One Punch Man 2nd Season

I wish I could say the sequel for one of the most popular anime of this year to be good. I really wish I could. One Punch Man’s release back in 2015 made headlines with its high caliber animation quality and ultra comical character cast. The manga itself is also very popular. Ask anyone who’ve read the series will tell you that it’s more than just your usual battle shounen. Known for its top notch quality comedy and unorthodox storytelling, it’s a sensation. But this…second season is nothing short of a horror story. It’s the type of horror that scared me to realize how far ... this anime has fallen. What did the second season go wrong?

Well for starters, there’s the change in the staff. Director Shingo Natsume left this season and responsibilities were handed to Chikara Sakurai. One of their previous project was Majimoji Rurumo, a show that probably most people has forgotten by now. One Punch Man has already established itself beyond the anime medium and with a growing popularity, it tries to aim higher. However, fans coming into this season shouldn’t have any high expectations especially if we take a look at the promotional material. While the key visual doesn’t turn heads away, the preview will. With the J.C. Staff in charge of this sequel, this raised a lot of red flags. In respect, the animation quality severely suffers in quality. Rather than a sharp, crisp quality animation with stylish aesthetics, we get static-like power point slides. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit but this second season’s quality is easy to point fingers to. Unfortunately, it seems J.C. Staff couldn’t handle the job of making this into a sensation again. They already have their hands full with a lot of projects this year after all.

Storytelling itself doesn’t improve much either if we talk about the main plot. Again, I really wish I could say the opposite but this sequel proves itself to be a tragedy. From the rushing of certain content to underwhelming delivery of some of the important fights, I felt no impact from this season at all. Zero. Early on the in season, we also meet Fubuki (Blizzard) who leads the B-Class hero group. At first, I was ecstatic to finally see her gain some relevance. However, the fight between her and Saitama passed like a flash. There’s almost no charisma besides Saitama’s heroic speech and attitude. Even on a comedy level, it didn't draw much popcorn entertainment. Similarly, many of the dialogues this season sounds very scripted. As a manga reader, I wanted to see much more than characters speaking their lines. What I got instead is just words and words coming out in a desaturated manner. Saitama is still the bald caped hero with unstoppable power. The first season captured the magic of his character while this sequel didn’t move the needle. What I mean is Saitama’s fight against adversaries this season isn’t even near the caliber as the previous season.

But it’s not always fair to compare the previous season with this continuation, right? Truth to be told, season 1 did set the bar high. Known for its visual dynamics and ONE’s creative writing, One Punch Man has always done all it could to be its own special series. Here, it’s lost the fire. People made memes out of One Punch Man because it was comically entertaining in a genuine way. Here, there’s worthy made besides weak impressions. Even the hero hunter Garou didn’t make much of an impact. As a foil character to Saitama, I expected his personality to be a bright flair. However, Garou ended up being someone that I forgot easily. Perhaps it’s because the overall directing of the show as several events takes place at once this season. There’s the fighting tournament involving various heroes, the invasion of the monsters, and Saitama living his day as usual as a hero. The joke of being one punched is far over after we’ve seen it so many times. The monsters themselves are hardly worth writing home about. To be honest, does any antagonist this season even contain an ounce of charisma compared to Boros? That fight from season 1 was legendary.

On the hero side, we do have some characters making reappearances. Names like Genos, Metal Bat, and Tatsumaki are a few I’m sure fans remember. Unfortunately, their roles this season has degenerated to little value. New faces like Suiryu brings in some excitement although he can hardly carry this season. In fact, the Super Fight Tournament arc felt like one big talent show of weirdos gathering together. I didn’t feel the stakes were impactful nor did the results feel satisfying. I mean, the show is One Punch Man. Who else is going to dominate this tournament?

Oh how the mighty of fallen is the easiest way to describe One Punch Man Season 2. The first season was a juggernaut that exceeded expectations. Fans still embrace what became a blockbuster. It’s 2019 now and we’ll have people talking again One Punch Man again. Unfortunately, people will quote more from the manga than recommending this sequel. Trust me, One Punch Man Second Season is a mistake. A grave mistake.

Tldr: it's bad, read the manga.

To start this off, I am a huge fan of the manga and webcomic , and as an anime only you might get at least some enjoyment out of it, but for someone like me it's just a terrible adaptation.
The animation is one of the obvious criticisms, but it's not only a downgrade compared to season 1, it's also pretty bad compared to your average action anime nowadays.
The use of still images is quite prevalent, and impossible to miss, and the few well animated bits are often lacking a real impact, which makes the punches feel hollow. ... Furthermore the awful effects, and confusing editing get in the way of what's left to enjoy. A great example for that would be the fight from episode 3, in which during the pivotal turning point, you can't even make out what's happening, due to shiny blue rays, covering everything.
The fights being so bad is quite the big problem, especially for the characters that have their introduction, and most of their development in their respective fights.
Another major issue is the awful artwork, it's inconsistent, ugly, and just looks amateurish a lot of the time. We all knew that they could never keep up with the manga, because Murata is a god, but as season 1 showcased, it's definetly possible to stay relativly close to the source material.The bad art is being worsened by the abysmal shading, which made all characters that have metal on them look ridiculous.
With them obviously not having enough time to finish this properly, it seems like they cut corners at every turn, a thing that makes this quite evident, is the abundance of close ups, in order to reduce the amount they need to draw. This is simply annoying, and it also ruins some of the great panels from the manga, which they should have simply copied, considering that they were still images. What is even more infuriating, and absolutely inexcusable is the lack of lip flaps during some conversations, most notably in episode 2.
There are many more things I could mention, like for example that Saitamas voice actor sounds like he is just phoning it in, or that the bad opening even spoils a major plot point, but I think you get my point. Overall this is just a bad adaption, and I wish it didn't exsist, because then there would at least be the possibility of a decent season 2, and the franchise I love wouldn't have such an awful anime representing it. The few good moments are all due to the source material being so good, the adaptation ads nothing to it, and actively hamstrings it most of the time. That's why can't enjoy anything about it, and it makes me actively mad, thus, I can't give it anything but a 1/10.

*Mild Spoilers for One Punch Man Second Season*

The second season of One Punch Man is a miserable fall from grace, with a quadruple whammy of circumstances contextualizing the gravity of the show’s failures. It’s a sequel to one of the most well-animated mainstream anime of all time, released over 3 years later. On top of that, this franchise’s counterpart, Mob Psycho 100, got adapted for a second season that practically pushed the boundaries of current TV anime 3 months before this season came out. Combined with the awful feel and presentation of this new season, that set of circumstances becomes the world’s nastiest measuring stick. ... Sadly, the inability to live up to any decent set of expectations isn’t unexpected when you look at all the writing on the wall. The stiff and barely animated trailers, the off artwork, and the fact that production switched over to J.C. Staff all should have told you this was doomed to fail. The worst part is I can’t even blame the people involved, as they simply didn’t have the time, physical capacity, or resources to pull together an acceptable product. It’s a cruel joke, and a herculean task for director Chikara Sakurai and team to be burdened with.

This isn’t to say that that this season would have been great if Madhouse or the original team took over. Boogiepop 2019 was animated by the same team and studio as One Punch Man Season 1 and it didn’t look that good. It was plagued with terrible artwork and redesigns, and a sheer lack of the atmosphere that both its source material and the 2000 anime bathed in, thanks to the removal of the rustic color palette for a generic one. Madhouse also animated the Overlord anime trilogy, which is littered with repulsive CGI and artwork that I’m not a fan of. The two shows they produced this season are a powerpoint presentation baseball anime and a show no one likes that apparently also suffers from hideous CGI, so it’s safe to say there’s no way they’d fix this on a visual level. Maybe the color palette wouldn’t be so unpleasant but that’s about it. Hell, I’m not even sure that studio could fix how drab this season feels, since everything feels so floaty, awkward, and self-serious. The jokes, the excessive monologuing, the terrible attempts at emotional beats, and the mind-shattering attempts at retroactively downplaying the threat of the first season’s climax are all downright surreal.

When it comes to the jokes, there’s none of the exaggeration or punchy energy to them that was present in season 1, and the lack of comedic facial expressions only adds to how limp and awkward the delivery is this season. The deadpan humor is also weakened by the stumbling, borderline lifeless presentation. I can honestly count on one hand the number of times I even chuckled in any given episode, barring maybe episode 3. On top of that, despite Saitama still one-punching overconfident bad guys in this season --i.e the main gimmick/punchline of the first season-- we don’t get to see him OHKO anyone on-screen even once until the finale. Perhaps they thought saving it up for a grand climax was a good idea, but all things considered, it’s just not worth it.

Getting back to the other issues at hand, one of the strangest criticisms I’ve ever had to lay out is that moments that seem to have happened simultaneously like the encounter between Genos and Speed-o’-Sound Sonic and the encounter between Saitama and Fubuki in episode 2 turn out to not happen simultaneously. This isn’t the first time that time becomes a liability in the show but detailing the other instance in the second half would get into some head-scratching spoilers. Another strange issue is how some episodes just end abruptly, as if they had no idea where and how to stop an episode. For a more traditional complaint, the pacing in this show is abysmal. Once the main arc of the season kicks in around episode 3, the pacing slows down to a crawl for several episodes before blitzing through everything in episode 7. The weirdest part about this is how apparently this adaptation has been burning through chapters like Sonic speeds through stages, making the sense of fatigue and whiplash all the more dizzying. No matter what, things just happen with no time to really establish anything or allow the audience to breathe and let things sink in. This, along with lifeless direction and lackluster character writing, makes it so there’s almost never any weight or impact to the big and intense moments that permeate the bulk of the season, adding to the vicious cycle of everything and nothing happening as events simply cycle through one another for no apparent reason. It’s issues like this that remind me why even in season 1, OPM was never good at being a serious narrative, let alone shuffling between parody and serious shounen.

That said, the overarching narrative of this season isn’t necessarily bad on its own. In theory, showing how the hero organization is now yet another corporation that cares more about the safety of its executives than those who work for them, and how it, Suiryu, and Garou are all foils to the heroic traits Saitama values and finds fun in, are good ideas. On top of that, the narrative genuinely gets interesting towards the last leg of the show. It’s just that everything gets tremendously bogged down by terrible presentation, hollow characterization (which we’ll get to), and a sense that vital moments are actively missing from otherwise solid character arcs and plotlines. Even worse, this season’s bloated, badly paced, and watered-down arc is all setup for a third season, so all of that arc fatigue meant nothing.

Speaking of nothing, there’s the gigantic cast of characters for this season. The characters all feel stale, including Saitama, the most entertaining character from the first season. He’s no longer this disgruntled guy who wants some respect for the hard work he put into his fun superhero craft, nor is he someone constantly wishing to fight someone strong because he hates how he can just one-shot everyone. The first scene of episode 1 tries to pretend that he still deals with the former issue, but make it past that and you’ll see that’s not the case. As for the latter problem, it’s no longer this drive that’s been eating away at him due to how disappointed he is all the time. Instead, he just casually wants stronger opponents, so he enters a tournament of martial artists, where he meets a foil of his now watered-down need to fight strong opponents. They don’t justify any of this either, so it creates this disconnect between season 1 Saitama and season 2 Saitama. They try diving back into the issue in episode 9, but they should have further demonstrated how empty he was feeling beforehand, as this episode cements that he’s not just bored, he’s practically lost and depressed. It feels like prior to tackling this issue, they wanted to give Saitama a flat arc, where people grow around him. They didn’t do a good job, for reasons mentioned prior. Another reason this doesn’t work is that the rest of the characters are incredibly one-note and eager to monologue about their baggage at the drop of a hat. Several of these monologues are intrusive and redundant as well, so the sheer abundance of them becomes grating, especially early on when they’re at their most prevalent. You know it’s bad when the one-off heroes and villains have more personality and presence to them than important side characters like King and Fubuki. Secondary and tertiary characters were never one of season 1’s strengths, but this is just lousy!

We do at least have a somewhat entertaining villain, that being Garou. However, when everything around him is so dull and when the action and presentation is as bad as it is, his intimidation and fun factor are somewhat diminished. Additionally, despite him actively going out of his way to kill both heroes and villains in his first scene and siding with the monsters who kill heroes and everyone else alike, he doesn’t kill anyone in subsequent fights. They don’t even try to justify this inconsistency. He does have some decent scenes and he does work as a warped foil of everything Saitama stands for, so despite the glaring inconsistency mentioned earlier, he’s still the best character in this show full of lifeless side characters for whatever that’s worth. On top of that, his arc to become stronger is probably the only compelling piece of writing in the show. He’s not the only foil for Saitama, as Suiryu from the god-awful tournament arc is like a more selfish, less dangerous version of him. His main difference is that he wants an easy life with his strength, and we actually see a decent arc come from him halfway into the series. The show gets to a point where I sometimes almost root for him and Garou because almost everyone else in this show is so unlikable. Practically everyone in this show is either a blank sheet or a total prick, sometimes both! Apart from a few side characters in episode 11, the only notable exception is Metal Bat, and that’s literally because of one scene at a sushi bar with like two funny jokes. Yes, they wanna show that heroes aren’t all morally sound because Garou has to have a point, but that doesn’t mean we need Saitama’s foils to be the only ones with any layered writing behind them. One last issue regarding characters is that even the world around them has none of the vibrancy and personality than in season 1. None of the one-offs are as funny or vivid as the disgruntled alien crew from the end of season 1. What a shame.

Another positive aspect of the first season was the music. The OP was a thrill ride and the admittedly overplayed OST was filled with incredibly memorable tracks that accentuated the hype and emotionally satisfying feel the show aimed for. None of these return for this second season (barring that one time they remixed one of the OG season’s tracks in episode 5), and in their place lies a bunch of boring background tracks (save for one or two of them) and a mediocre opening that doesn’t even remotely capture any of the excitement or aggressiveness it shoots for. The visuals are somehow even more lifeless in the OP than in the show too, which almost never happens. The ED is also grating to listen to thanks to the vocals, and it’s even worse than season 1’s lackluster ED. The part that stings the most is that the composer for this season was Makoto Miyazaki, the same guy who did the last season’s music. What happened?

Above all else, this show’s most controversial aspect is its visuals. By the standards of season one, the standards of the manga, the standards of both seasons of the franchise’s counterpart Mob Psycho 100, the standards of an action anime, and even anime in general, the visuals of One Punch Man Season 2 are terrible. There’s about as little animation as your current non-action seasonal or a long-running slideshow like Yugioh Duel Monsters, and almost no visual flair to compensate, with loads of panning shots, and badly edited quick cuts which make some of the fight scenes simultaneously as unstimulating as the rest of the show, and more incomprehensible than the most badly edited fight scenes from SAO and Fate/Apocrypha. Episode 7’s fights are the worst by far, with constant character model mishaps, extreme usage of bad, looping ghosting afterimages to simulate characters attacking rapidly, frame rate-killing camera movements, and CGI objects that also kill the frame rate. Even the best fights are barely above your average Fairy Tail GIF-fests, and your average fight in this show is just that but undetailed and incomplete. There are occasional, freakish drawing mishaps even outside of the fight scenes, such as the sequence where Saitama’s head is shaped like a lightbulb during a camera rotation in episode 1, or the entirety of Saitama’s conversation with King in episode 9. That alone is inexcusable, especially when this anime is 90% panning shots filled with stock assets as is! It’s even worse here where the artwork tends to be incredibly rough and badly drawn, especially with the characters’ faces and the close-up shots with inconsistent outlining, especially in episode 1. Practically every episode has a unique, outstandingly awful visual blunder to notice, and the few well-animated cuts in the show, primarily towards the final third of the series, can’t make up for that.

The strange charcoal coloring of Genos’s metal frame doesn’t even feel like it fits with the rest of the drawing of the character, and not only is it inconsistent with his season 1 frame, it constantly changes from scene to scene in the first two episodes with no rhyme or reason. As of episode 3, it seems like they’ve settled on what he should look like again before changing it one more time in another repair late into the second half, but that should have been done in the character design phase, not after production of certain episodes has ended. You can’t use the excuse of him getting all those repairs and new parts since he did the same in season 1 while looking consistent. The show doesn’t justify this itself, so neither should you. Back to the issue of charcoal-esque metal feeling out of place on the characters they’re attached to, as it applies to another returning character, Speed-o’-Sound Sonic, and other pieces of metal like Metal Bat’s...bat. This raises another issue with the show as a whole: the coloring in this season feels off. This season has a darker and more off-putting color palette than before, and along with some of the colors they used, it makes the show generally awkward and strangely bleak to look at. Even if the show somehow was animated beautifully, the color palette alone makes this show aesthetically displeasing to me. It’s a shame considering how good the returning character designs are, since now they just look off, regardless of if they’re on-model or not. Still, along with the interiors and entire buildings comprised of terrible CG assets, all of these issues make it so there can almost never be a scene that genuinely feels great to look at. Even the incredibly few moments of fluid animation suffer from most of these issues. The Blu-rays may mitigate some of these issues to an extent, but the problems are too deep-rooted for blu-ray touch-ups to truly fix.

This isn’t even a question of failing to live up to the stellar animation quality and overall visuals of the first season; this is a case of visuals that are just plain bad. It doesn’t take an animation snob to look at this and go “wow this looks wrong” or “this feels off”. No one should be grateful that a studio forced a bunch of overworked, under-scheduled staff members --including a director with almost no prior directorial experience-- to make this show. It’s not a gift, it’s a product, and a badly produced one at that. The production is so bad that the proofreader for this review had an absolute ball with the visuals, often pointing out several awful aspects and moments even I didn’t even notice. Sure, it’s no Berserk 2016/17 or Hand Shakers franchise, but that doesn’t mean we should bend over backwards just because this is a continuation of a show most of us like. As much as it hurts to say, I’m glad that this hate train started simply because it shows that even despite the pushback against this movement, we can still put our foot down on what is and isn’t an acceptable product. It shouldn’t take 3 episodes for us to see a fight with acceptable animation quality or a single cool shot, nor should it take until episode 9 for them to even attempt any interesting techniques. It also shouldn’t need up to 5 animation directors working on an episode like with episodes 2 (or 15 in the case of episode 8). That just proves this show was poorly managed, badly scheduled, and doomed to fail.

This really is the anime equivalent to Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, isn’t it?

The second season of One Punch Man is the end product of mismanagement and production issues emblematic of the dismal state of the industry. This show was practically destined to fail when given to a studio that’s been spreading their teams thin through 2-5+ projects a season and having well-documented scheduling issues for the past 3 years. I can’t imagine what the team must have gone through, trying their damndest to live up to the show’s monumental expectations with such little time, staffing, or resources. It’s crushing to think that when OPM 1 came out 3 years ago, people jumped on the hype train, and now with season 2, people are jumping on the hate train. Hell, as someone who only kind of liked season 1, that’s the main reason I watched this season. While the first season functioned as the fun blockbuster anime it wanted to be, this second season was unable to truly be what it wanted to be. Honestly, it’s more depressing than hateful, and it didn’t have to be this way. That’s the anime industry for you, where blood, sweat, and tears are soaked up by cash that get put into the next season’s 5 isekai shows. One Punch Man 2 is a casualty of the industry we’re encouraged to support, and the worst part is people are ok with this.

Written and edited by: CodeBlazeFate
Proofread by: Peregrine

It's not a very hard task to tolerate with low production values, but when the heart and soul of a beloved franchise gets destroyed by directing that completely misses the point of the series, it becomes near impossible to overlook the massive amount of problems we have at hand. Welcome to the 2nd season of One Punch Man, sequel which inferiority is beyond comparison, show which is not only terrible but an absolute disgrace towards its fans. This is simply not acceptable.

This review will cover 3 main points explaining why I personally found this series to be complete bollocks. These are 1) Comedy 2) ... Directing, and 3) Art.

1) The comedy doesn't deliver due to poor comedic timing. It's a hollow, near dead version of what it used to be. Scenes end before they reach their climax. Nothing shines or stands above the rest. The content is never pushed to its limit or even tried to. There is no pinnacle to be found as the show is flat like the chest of those countless loli tsunderes J.C. Staff is most famous for. It's like the entire thing has been made without any vision, possibly by someone who never thought there was anything fun about this series to begin with.

Season 1 played around with its comedy, waited for the right moment and even pushed the overall comedic resolution to its utmost limit. It was the type of content that constantly showed respect to its audience, and this was done to an extent that made it very easy to respect it back. After all, making a series about a dude who -- most of the time -- wins everything with a one punch is a risky move which could only ever work if there's a perfect harmony and the strongest merits are polished. And that was done and achieved. With this 2nd season, the presentation is bad, the execution is worse, and its overall form is, at best, like a parody of its predecessor; The punch is still there, but it doesn't have any impact.

2) Immersion is the key, and it's best achieved by atmosphere because with atmosphere comes awe, and awe is something that limits disbelief and gives us the basis that is needed to forgive all sort of flaws, problems and questionable choices any series contains and does. Experiencing the gar-like awe this series is famous for and getting into the show at all has been hard, if not impossible. Action comedy series (and visual comedy alike) tend to be on par with blockbuster action by default. They in generally are build around empty and soulless ideas that don't have much good things going on. This weakness needs to be countered to create this so called "genuine entertainment" that has minimum amount of annoying problems that ruin the fun. This is typically done with written details (such as oneliners or unique characteristics), audio directing, and visual execution that solely exist to make the series seem better than it would otherwise be. I.e. value is placed on details to carry the otherwise lacking content. This job is what the director is supposed to do. But OPM S2 did nothing to fight against its own flaws, rather, it only created more of them, poisoning its own core.

Audio choices, audio directing and directing itself are some of the most important things when it comes to turning mediocrities into something outstanding. But it isn't there. Rather than playing around with the mood and teasing the audience by making us wait -- or alternatively doing the opposite by throwing in some ridiculously energetic beats -- the series is more like "let's get this over with" and then they do. End of story. It promises to reward the viewer but never does. No real value is given to any scene or moment with the comedy (like mentioned earlier) and the same thing applies with the story board, the action scenes, the visuals, and music choices and seiyuu work. To get completely serious here, nearly every scene could be used as a material for Every Frame a Painting videos as an example of the unpreferred way to do shit.

Perhaps the best example of all of this are the first 8,5 minutes of episode 09 which are so poorly made I doubt anyone who gets into film school, but hasn't even taken any lectures yet could manage to do worse job even if they tried to. Heck, I doubt there are even many graduates who could purposely achieve this level of awful. Pay attention to the lackluster sound mixing, monotonous voice acting, the near complete absence of SFX and note the music choice that would be tagged as (mellow piano) in hearing impaired subs. Perfect mood for a scene where some incredibly socially awkward dude tries to kiss his crush with whom he has never spoken with, right? Guess again! It's the most badass fight scene in the first half of this arc! And this is only the audio we're speaking of. What the actual krukk? Talk about failed delivery. Life of an art house visionary, I tell you. This can hardly be called "directing", rather, it seems like a serial production process for products that should've been buried deep under ground and sealed away in cement. Tho a better example of how awful the SFX is is a fight scene from episode 11 where the sounds of landing punches were most likely created by someone repeatedly hitting church organs with a wet sock.

3) Art. When we asked for "loyal adaptation", no one meant "keep the webcomic art as it is", but that's all we've got. MadHouse's art and animation cannot be overhyped. One Punch Man is the single best animated action anime that has yet been made, one may disagree but not change my mind. I saw it 4 times, own it on blu-ray and it looks glorious, visually one of the best things that are called anime, especially when looking into modern productions. Season 2 is a generic J.C. Staff production where still artwork flows around the screen, cheap effects and camera tricks are trying to create the illusion of animation and movement; Even the most basic scenes are done with voice-over narration to ensure there is no need to even animate mouth movements; If there is a way to save money and time, it's chosen every single time; Character models are only few steps away from sanic-tier, purposely terribly drawn memes; The color pallet is not only bland, but inconsistent to a point that the episodes could have as well been made by completely different teams who never shared any data between each other. Just compare the colors of episodes 3 and 4. Let me repeat what was said in the opening paragraph: low production can be forgiven, but One Punch Man 2nd Season's production is a heartless piece of industrial waste, anime that has not known love or passion.

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What J.C. Staff is doing here is despicable as it's making their creation seem like an attempt to use this entire medium as an investment platform. Minimum effort and risk to ensure profit. The ultimate safety route. "We missed out Bitcoin so let's see if this can cash us some." I guess that's why they couldn't even color metals properly since those aren't gold or silver. This is the furthest from a work of passion, driven by creed alone. Saitama is not "ok" anymore like in the meme, rather, it's a full turn around with a K.O. (sorry, I just had to put this here somewhere)

When series comes with such obvious and serious issues, I don't think there is any real reason to go in depth with the story and characters because OPM S02 is fundamentally so broken that no amount of pros falling under these categories could fix it. I will only talk about them briefly. Keep in mind that the technical aspects of the show lessen the entertainment value of its story and characters -- and ultimately they are just an inferior version of the re-drawn manga, which I personally recommend reading instead of watching this anime -- but since they are a part of this anime and not an entity that can be completely taken out of context, and considering this review is not aimed for the manga, you will face criticism that is only relevant to the anime. + This anime is not 100% loyal to canon anyway.

The story type changes during this season. The monster of the week formula is put in the background when new type of elements and side-plots are expanding the verse and moving the main focus from Saitama to other characters. At first, the series seems to be quite lost when the storyboard is all over the place, introducing characters at episodic speed and following wide range of different pov's in each, offering fights that don't seem to have real substantial value and showing monsters that are partially making the entire idea for the series seem old and outdated. It takes over half of the entire run time before the story finally tightens up, the supposed build-up phase concludes and the filler-ish feel of the past events start seem significant. Most of this run time is used to make the viewer understand the characters better and see what type of people they are, the actual means used to achieve all of this being secondary. Despite everything there is to criticize, the characters are not a missed shot. Fubuki is strengthening her role as the best girl for anime only watchers, King especially is portrayed to be an actual real human, and Garou "The Hero Hunter" is shown to be an actually very well-thought out villain. With mild issues in the storyboard (and major in their execution, of course), the story knows where it is headed and majorly improves towards the end. From these departments, the series seems bearable even under its massive problems listed above. There definitely was room for improvement from these departments, too, but even so, at least they managed to make watching this series more tolerable.

One Punch Man 2 is just tiresomely stupid and ugly.

Four years ago, Madhouse animated One Punch Man aka OPM and blew the charts with an outstanding production. The fans waited four years for a sequel, and in exchange, they got a piece of trash that is in pair with productions just as "Mommy, please save my eyes," "Honey, I destroyed OPM." I do not know if "Boku no Pico" is better than this junk, but it is clear that J.C. Staff failed severely. In one sentence: OPM2 is the kind of sequel you may end up wishing you’d never seen. If you are an OPM ... follower, be advised, proceed with caution, and be ready for a long agony.

After watching the first episodes, I was feeling miserable (the feeling never changed). I was not expecting to see something poorly drawn by a group of professionals that cannot understand how an action animated sequence is made. The characters need a vibrant movement. However, in this production, the action is weird because they overused "still" sequences; they do not have the right direction (sound, art, etc.). Furthermore, the design is awful and disgusting.

All went wrong with OPM2. The animation is ugly, the colors are horrendous, the jokes are unbearable, the story... did this thing has an acceptable plot, maybe? Lastly, the fights are grotesque, uninspired. The story tries very hard to catch our attention with the comedy and the villains' performance. However, you cannot transform the wood in gold, and you cannot turn OPM2 in OPM because the jokes are bad. I do not know if it is the timing, the writing, the art, the sound, or maybe I became immune to OPM's charm, but the second season feels empty. The biggest mistake is asking more for a studio that isn't specialized in this kind of genres. They did what they could. Sadly, this sequel feels more like a cheap imitation than a sequel.

Worse yet, the story does not deliver a climax. This kind of animated series needs to have a precise harmony between action sequences, sound, art, and writing. OPM2 fails in most of them so, in the end, the fights, the comedy, are unconcluded. Call it a wrong direction, bad production, I call it lack of studio's experience. The result is an empty carcass titled OPM2.

Lastly, I can continue pointing the bad points of this mediocre show, such as the sound that for me is one of the most awful of the season because it does not help the fights and does not raise the action. However, there is some positive aspect, such as the introduction of some villains (Garou, his background) that are there to boost Saitama's performance. The direction improved in the last episodes where we can enjoy some outstanding action sequences. For example, when Garou fight against Genos. However, the poor management predominated during all the season killing the entire show. While OPM2 just implodes and burns, J.C. Staff missed a golden opportunity to display the otaku community that they can be a great studio again.

One Punch Man, a series loved by many for bombastic animation and hilarious physical comedy has been viciously murdered by J.C. Staff.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last year, it’s known throughout the anime community that Madhouse handed the second season of OPM to J.C. Staff—a studio known for cutting corners in their animation. Our expectations were low, but JESUS CHRIST THIS IS GARBAGE.

The art is awful. It’s flat, the color pallete is dull, and the shading is messy dog shit. Character designs were changed from their clean cool style to jagged and hideous imitations of their former selves. Metal textures ... look especially awful; it doesn’t have a shiny effect anymore, it just looks pudgy and gray.

All of the animation is practically a stop motion slide show. When there is motion it is just excessive speed lines and other cheap light effects making it hard to tell what’s even happening. Action scenes are edited poorly, shots jump from one still image to the next rather than animating the character’s movement.

This season has a slower pace with more focus on one major villain rather than a monster-of-the-week story; it’s easy to see this as an improvement, but everything is executed much worse than the original. Extensive dialogue with very little animation is used to fill screen time in place of the abundance of action scenes in season one.

Even though the characters look bad, they’re still very likable. Garou is a great villian, and there are entertaining heroes like King and of course Saitama. However, the comedic timing is poor. Jokes don’t land with any impact. Unfunny humor is entirely due to the lame visuals, mediocre sound effects, and awkward directing.

Sequels rarely live up to their predecessors, but this is a hollow, mangled corpse of the original. J.C. Staff has been overworked and understaffed for years, and they should not have been given the responsibility of a show as big as One Punch Man.
Don’t watch this. Go read the manga instead.

Modern superhero movies suffer from regurgitated stories, negligible character developments, and unmemorable villains. Yet Hollywood inundates the public with action-packed spectacles (advertisements) for the mere purpose of generating boat-loads of cash and previewing the eventual sequel. Which, in turn, previews the subsequent film — creating an endless cycle of bombasity. Frankly, it’s nauseating.

Given the pitfalls of the superhero genre, I expected the first season of One Punch Man to be a parallel Japanese equivalent of the cookie-cutter, American model. What I received, however, was a self-deprecating, meta anime that humorously broke the formulaic ‘rules’ of a soulless industry. Instead ... of dragging out battles to fill airtime, they simply had Saitama defeat the villain with one punch. Rather than give Saitama a set of morals to live by, he fights for ‘fun.’ And in place of an emblematic suit, he wears a dorky getup that has no sense of style. But, despite this, it was hilarious!

Besides breaking all the norms, One Punch Man excelled in creating fluid combat sequences with more impact than your run-of-the-mill Shounen. With action and comedy hitting on all cylinders, One Punch Man was a raging success that spurred numerous anime and non-anime fans alike to tune into the next episode. But with season 2 under the stewardship of a new studio (J.C. Staff), hopes of receiving the same quality product began to sour. Especially with the inferior animation that featured dreadful pacing, weird character aesthetics, and a lack of fluidity. There was a joke in episode two where Saitama performed his “serious sideways jumps,” but due to rushed pacing, the joke never materialized as such.

Episode seven — Suiryu and Saitama’s championship fight — encapsulated all of the worst aspects season 2 had to offer and then some. Their various kicks and punches had no impact. Due to choppy fight sequences, it became difficult to interpret how someone was or was not getting hurt. When you find yourself rewinding to understand how something happened (the butt scene), rather than reveling in its artistic beauty — then you know the animators f—ked up!

Furthermore, the plot suffered from overloading the viewer’s senses. Far too many events (the Monster Association attacking the city, the martial arts tournament, Garou ambushing heroes, the formation of hero factions) were occurring at the same time without adequate build up. Inevitably, the whole proceeding became a mishmash of random fighting, other random fighting, and even more random fighting. Much of which felt inconsequential, particularly the ending of the martial arts tournament.

In terms of the characters, they were still entertaining enough to keep “One Punch Man Season 2” afloat. Saitama’s unassuming gags — like the bananas in the hospital — were quite humorous. Despite the alterations in animation, his character felt very much the same (which is a good thing). Although, his frequent video game outings with King became mundane after awhile. The new evil ‘monster,’ Garou, exhibited a level of depth that was refreshing to see in an antagonist. His plight to upend the established paradigm of the perpetual winning hero was a realistic motivation. Having watched WCW in my younger years, nothing was as exhilarating as watching Hulk Hogan join the N.W.O.

Why, you may ask?…Because! It was unpredictable.

Garou’s ambition to become a monster — despite being human — is unexpected given the narrative framework of season one. Furthermore, the various flashbacks and conversations with the boy in the park teased out his thoughts on the hero/villain dynamic. Giving the viewer an opportunity to empathize with his character, and understand his motivations. Does Garou’s extreme antics become tropey at times? Sure. But given the overabundance of all-powerful, omniscient beings who control matters behind the scenes, it’s nice to see a villain play it by ear and actively challenge heroes on the fly. That being said, Garou’s character felt like untapped potential. There’s only so much a 30-60 second clip can reveal about a characters rationale for wanting to become a villain. If more time was dedicated toward Garou’s specific reasons for hating heroes and preferring villains, it would have been time well spent.

Normally, decently-written characters would trounce cosmetic blemishes and a hurried plot. But given “One Punch Man’s” reliance on smooth, detailed animation to execute well-timed jokes and exhilarate the viewer. It comes as no surprise that the animation deteriorated the product as a whole. Also, besides Garou, none of the new characters resonated. King, in particular, was a major disappointment, as his interactions with Saitama were anemic attempts at comedy. How many times do we need to see him kick Saitama’s ass in video games, honestly?

In the end, it was a passionless attempt to rekindle the love fans had for season one and had all the markings of a quick cash-grab. Not unlike the superhero films it mocked in season one.

Looking for a sequel to One Punch Man? You're in the wrong place.
To call this the second season of the near worldwide phenomenon that is One Punch Man is an absolute insult. To call it an adaptation of either the webcomic or the redrawn manga is an absolute insult. Had I scored this disaster of a sequel comparatively to its predecessor, I'd have scored it even worse. As it stands, I'll treat this as its own property and move from there.

The story is solid - as one might expect of something written by ONE. The story is one of only two redeemable traits about this ... show. If you're at all interested in this story, please go read the manga.

The art is garbage. The animation is garbage. The most you'll get out of any given episode is badly drawn still frames being flashed onto the screen or panned across, sometimes with the addition of speed lines or other effects to give the illusion of movement. The character redesigns are awful. Every single flesh-toned character looks like they've been colored using those children's blow pens, or like they applied self-tanner really badly. They're constantly off-model. Anything more complicated than Saitama's simple comic design looks like it was drawn by a fifteen-year-old on deviant art - and even Saitama's design is butchered on occasion. The metal textures look absolutely disgusting - they're dull and muddy looking, and the excessive lighting effects don't even help most of the time. It's almost offensive to look at.

The directing is some of the worst I've ever seen. Every joke falls flat, every 'tense' moment falls flat, the music is used at awkward times, every opportunity is wasted and it really appears like the only purpose this director serves is to attempt to make the awful art look less horrible. He fails at that as well. The whole show is short cut after short cut. I could ignore bad art if the jokes were funny, or if the action scenes held any weight, or if the constant 'movement' weren't so distracting, but absolutely none of that is true. Some episodes really and genuinely feel like they go on for hours because every second is painful to watch. It's like I'm watching this director and studio choke One Punch Man to death with their bare hands.

The characters are the second redeeming trait of the show, but that has everything to do with how good the source material is. It's a miracle that the characters and story managed to survive this massacre at the hands of sheer incompetence. Go read the manga if you care about the characters.

I really wanted to like this. I don't know a lot about JC Staff, or the industry in general, so I didn't go into this expecting the worst. I'd heard the rumors and concerns, but I wasn't bothered by them until I saw the PV. The show is so much worse than anything I could have imagined and even worse than most peoples' worst fears after they heard about the staff change. There's little to no enjoyment to be had here if you enjoyed the first season or source material, and it's forgettable at best as a stand-alone work.

Overall, I'm giving this a three. My score has lowered steadily every episode, but episode seven took the cake for me. Don't watch this if you love the original or value your own time at all. Don't force yourself to experience the type of disappointment that led me to leave my second review ever out of pure anger. Don't do yourself dirty like that.

Read the manga.

We’ve all heard this before since it’s a tale as old as time: A sequel of a popular property isn’t nearly as good as the original. This is a phenomenon known as sequelitis. Sure, there is the possibility that the sequel made just doesn’t quite live up to the original work, but is still an ok experience overall, like Incredibles 2. However, OPM2 not only fails to build upon the source material, but it’s also a complete disaster as a standalone product. Hideous visuals, an underutilized cast, and unfunny jokes make watching this season about as fun as diarrhea, although there were some decent scenes ... and fights here and there.

This entire season is littered with still frames, gross background colors, inconsistencies, poor editing, lack of weight in any of its fights, and a weird metallic shine on a few of its characters. The phrase “Look at how they massacred my poor boy” doesn’t even begin to describe the kind of hell that Genos went through in this season. There was this scene in Saitama’s apartment where Genos’s arms look like they’ve rusted almost as bad as my sister’s bike. Whenever they have him in a fight, he looks like a cheap bootleg toy from China. They also gave him this metallic shine to really drive home that he’s this super cool fighting robot, but he just looks gross when he’s fighting. Back in the first season, whenever a fight happens, you can really feel the impact of the punches that are thrown. Characters are launched several feet away, and whenever Saitama throws a punch, it causes the monster’s body to be torn to shreds. In this season, whenever someone is getting hit, they turn the entire background into a single solitary color like red, orange, or purple. This might’ve been done to emphasize the hits, but it just looks ugly and distracting. It’s typically used over stills after the punch has been thrown, and it gives the characters this horrible looking outline after the hit. It doesn’t emphasize on the hits, but it instead just cuts after the fact, so the action can’t stick with the audience at all. Also, when a character like Bang or Garou hits an enemy several times, they have these impact effects, but they’re so stilted that they don’t feel like it's moving at all. There are several general inconsistencies, like Saitama’s head looking like it got swollen from a brain tumor in episode 1, and Metal Bat’s dried up looking blood covering his face in one scene but then having only a little bit of blood coming out of his forehead in the next. There’s a lot more than I could go over here, but I think you get the point. Aside from not living up to the standards that the first season set, it fails to live up to any basic standards in the industry. There’s an animator named Kenichiro Aoki, who is responsible for some of the shots, and the animation he’s done are the best parts of the show. You might as well call it One Animator Man since he’s the one responsible for all of the few decent parts of the anime, such as the cockroach fight in episode 6, but all of the other shots look so rushed and poorly put together. This is what happens when you rush animation and try to get something out ASAP, as a studio such as JC Staff doesn’t care about quality, but quantity. In an industry that shits out as many anime as possible, this season is just another example of horribly produced manure.

The comedy in this season is also unfunny except for a few scenes. A lot of this is because of the animation and horrible direction, but most of what the show tries to pass off as “jokes” are just not funny. As a friend of mine, SunlitSonata pointed out to me that something the first season was good at was contrast. It would go back and forth between crisp art, to a drawing ripped out of a manga, like the OK face. There was also the fight with Saitama and Genos, where it made it look like Saitama was about to punch Genos, but he just runs up to him and taps his shoulder. OPM2 tries to go for the same thing, like when Garou attacks Saitama. Saitama goes for the manga expression and knocks out Garou, but the presentation is too bland for it to stand out. When King is revealed to be a total coward, they do make a joke with Saitama’s deadpan reaction to seeing King play a visual novel, but it goes by too quickly to be funny. Another example would be when Fubuki tries to recruit Saitama into her group. When one of her lackeys tell Saitama that she’s Class B Rank 1, Saitama doesn’t care, and we get the groups reactions. The problem is that when we see their reactions, we get the gross looking solitary colored background I mentioned before and ugly shadows. I only found two jokes funny from this season, such as when Metal Bat’s younger sister knocks him out since that’s so unexpected. The best joke is when Saitama knocks out the blonde guy from the martial arts tournament. To add insult to injury, the announcer ends up embarrassing the blonde guy by revealing that his girlfriend didn’t even show up for the tournament despite the fact he planned on proposing to her. It’s such an overly cruel joke that I couldn’t stop laughing for a little while. Though that joke was saved for the post-credits scene, so I ended up missing it the first time I watched the episode. Sadly, for the most part, the presentation ruins almost all of the jokes, so it’s hard for me to care a lot of the time.

Saitama and Genos practically act the same, as Saitama is still the super strong dense hero, and Genos is the extremely serious straight man. There’s no problem with that, but they aren’t utilized very well here. They’re both are completely glossed over to the point of no return, aside from a few notable scenes. Saitama’s lack of satisfaction with fighting opponents because of how ridiculously strong he is gets completely shafted until we get an admittingly good scene with Saitama and King talking about it, but that’s all you get with him. The show revolves around a monster invasion, as the number of monsters and their intensity gradually increases throughout its run, and one human claim to be one of the monsters. That person is Garou, and he’s the best part of the show. We all have villains we find to be more entertaining than the heroes, and Garou is the embodiment of that sentiment. He’s on an ongoing quest to defeat all the heroes from the hero association to prove that monsters are superior to humans. He’s an extremely arrogant and strong material arts master. Every time he’s on screen, it’s fun to watch with his entertaining lines, and enjoyable personality. He’s not all bad, as he seems to have a soft spot for children since he was even willing to kill a monster to defend Metal Bat’s younger sister. The presentation does ruin his appearances in the show somewhat, as his muscles look like trash bags mashed together, and one of his facial expressions had a Grinch looking simile. He’s still enjoyable overall regardless, but he’s probably a lot more fun to follow in the manga.

The opening is done by JAM Project, who was also responsible for the opening of the first season. The animation for the opening might be terrible, but the song itself is pretty good. It has this real banger heavy rock part at the beginning, and the rest of the song is just fun to listen to. The ED for this season that was sung by Saitama’s voice actor, Makoto Furukawa, is just ok. Like the first season, it goes for a more melancholic song for ED, with a piano and slow singing. However, the song itself isn’t anything noteworthy and it’s nothing you haven’t heard from before. As for the OST, it’s quite good, as Makoto Miyazaki returns, and it does help liven up the most boring show with some nice rock tunes like Garou’s theme. It goes for this sort of intensity that helps liven up the otherwise stilted action scenes.

I’m sure some might be asking why I even bothered to finish a show I hated so much and write a review about it. I didn’t find OPM2 to be so bad it’s good, like Inuyashiki, and I found it boring at least 90% of the time, so what made me finish it? This review aside, the main reason would be because I was curious to see how far this titan would fall. I wanted to see how bad the animation could get as the show could progress. Most episodes were horrible looking, with episode 7 being the worst one, but there were a few decent episodes like episode 3. You’re probably better off just reading the manga.

In my opinion, this tournament is a Filler. Original web comic didn't have this arc, which kinda explain the poor comedy in it.

I think and hear me out, I think this whole arc and so much more is extra crap added by the artiest who adopt the web series. I never found his comedy to be good and it shows in this season compare to the previous where he didn't add anything to the story. His influence in the story is so much clear in Season2 and more in the upcoming material from the manga. Or it could be because of the serialization. Either-way, ... it isn't that good and expect the Comedy quality to be dropped in the future for "Kool Action" when this started as a Gag manga about a Overpowered character.

Example of extra characters that wasn't in the original series until they serialized it: Glasses and the Martial Art boy.

Okay, the season is not over, but we reached 3/4 of it so I feel confident I won't have to edit my review xD!

I'll be blunt, this season is abysmal. It does nothing right, as the studio makes a bad job at animating it and the story is empty.


STORY
In this season, monsters attack the city and force some humans to eat monster cells, which turn them into monsters. We learn they are a part of the Monsters Association.
Saitama gets in a martial art tournament, where he OHKO each and everyone of his enemies as expected.
And there is the introduction of Garou, the man who wants ... to become a monster and hunts heroes.

In three sentences only, I summed up [b]literally the whole season.[/b] Needless to say this story is empty.

The first season had this issue as well. However, it was the introduction, so I was more forgiving about that. I expected season 2 to dive more into a story, because otherwise it would just become boring. Sadly, that's what happened.
Now of course this issue comes from the source material. The manga itself tells no story, we couldn't expect its adaptation to do so. Although KyoAni proved it was technically possible with K-On...


But the worst is, the few things it does tell... is pointless.

- What was the point of the tournament?

- What was the point of Garou?

- What is the point of any other character?


There is NO POINT. AT ALL. It doesn't tell anything! It just introduces a bunch of new characters, each one seems to have a story but no story actually is relevant to the main scenario!
I don't need a complex scenario which will give me food for though. But I need at least a goal. WHY do you show me these characters? WHY do you show me these events? WHAT do you want to tell?




ART
J.C Staff does a bad job, period. I don't see how anyone would try and defend them.

- Most of the season is still pictures, sometimes with a single cheap effect on it (a small zoom, or blur, ...).

- When it does move, it's only a few frames they repeat one after another, making the fights shitty to watch.

- Almost NO HIT is shown, like it was too difficult for the studio to animate a punch or a kick. Instead, they just cut from a still picture to another still picture while playing a hit sound effect.

It's as cheap as it gets. And it's not just the animation. The drawings are bad. They're dirty, disproportioned, and inconsistent.

Finally, the opening has a bunch of pictures that make no sense. And of course, its outro is screwed up: they intended to make a transition between two related pictures, but it simply doesn't work.



Long story short: [b]this is the worst.[/b] JC Staff is not a brillant studio, but this is the worst they ever did by far.



SOUND
The OST is not bad per se. But it's repetitive, it doesn't have any new themes compared to season 1, and it doesn't fit the scenes properly sometimes.
The seiyuus feel dead inside. Like they don't take their job seriously. They actually sound bored, which is boring to hear.

I like the opening, although it's a bit too much like the first one.



CHARACTERS
Saitama is powerful, dumb and funny, as usual.
Garou is awesome, I loved him until I realized his story is pointless.
The rest of the bunch is... useless. Many characters seem to have their own story, but none of these stories are developed or even slightly important for the main story. This series keep introducing pointless characters. Some of these characters are funny though. I love Sonic and Suiryu. I liked Genos in season 1, but he is so useless in this one...


ENJOYMENT
I had a few laughs in front of this season. But I clearly will never watch it ever again. It tells nothing and the visuals are awful, this is the worst combination ever.
(And I don't even compare it to the first season. This season 2 is bad by itself.)

It's sad, but at least I did enjoy watching it for the few laughs it gave me.

= No spoilers, just bs review =

Updated Review: Even 12 Episodes didn`t even saved from this monstrous disaster.

Old review
=========================

Overhyped.
And the results, is probably one of the worst animation shifting ever.

... One Punch Man, or OPM, is one kind of anime that everyone talks to, I don`t care who you are or what age you in, you still know this show. Even friends who don`t like anime knows. Its a true testament of a show that brainwashed every fellow humans. Its about one guy named Saitama who wanted to be a Hero, despite of overpowered guy to kills anyone in one hit.

And when the second seasons starts advertising up, everyone still excited to see the Garou Arc... well. It turned out to shitstorm. My enjoyment has become similar to Saitama. Its unenjoyable. It was disappointing beyond incomprehensible. I expect a lot more, after all long years of not giving Season 2.

First thing that you notice is how very weak the trailer is. And that is the easiest to notice that show will be going like that for whole series.

The one thing major flaws is the Pacing and Animation. They f up real good. If they f up the animation, they f up the pacing.
Madhouse style, at least fight have a huge impact, highly animated choreography to the extreme, and fight length doesn`t need to be long enough to move on to the plot.
JCStaff style, how about a minute or less (at least some of it was ok), panning copy-paste manga animation, big ass word to emphasize their kill-moves, and a sudden pacing that "suddenly monster destroyed without animated". Oh, and also a bs filler that they didn`t even try to use remaining timeline for a show called "action".

Plot of the series is better than Season 1, but the Character had way too much skipping scenes, a.k.a pacing issues. Until that point I have no interest of each of new character. Except King, and one dedicated for Seiryu. So in conclusion of plot, its very laughable. I know its a Comedy show, but its weak presentation makes a joke a nill to me.

Sound also is messed up, some are missing or too "bass". Some are very "movie" like effect, but it didn`t really work at all. OP song isn`t that great either.

For those who came from manga reader, I suggest completely skip this show. Unless if you just watch it for fun, then yes.
And since I saw already 9 episodes and still not get any better, well...

I don`t know if JC Staff care about making this show.
(Some news that Director has been fired for putting a bad name at creator "One" and he deserve that.)

Season one was amazing. Great fight scenes, Great comedy really was a masterpiece.
This season has been butchered. Sloppy art work, poor sound quality, rushed fight scenes with no impact or emotion behind them. Has the same quality of a overnight rushed essay. The characters are still amusing so that a plus.
I like the story and even some of the comedy like the banana scene, But honestly even though I didn't have my hopes up for this season the little expectation I had was crushed.

Will I watch it? Yes
Will I enjoy it? Maybe
Will it be anywhere near the level of season 1? Nop

I'm a ... fan of the series so I will watch it. But its nothing impressive.

Please for the love of god, If they decide on a season 3 don't make the same mistake of half assing the series if you have any respect for your fans.

There will inevitably be a lot of people attempting to diagnose what went wrong with One Punch Man season 2, but I think anyone could tell you why it doesn’t work. The obvious answer is the downgraded animation and confused direction, but there’s a bit more than that. Let’s just start with the biggest problem.

~Sound~
You thought I was gonna say the art/animation? Well, that isn’t the biggest problem with One Punch Man season 2. An equally big problem is the sound effects and sound design, but to drill down further it’s the studio. J.C. Staff has no idea how to do action. Don't believe me? ... Go watch Taboo Tattoo. They have no idea what they're doing.

Now, J.C. staff does really well with the slice of life and romcom genres. They produced Toradora and Azumanga Daioh, which were outstanding entries in the romcom and SOL genres respectively. That last detail is important because I hate 95% of SOL shows that came out and I dislike romantic comedies. They bore me. JC. Staff is so good at doing those genres that even I enjoy their takes on them.

But action? They can't do action at all. Taboo Tattoo didn't work partially because the source material is garbage, but also because J.C. staff used terrible muddy sound effects during action scenes that ruined the fighting aspect of that show. The same is true of One Punch Man season 2. For one, the sound design in this show is horrendous. The same muddy, unfitting sound effects that I remember from Taboo Tattoo have returned in OPM. The punches lack the oomph needed to connect with the viewer, the building/concrete/rock destruction effects sound like someone tossing some pebbles, and the fire effects (Genos' engine boost sound effect especially) lack the necessary impact to feel satisfying.

Sound is really important in general, but some genres can get away with having bad sound. Say, romance or a drama. But for 3 specific genres, having good sound is NECESSARY to sell the show. Those 3 genres are sci-fi, fantasy, and action. It’s more important to get it right in sci-fi and fantasy because the sound effects chosen can make or break the world you’re trying to build, but it’s pretty damn important in action too because a fight with bad punching sounds or a car chase with unconvincing driving sounds deflates the entire scene. Go back and watch OPM season 1 and you’ll notice the sound is pretty damn good. Without those fantastic sound effects and generally good sound design, it wouldn't be nearly as effective. Punches have the right sound to feel powerful, destruction effects sounded fantastic, and the industrial/mechanical sound effects (Genos especially) sounded great. The show’s structure demanded its action be done well, and Madhouse was able to deliver. JC Staff did not.

The voice acting is mostly good, but that doesn’t matter as much in an action comedy. What’s important is that it can make its fights register with its audience with good sound design and sound effects. And they failed spectacularly at that.

Also, all the music in this show is horrible. They’re trying to mimic the approach Madhouse took from season 1 and they fail at it so hard. Like go listen to Garou’s theme. It’s one of the most excruciating pieces of music I’ve ever heard. 3/10

~Art/Animation~

On to the other big problem. The other half of why the action doesn't work is the terrible visuals. One Punch Man season 1 was a lightning in a bottle type of show that could never happen twice, in that there were a lot of freelance animators brought in to work on it, along with the source material being fantastic. The framing and composition of shots, as well as animation quality and editing prowess, propel it past any competitor on a technical level. You could feel the energy in every fight through the framing and editing, and sound design accompanied it perfectly.

OPM s2 lacks all of this. The animation quality obviously isn't up to snuff because season 1 was, as I said before, lightning in a bottle. No other action show I can think of had that consistently fantastic animation. In a way, it was privileged to have such high production values behind it, so it isn’t really fair to compare the 2 on a technical level. But even if you remove the high quality animation from the equation, it's still lacking. Not having the animation budget of Madhouse doesn't prevent J.C. Staff from recreating the great framing of shots in season 1. The camera angles and fight edits in season 2 are dull and uninspired, and the battle choreography is too stiff and looks awkward.

Also, the visual effect they used for metal effects like Genos' body and Sonic's armor looks like trash. It's awful. Honestly, any attempt at creating a metallic surface that has to move (Genos’s armor, Metal Knight’s drone, and Metal Bat’s bat specifically) has the single ugliest attempt at a metal texture I’ve ever seen. Usually I try to come up with a more nuanced take on things but that effect is rubbish. It looks like someone rubbed grease all over unpolished metal. It looks so bad that it constantly distracted me even outside of action scenes, and I had to rewind a LOT of scenes because I missed dialog while I was gawking at Genos’ armor or Metal Knight’s drone.

For some reason, that same texture is used to color Superalloy Blackluster’s body. So now they can’t even draw people’s skin right? He’s supposed to look like a beefy oiled-up bodybuilder, but the gradient they use for his skin looks…atrocious. I can’t even describe it. And EVERY shiny or metallic surface is plagued by this gradient. It’s the worst.

Lastly, there’s the inconsistent art quality. If you look closely at character outlines, they tend to be choppy and at times smeared. What the fuck is that? Was there not enough time to finish the outlines? Why are the characters drawn so unprofessionally? I don’t know what JC Staff’s production cycle is but clearly it isn’t enough if you don’t even have time to finish drawing the fucking characters.

I do think the background tend to look very nice and if your eyes are tired of the shitty leather and metal gradients and unfinished character outlines, maybe you can zone out for a while and stare at the fucking clouds or something. 2/10

~Story/Writing~

People often call OPM “One Joke Man”, and I think people are now starting to realize how thin that joke can be stretched before it wears too thin to function. The first season didn’t have any problem working around that joke because it was extremely well-animated, the choreography and cinematography were great, the sound effects and music was excellent, and any problems with the narrative were covered by its comedic timing and great pacing. The creators also took advantage of those high production values and threw in a lot of action-based comedy. They were consistent in working comedy into action scenes, which helped keep the comedy and action sides of the show flowing into each other continuously rather than feeling segregated.

With season 2, it no longer has the benefit of excellent production value backing up its comedy. Which would be fine if JC Staff was taking notes from season 1 and worked comedy into the fight scenes. But rarely does the show work in any sort of comedy into fights. When they do attempt it (like with Saitama vs Blizzard’s goons), it doesn’t work because the technical aspects of the show suck. Saitama sending some goons flying into the distance might be funny if the timing was good, the angle wasn’t flat, and the punch sound was satisfying. You see what I’m getting at? J.C. Staff’s shoddy production quality here tanks the entire thing. And it isn’t just because they have a smaller budget. There are ways to make an action comedy work on a smaller budget. Just look at the earlier episodes of Gintama. JC Staff just doesn’t have the competency to pull it off.

If you go to J.C. staff's producer page on this site and sort by score, you won't find a title with the action tag until the 23rd entry. And that show is Toaru Kagaku no Railgun S. The first true action title there is...One Punch Man season 2, the 28th highest scored show they've produced. They just aren't good at action and should not have been selected to take this adaptation. Bones (FMA/FMA Brotherhood, My Hero Academy, Mob Psycho 100) or David Production (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Cells at Work) would have done a much better job. Ideally you'd want Madhouse to take the helm again but for some reason (possibly involving tequila) they decided AfterLost was a better use of their resources. 6/10

~Characters~

The characters in OPM are more or less pointless to critique. OPM is a satire/parody. Pretty much the entire cast consists of joke characters. Saitama is a weirdo who beats everything with one punch and thus tends to be oblivious to situations that are dangerous to people around him. Genos is super serious but gets his ass kicked in every single fight. Mumen Rider is some dude on a bike. King literally has no powers and is some sort of otaku. Sonic is lightning fast and would be potentially dangerous…if he wasn’t obsessed with fighting the one character he has no chance of defeating, thus guaranteeing he never actually poses a real threat to the rest of the world. Some of the other hero designs include: a guy in a pineapple suit, a dude dressed up as a dog, a guy in a red and yellow full-body latex suit with a smiley face hammer, and the main character is some lanky dude with no hair and wears yellow dishwashing gloves. Almost every character has some sort of joke associated with them or their appearance. There is no point in critiquing that, so I’m leaving this score blank.

~Enjoyment~

I don’t really grade for enjoyment. How much you enjoy something is determined by the product of your experiences in life and what you consider to be a quality production, which are different for every single person. As such, attempting to grade something inherently subjective with an objective grading metric is a paradox. I will leave this score blank.

~Conclusion~

One Punch Man season 2 is a failure almost exclusively on the technical front. If you analyze it for its writing and comedy, it’s pretty good. But that’s only half of what One Punch Man is. It’s an ACTION comedy. Action is half of it, and the action is terrible. As such, I can’t really give it a score above 5. After all, it fails at half of what it’s supposed to do.

One Punch Man season 2 gets a 3/10.

So I went into this season with low expectations after seeing what was happening with the production. It was obvious that things were going to be severely rushed and pretty unpolished. I thought that maybe I should just forget about the animation quality (to an extent) and just enjoy the show for the story and comedy. There's a problem when there's no redeeming qualities in those departments either.
It's almost as if everything went wrong from start to finish in every department. Not only is the animation, art, compositing, color palette, and overall aesthetic just poor, but the direction is all over the place. Each episode ... has a bad tendency to cut around to a bunch of events, losing any sense of focus. Not to mention that all of the charm that the first season had is gone. Everything feels very generic.
In terms of sound, everything but the voice acting sucks. The OST is a mix of new unremarkable tracks and stuff from the first season. Nothing memorable to be found there. The sound design is atrocious. From the same guy who did the sound design for Berserk 2016, this time he decided that every impact sound effect needs to be bass boosted and distorted as much as possible. It's super obnoxious.
So, overall, there's nothing truly good about this season. Every aspect of it is mediocre at its very best. It goes to show that a poor team and abysmal production schedule will lead to nothing but a disaster.

Have some standards, weebs.

Yes, a show is more than its animation, but this franchise was never all that deep. OPM always functioned on three pillars: great animation, great comedy, and hype as hell fights. When the first pillar is completely shattered, and the other two are frankly not as strong as they used to be, you're naturally going to be on very unstable ground.

And the visuals really are that bad. If you can ignore it, good for you. But I really couldn't. The reason this is an issue is because it becomes distracting how low-effort every episode looks. A brief summary of the issues
- Downright ... ugly new art style, with many characters having this bizarre gradient that makes it look like there's a dark smear on the middle of their faces
- At least once an episode there's a shot where they start zoomed in on one part then zoom out to show it in full. They didn't even bother to animate it properly, instead literally zooming in on the frame, so it starts out blurry and looks incredibly unprofessional
- Metal characters like Genos or Metal Knight are either rendered in ugly CG or drawn so horribly that it makes no difference
- GHOSTING. It's everywhere. Almost every fast-moving scene blurs frames together which makes it really difficult to see what's going on
- Shot by shot, it's just plain less interesting. There are far fewer dynamic shots than the first season and the big hype punches have far less impact

But the thing is, it's kind of worse than that. Manga readers may burn me at the stake for this, but I think the story is significantly worse too. I don't know or care if they diverged from the manga or followed it exactly, because either way what ended up on screen just wasn't very good. Saitama, the heart and soul of the series, has a fraction of his former screen time, leading to many battles played completely straight.

Then there's a downright insulting scene in chapter 9 that baits any fans that think the story of this series might actually progress a bit before yanking it away. Stay static if you want, OPM, at least if you do that I can just leave. But episode 9 pretends that character development is about to finally happen before snidely dismissing the whole idea. At this point I decided to power through the series rather than drop it just so I could shove a 3/10 up its ass when it was over.

There's still some of the former glory in here. The main villain is definitely a step up from the previous ones, even if his story takes way too long to hit the road. There are usually a few reliable chuckles per episode, but this is where those aforementioned standards come in. You can't excuse an entire season of poor concepts and worse execution just because it occasionally reminds you of better days.

[Imagine my shock]

J.C. Staff tarnishes the reputation of a once-beloved series for money. Is anybody surprised?

[Everything is shit]

The art is bad. Using digital zooms in your anime instead of drawing a scene from a different angle is lazy and stupid- KIND OF LIKE THE ANIME COMMUNITY. This absolute garbage still maintains a high rating because anime fans are clingy little bastards. It's OKAY for a sequel to be shit, but if we don't all admit the flaws of our favorite shows, how can we expect them to improve? This same shit happened with Overlord and JoJo's and it's bound to happen to every other well-known ... series too. Fans are just too accepting. Once they're hooked, they never let go.

The story is shit as well. This show is called One Punch Man. It is a show about a man who kills in one punch. So, then, why is there no Saitama? In the last episode, he shows up for like, 30 seconds. That is our finale? Fuck off. Go to hell, J.C. Staff.

[SAO BAD OPM2 GOOD]

This season managed to be so bad that I feel the need to defend Sword Art Online. You know SAO, the show that is unanimously shit on by the anime community for being a generic, lazy, poorly animated cash-grab. AHEM. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? At least SAO's characters LOOKED GOOD. Everyone is fucking ugly this season. Saitama's head has the boob gradient, which is funny, but also pathetic. As far as I know, SAO's sequels have been consistent- if not better than the original. Not OPM2 though. No, this show's quality is in a spiral. Specifically, a DOWNWARD SPIRAL.

[DOWNWARD SPIRAL]

Down war, D.S. Piral, dow nwardsp irald ownwardsp. Ira ldown war dspi ra ldownwar dspi? Rald own ward, spi. Rald ow n ward spi rald. Ownwa, R dspi rald ow nward spir aldow. Nwa rds'p irald ow nwar dspiral?

[3/10]

Fuck off.

I have to start off the review by saying that the first season was absolutely fantastic. I love everything about it and i anticipated the second season to be Godly as well.

But.. as the season started it felt off. First episode - off. Second - off. Third - off...

I am now on episode 7 and its absolute load of horse poop. They changed the team that was working on the series and it seriously shows. They are trying to cover this by putting in more fights, but each and every one is just more and more of the same horse poop animation that leaves ... you utterly disappointed both through the episode and at the end each and every episode.

After watching episode 7, i now know that the rest of the season will be awful. The ONLY real allure of the show was cool fights.

Season 2 is only getting by because of how good Season 1 was.

TLDR; the art style in season 2 is horse poop. The show went from a solid 10/10 to a solid 2/10. I am extremely saddened by this :(

Just read the manga instead. The action is honestly better with still images because at least they have backgrounds. The animation for this season is so abysmal compared to the first season, or really any other anime I've ever seen, that it breaks my heart. Every action scene is characters fighting over white, grey, or red backgrounds. It's as if they're playing fucking Yu-Gi-Oh because nothing happens in the real world during fights. The only redeeming quality is the music, and I can just listen to that while I read the manga. In fact, I do listen to the music while I read the manga ... because it's 100 times more enjoyable than watching this dumpster fire. I'm actually dumbfounded by the content of each episode I wait a week for. In episode 5, they dared to use still images of a character while they were talking. That should be enough to avoid this show like the plague by itself. I give up.

As a manga reader,I anticipated this S2 for so long just to know that the S2 was so bad I can't hardly understand a thing they showed me.The comedy was so off,the character design bad, and most importantly the action.So so bad.It was like watching typical a low rated action anime .This is One Punch Man.Like wtf,where do it all gone wrong?

Not only that,the episode was so fast that they mashed up over 7 chapters on a single episode + the bad action scene + bad character design.Like,why? Cutting cost production? Bad studio for OPM? or the director himself is ... bad?
I don't know.

I'm full fan of One Punch Man,and to see my favorite webcomic+manga+anime goes to this part of journey is disappointing af.I would rather wait for new studio and director to handle this anime even if it will take me years to wait rather than this.No offence to J.C.Staff. It's just bad.