Kyokou Suiri Season 2

During a blizzard, Masayuki Muroi's old high school friend pushes him off a mountain to certain death. However, Masayuki survives the fall and escapes to safety thanks to Yuki-Onna, the spirit of a beautiful young woman who is said to lead men to their demise—but all she asks in return is money.

Eleven years later, Masayuki has lived a successful life, having gotten married and amassing a great fortune. But when his company collapses and his wife cheats on him, Masayuki retreats to the city where Yuki-Onna once saved him, and he reconnects with her by offering her money and tasty meals. While Masayuki recovers from his misfortunes, another one knocks on his door: his ex-wife is found beaten to death, and now only Yuki-Onna—who cannot reveal herself—can corroborate his alibi.

With no one to turn to, Yuki-Onna enlists the help of the spirits' God of Wisdom, Kotoko Iwanaga. Revered by the various spirits that wander the earth, Kotoko uses her extraordinary wits and cunning to solve all quarrels they may have. In her duty to protect spirits and humans from colliding, Kotoko drags along her immortal boyfriend, Kurou Sakuragawa, and promises to prove Masayuki's innocence without exposing Yuki-Onna's existence.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Iwanaga, Kotoko Main

Kitou, Akari Japanese

Sakuragawa, Kurou Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Yuki-Onna Supporting

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Sakuragawa, Rikka Supporting

Saco, Mayumi Japanese

Muroi, Masayuki Supporting

Furukawa, Makoto Japanese

Jujoji, Ryoutarou Supporting

Eguchi, Takuya Japanese

Fujinuma, Kouya Supporting

Terasoma, Masaki Japanese

Tohira, Zenta Supporting

Kikuchi, Yasuhiro Japanese

Otonashi, Susumu Supporting

Uchida, Naoya Japanese

Otonashi, Kaoruko Supporting

Hasegawa, Nodoka Japanese

Maruyama, Hajime Producer

Ishiguro, Tatsuya Producer

Kurosu, Nobuhiko Producer

Yamaoka, Yuuki Producer

Reviews

Jul 24, 2024

hexashadow13

Recommended

tl;dr: A sequel season that has a bunch of smaller but still great stories, though it does so at the expense of any progress in any overarching plot lines or character/relationship development in the main couple.

The second season of Kyokou Suiri, AKA In/Spectre, continues to follow Kotoko and Kuro as they deal with various affairs involving both humans and supernatural entities. Seeing how the first season ended with a battle of wits between Kotoko and Rikka, I had assumed that in this season Rikka would continue to mastermind various incidents and Kotoko would continue to face off against her in resolving them. However, this isn’t ... the case at all. Let alone serving as the antagonist of an arc, Rikka barely barely shows up in this season at all. She has enough presence to remind viewers that she exists, but she isn’t really important at all.

As such, all of the arcs this season are pretty limited in scope and aren’t really contributing to any sort of overarching story. They’re also in general pretty short, ranging from one to four episodes, which is far from the Steel Lady arc that took up pretty much the entire first season. The arcs this season are a lot simpler than the Steel Lady arc, but overall I found them just as interesting. Every arc in the anime involves Kotoko using her wits and knowledge of the supernatural to figure out the exact nature of whatever supernatural problem is occurring and then dealing with it.

The most interesting part of this as in the previous season isn’t the actual solving of mysteries, which is overtly straight forward most of the time. Rather, the most interesting part is Kotoko weaving stories that are far from what actually happened but are completely believable to those she tells. This isn’t an anime about a detective solving mysteries, it’s an anime about a liar fooling her marks. She has good reasons for doing so and there isn’t any maliciousness involved whatsoever so it’s entertaining and fascinating, even when you like the people being lied to and tricked.

On that note, this season had a lot of great side characters. For example, Masayuki and Yuki-Onna were just really likable and thus it was really satisfying to see them get solid character and relationship development. And as another example, the Otonashis had interesting backgrounds and motivations so it was interesting to see all that get fleshed out. These all felt like one off characters and I doubt we’ll see them at all in any future arcs. But their presence still made it easy to get invested in their respective arcs which made the anime overall much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, the main character’s didn’t fair so well. Kotoko and Kuro didn’t really have any development whatsoever. They have zero character growth, and while Kotoko’s unique personality is enough to keep her interesting, Kuro seems to be getting kind of stale. There are comments made in passing by Kotoko that imply that their relationship certainly is progressing off screen, but this wasn’t focused on in the anime at all. To be honest, the two of them felt less like they were written as actual people, and more so just their functions in the plot, which is making it a lot harder to stay invested in them as characters. This doesn’t matter much this season as the writing doesn’t seem to be asking the viewer to care about them all that much, however it will likely be a detriment to future arcs where the narrative shifts to focusing on Kotoko and Kuro themselves.

The art and animation were solid enough. The character designs were decent but nothing particularly memorable. The OP and ED were also reasonably solid in terms of the song and visuals. The soundtrack was also fine but didn’t really stand out.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Aug 25, 2024

Kasuk

Mixed Feelings

This will be against the grain compared to the general consensus in regards to this season, but the truth is, it is just okay.

The formula of the mysteries is really a simple Point A to Point B, very straightforward road, but then the author introduces pit stops going a scenic route and dragging the journey out. But the destination of Point B was never in doubt. In fact throughout the mysteries Point B is probably where your mind goes to initially, and then the MC throws in a bunch of other stuff to lead you off path... but then STILL ends up bringing you ... back to Point B.

What it ends up being is a really straightforward answer, being convoluted with a bunch of extra unnecessary information AFTER you've already made your assumption.... only to lead you right back to that assumption. Really basic answers fluffed up with pseudo intelligence

Only real reason to watch is to see the relationship interactions of the MCs

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jun 22, 2023

closypie

Not Recommended

Funny

Preliminary (8/12 eps)

Way too much talking it pains me to watch this series. First season was ok because there was a bit of a story line but the second season has no real storyline or link between most episodes, it’s really just mini stories/mysteries which for this kind of series I don’t really like. This series really relies on the whole you didn’t know that I know that you know type of resolution and it gets really boring and repetitive.

Seriously, there was barely a breath between characters talking let alone the characters rambling on for a whole episode.

I would not recommend the second season of ... this series.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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