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Date A Live has always been about the comedy that comes from facing down supernatural forces with an ordinary high school boy. While governments are sending top military forces to fight the mystical spirit beings, our powerless protagonist is forced to approach the spirits completely unarmed, and simply try to chat them out of fighting, eventually trying to date them to seal their powers peacefully. That has always been the core of Date A Live.

So why does this season have the protagonist flying through the air, blowing kisses at hordes of cloned enemies, because apparently that disintegrates them?

It's so hard to tell what this ... show is even about anymore. Characters split their minds into pieces, leading to intense conflicts between the characters and... themselves? There's so much time travel and re-writing realities that it's impossible to tell who came from which timeline and what memories they have. This season is all about alternate futures, sharing memories between different versions of characters from those alternate futures, and fragmenting characters' beings to send them to parallel realities. Instead of fighting these fantastical things with the (lack of) powers of regular high schooler, and defying expectations by showing how effective a bit of chit-chat can be against a magical being, Date a Live V has the protagonist utilizing every spirit power in existence, usually at the same time, turning the whole season into one big magic-fight. There isn't even any dating anymore.

Aside from the fact that the series went full-fantastical, the worst part of this season is is definitely the ending. It's so brief, with the final battle ending less than 2 minutes before the end of the final episode. Then, there's a quick slideshow with pictures of the characters doing daily-life things like shopping and going to school, which plays during the 90 second outro. That's it. What happens to all the surviving antagonists? Who has spirit powers anymore? What happens to the massive organizations that were fighting the antagonists? Why is there no mention of any of the side characters in the last 3 episodes? It doesn't feel like this would be the end of the overarching conflicts whatsoever, but the series just ends and shows some still images of the characters having fun around the city once a single battle is finished.

Another issue is that there are so many characters, that nobody gets enough time to even make an impact anymore. The worst part is when they have all 9 spirit girls standing in a horde, just off to the side of the main conversation, reminding you of just how many once-important characters are throwaways now. Remember when Yoshino got half a season where she was the most important character? Well, now she stands off to the side in a crowd of 9 people, hoping to get more than 1 line per episode just like everyone else.

This season has 2 main antagonists. There's the big bad Isaac Westcott, who has been sadistically hunting down spirits as the overarching antagonist since the start of the series, and the new "Origin Spirit", whose identity was revealed at the end of season 4.
Westcott is one of the most underdeveloped antagonists I have seen in a long time. Despite being unrelentingly evil, torturing spirits every chance he gets, it's never explained why he's evil in the first place. He actually gets his own backstory episode, but the most he ever says is, "When I was 4 years old, I realized that I am evil. I felt happy whenever everyone else was sad", and that's it! He was able to kill entire rooms of people with no hesitation back in season 3, but why? Guess he's just evil, no more to it than that.

As for the other antagonist, it really feels like they picked the name of a side character out of a hat, and went with it. There's no way anyone would have ever surmised that this character would turn out to be the most important in the whole series. It was a jarring and sudden promotion of a random character from barely relevant to main plot device.

Overall, if you liked watching the protagonist try to have real-world conversations with magical spirit-girls, then get them to adapt to human life through taking them on completely normal dates, you won't enjoy this season. This season is about leaping through timelines and realities, splitting yourself into several different people with different memories, then realizing that you're actually a completely different person, and you've been time-travelled into a different period. Then, there's a big fight with someone who we don't know anything about, and when that singular battle ends, the series ends. I understand that the series couldn't just keep playing the same gags that it did in the first two seasons, but it's disappointing to see this show drifted across genres, never figuring out what it wanted to be until the final episode came to a close.