu. And since this is a shounen series, I have a feeling the latter is what we’re going to see in the end.

Conclusion

Overall, Dr. Stone is a 5/10 from me. It’s almost a 6, but not quite. There were just way too many flaws with the logic of the series for my liking. And that’s especially egregious considering this series advertises itself as a science series.

If you really want a more in-depth look at this series, I did weekly reviews for every episode. In those reviews I discussed the specific issues I had with the science of each episode, so they’ll give you a much better understanding of why I have this series rated as I do.

But, if you enjoyed this review or found it to be helpful in any way, click the like button ❤ down below. Also follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. I tweet out every time a new post goes live.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN and CaptainRainbowPizza for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika and Sensei tiers respectively this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the second season: Stone Wars is available.