'Food Wars!' Season 4 Reveals New Key Visual

As season three of Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma quickly comes to an end sooner than you'd expect, it's time to look to the future.

Season four of the anime series will release in April 2018, and the series has teased it by releasing its first key visual.

The visual depicts a solemn looking Soma Yukihira standing in the snow. This is most likely because the fourth season will tackle the "Promotion Exams" arc. As teased by the first trailer for the season, season four will include the likes of Soma's big showdown with Hayama after his siding with Central (thus the depiction of him here with his hair let down and the two mysterious twins who play a crucial role).

The majority of the teaser and this key visual involve snow, and the "Promotions Exams" arc sees the surviving rebels of Totsuki go against the Central's new Elite Ten in a series of even more aggressive challenges to stay in school while riding a train in the mountains. Most of those scenes take place during snowstorms, so they must be featured heavily in the upcoming season as well.

The first two seasons of the series each ran for 24 episodes a piece, so the upcoming Winter finale of the third season had taken fans by surprise as it's the first season in the series to end at Episode 12, as it just introduced the idea of Central to the series in the first place. Fans hope this means Season 4 will run a bit longer than the third one.

For those unfamiliar with Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, the series was originally created by Yuto Tsukuda and illustrated by Shun Saeki. The story follows Soma Yukihira, a young chef who one days wants to get good enough at cooking to take over his family diner from his father. But when graduates from middle school, his father shuts down his diner and tells Soma to enroll into Totsuki Academy, an elite cooking school where only one percent of students who enroll actually graduate. In order to survive in school and avoid being expelled, Soma eventually has to challenge and defeat any other chef that stands in his way.

The series was first published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 2012, and has been collected in 26 volumes. The manga has been licensed for an English language release by Viz Media. It was adapted into an anime series by J.C. staff has has run for 48 episodes across two seasons.