Followed that up with another he mentioned Nozomanu Fushi no Boukensha (The Unwanted Undead Adventurer). It was really quite good all in all, and then completely fell apart in the end when it was revealed that it wasn’t really an anime season in any meaningful sense, but was pretty much just a 12 episode prologue.

It’s partly an issue of the structure of the source material (I was entertained enough to seek it out, despite the lackluster ending), which the anime follows fairly closely. The novels don’t partition out well into cours- or volume-length chunks—the author was obviously writing a continuous webnovel-type narrative without taking stopping points into consideration. The first real climax in the story corresponds to the end of volume 8, which, given a typical LN-to-episode conversion ratio, would land around episode 32. Given that they were only doing a single cours, I think the animators they picked the best stopping point they could, even if it wasn’t great. If they’d adapted the last chapter of the 3rd novel instead of stopping with the next-to-last, the result would have been worse, because it ends in a somewhat random place.