In Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma: The Third Plate, Totsuki Academy held the school’s biggest annual festival called Gekkyousai (Moon Festival) and the story has taken a new turn. Azami Nakiri suddenly shows up in front of Erina with a new scheme to reform the academy. What is his purpose? What is going to happen to Totsuki Academy, to the Polar Star Dorm, to the Shokugeki battles, to Soma, and to the other characters? The story develops rapidly and you can’t take your eyes off it. Whether you know the story of the manga or not, be sure to hang on to catch up with it.

※Spoiler Warning ※
This article contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

If the anime series is to follow the original storyline faithfully, we will learn about the mastermind behind all the fuss, Azami Nakiri, after the current cooking battle between Soma and Eizan ends. He is a graduate of Totsuki academy and his past involves episodes that include Soma’s father, Joichiro Saiba, and his rival Gin Dojima. Furthermore, later in the story, you will see an all-out battle against the new members of the Elite Ten under the pretext of hunting down remnants and ends up with another battle against Akira Hayama who decides to side with Central to protect the Shiomi seminar.

Now, let me remind you of something. Soma Yukihira, Akira Hayama, Joichiro Saiba, and Gin Dojima. Do you remember all these people appearing together in one episode in the past? That’s right, at the final match of the Autumn Election. This part is animated in the Episode 10 of the second season, ‘A New Genius’, and you can find it in chapters 101 to 104 of the manga. If you re-watch it or re-read it carefully, you can notice that there is a lot of enigmatic foreshadowing elaborately hidden here and there within the dialogue and presentation. Let’s look at a few key points in this episode along with the differences between the manga and anime adaptation.

The Cut Out Scenes

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Souma: The Second Plate, only ran for one cour (about three months). The first season ended in the middle of the Autumn Election, and the second season had packed the rest of the event up very tightly in order to have it finish at the end of the cour. It must be tough to cut out so much without disrupting the storyline, but it happens a lot with anime adaptations in Japan.

The same thing happened with Episode 10, and you would have been excessively surprised to see how fast paced it was if you knew the manga. That means so much dialogue and many anecdotes were cut out. For example: the incident with students in the audience making a lot of noise, the explanatory notes on the cuisine, and the judges’ dialogue were greatly cut. The main characters’ dialogues were changed as well. The most notable one is Akira Hayama’s flashback scene. He was recollecting his memory with Jun Shiomi as his benefactor before the winner announcement, and the manga described it elaborately using 5 pages in total while the anime adaptation made it into a very short summary, probably only 2 pages-worth if retrospectively adapted into manga. You can vaguely imagine what had happened between the two in the past from the adaptation too, but personally speaking, it was quite sad to see it missing that much. I would really like anime fans to check out the manga version for his flashback.

The Alternating Sequence

Due to the above reason of speeding up the pace for the anime adaptation, there are a few other changes made other than the cut-out dialogues and scenes. One of them is the alternating sequence of multiple scenes.

Episode 10 starts with the judges trying out the dish Salted Rice Bran Pacific Saury Rice cooked by Soma and ends the Autumn Election. The highlights of this episode are the explanatory notes on the dishes, the judges’ reactions, and the characters’ dialogues. The manga divided each of them into several scenes and different shots to show them in an alternating sequence, in order to express the high-tensed presence of the battle, leaving a strong impression. But it seems too hard for the anime to faithfully adapt them completely.

It’s probably easier to grasp it if you check out the conversation between Isshiki and Eizan to get what I mean by mentioning an alternating sequence. Like I explained above, the manga separates their quite massive conversation into several scenes and shows them parallel with different scenes with shots of others alternately in between. The anime adaptation put them together as much as possible and tries to show them together. This is just my personal opinion, but I’m afraid that applying the method used in the manga could have confused the viewers too much with the high-paced story in anime. This method is very effective with manga as you can read at your own pace, but it could work negatively with anime as you can’t change the pace when watching it on-screen. You have to respect the original creator’s intention but you also have to adapt it in a way that viewers can easily enjoy the scene. The anime staff probably had a tough time dealing with this sequence.

Foreshadowing for the later story

There are several dialogues that appear to be foreshadowing the later story development. One of them is the lines Dojima said to Hayama after winning the Election:

‘Too great a talent will turn against itself in the end. I hope you will be able to maintain a good relationship with your talent.’

Hayama could not understand what that actually meant. I’m afraid that the same can be said for the readers/viewers. Nobody knew what Dojima had in mind when he said that to Hayama. However, now that the manga readers have learned about Azami Nakiri’s past story, it’s clear that this is an advice from Dojima reflecting on how Joichiro was in the past. Hayama’s amazing olfactory talent probably reminded Dojima of his friend who got stuck in the mire by his own talent and left.

Another impressive line is the following by Joichiro:

‘He has the strength to face his inadequacies head-on. That’s an incredible strength that I never had.’

A young Joichiro devoted his life to genuinely pursuing the way up at Totsuki Academy, but became overwhelmed and was crushed by his own talent blossoming, and lost his goal in the end. He spent time without being able to enjoy cooking, to face himself, or even to rely on his friends. After experiencing such a setback, he discovered that his son, Soma, had what he lacked. He probably thought that Soma might be able to walk straight on his path without getting lost. His beaming smile on his profile was very impressive in the scene.

Let me repeat that both the anime and the manga series will be even more exciting than ever from now on. If you have a hard time waiting for the next episode, let’s tide over a week by reviewing the past episodes.