Golden Kamuy Final Season

Episode 62

I…am so glad we're getting more Golden Kamuy!!! I'll be the first to admit that I fully bought into the branding of this season as truly being the “final” installment of Golden Kamuy and started this episode expecting an incredibly rushed ending. While this apparent mid-season finale does contain its fair share of animation shortcuts, I'm thrilled to say that it does an incredibly effective job at teeing up the final conflict of this wild and wonderful anime.

Beginning with most of the main cast fleeing from Fort Goryokaku as the conflict turns into a game of keep away with Asirpa holding onto the deed, the episode quickly transitions to Sofia making her last stand in the military base. With all of her Russian Revolutionary comrades dead, she reflects on her life and the events that led to this moment as she picks off Lt. Tsurumi's soldiers. Reflecting on the values Wilk helped instill in her, she confronts Tsurumi as she buys time for Sugimoto, Asirpa, and Shiraishi's escape. She immediately meets with Tsurumi and sees a vision of him as the young man she met more than a decade ago, as he kills her and absolves her of her guilt for accidentally killing his wife and child.

This is both a great send-off for Sofia's character, who's been motivated to right the wrongs of her past since her introduction, and builds up Tsurumi to even greater heights. While he's been a terrific character since minute one of this series, this episode fully transforms him into a gleeful revenant. This is a man who's dedicated his life to revenge to the extent that he willingly disfigured himself to have useful allies who would never question him, and now he's able to finally start holding the people he deems responsible for the death of his family responsible for that tragedy. Don't get me wrong, Tsurumi is super fucking evil and should in no way be emulated, but I can't help but love and appreciate a character like this, who finally starts to reap the benefits of what he sees as justified revenge.

Asirpa and company do manage to escape from the Fort, though, largely thanks to a surprise last-minute appearance from sexy mountain man Tanigaki. As Ogata manages to take Vasily out of the fight by deducing the Russian sniper's strategy to lure Ogata out, the main factions in this story manage to converge around a train bound for Hakodate station. Filled with more of Tsurumi's men, the main combatants of Sugimoto, Hijikata, and Ushiyama begin slaughtering them as Tsurumi, Koito, Tsukishima, and Ogata all converge upon the train as well. Tanigaki immediately gets shot by Tsurumi, which, on top of being a really funny meta acknowledgement that he's not useful in this situation outside of being an extra set of hands, sends Asirpa even further down a depressive spiral as she has to process more back-to-back death and violence towards people she cares about than at any other point in this hyper-violent anime.

While this episode does have a lot of slideshow moments and CGI animation for background and less common kinds of movement, there are plenty of high points to make up for these shortcomings. Tsurumi trying to pull the quiver containing the deed book from Asirpa was terrifying, and the episode broadly does a great job capturing the fullness of the usually controlled Tsurumi's explosive emotions. While I wish the conclusion to this season were happening sooner than Q4 of this year, this episode effectively tees up what already feels like one of the greatest conclusions to a long-running anime.

Golden Kamuy has once again put all of its pieces into an interesting but immediately legible scenario, and I know I'm going to have a blast seeing it all play out once this season resumes!

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The immortal Lucas DeRuyter (no one's been able to kill him yet at least!) is an entertainment writer with a focus on anime, video games, and other forms of niche media. A sampling of his past work is available on his portfolio and you can keep up with him on a weekly or daily basis by checking out ANN's This Week in Anime and his Bluesky account, respectively.

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Golden Kamuy Final Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.