Da Li Si Rizhi 2nd Season

The second season of Da Li Si Rizhi (White Cat Legend) continues right after the events of the first season and takes a darker turn, with a greater focus on political intrigue and Li Bing's past. Li Bing & co investigate General Qiu Shenji's involvement in the burning of Bo Zhou city, but things aren't as simple as they seem. Not to worry though, there is still the same slice of life and comedy from season one interspersed between heavier moments.

The supporting characters really shine here; we get to see more of their past, their motivations, and their connection to the main characters. The ... animators and voice actors did an excellent job bringing the characters to life by displaying the complex emotions and personalities of each one. There are plenty of terrible characters, but no terribly-written characters. It's all too easy to get attached to them.

Story is good, and it works largely because of how well-written the characters are. Same as in season one, the characters are the ones that drive this story. Everything that happens is the cause and effect of each characters' decisions, like a butterfly effect.

"What would have happened if I did things differently?" "This wasn't what I intended, where did things go so wrong?" "Is this my fault?"

The characters repeatedly struggle with these questions, and it's interesting to see the results of everyone's actions influencing each other and shaping the finale.

Art quality is good if not better than first season, music/sound is excellent (OP is by Zhou Shen, the same person who sang Big Fish & Begonia's theme song) and enhances the atmosphere. One instance of good animation+sound was during a graphic part of the story where they used non-graphic visuals and sounds to cue the audience on what was happening, and made the scene just as impactful as if the audience were witnessing it themselves. (Graphic scenes were not allowed in the show so they had to be creative when illustrating certain scenes.)

Only critique (this is more a personal preference) is the show's pacing: This only happened a few times but it was awkward when they'd abruptly switch to comedy right after a heavy scene. The director likely wanted to give the audience a breather, since many people who haven't read the manhua weren't prepared for the serious turn this season.

Where to watch: the entire show is free on Youtube!

MASTERPIECE!!
What is best about animations is they can bring you stories which is very unlikely could be adapted into live-action because of enormous budget it needs. And White Cat Legend using this advantage of animation greatly. Sadly it is not getting the attention it deserves. I saw many different series, but i have never saw any anime that underrated as much as White Cat Legend is. People skip this 'cause of it is Chinese and their first impression of art style is 'cartoon-ish'. Don't do this.

Story basically is court drama in Tang Dynasty, very well balanced with action, comedy, mystery, drama and some politics. Main ... story was hard to follow in season 1, but it is much better now. And dialogues are very well written that i truly enjoyed them all time. It is inspiring and interesting. But keep in mind that storytelling in this series a bit different. In most series concept is a world building step by step starting from the very beginning, but here an already developed world with it's many characters served you in the middle of it wants you to get in it, and as you watch more you learn more. Kind a similar to dorohedoro in that way if you have watched. And since there is no background storyteller voice in this series you may confuse later if you skip any dialogues or names

For those who confused: queen dethrones his son and becomes first empress of china. emperor's relatives, Li family, were very against it and some of family members start rebellion with leadership of Li Chong, known as King of Langya, who also is our cat mc's cousin. There are some parts of story are events that really happened back in china history as far as i know. Season 1 had slightly introduced King of Langya case and focused more on introductions of core characters. Season 1 started with empress completely obtains throne and forgiving non-related to coup members of Li family, but decreasing their status.

---season 2 some heavy spoilers starts here(you may skip)---
Anyway, during rebellion empress sends General Qiu to suppress rebel forces. Weakened rebels forces Bozhou city people to join them in order to fight queen's army. Even people were persuaded by fancy words of wealth and glory at first, later they regret too much when they really was about to go in war. a smart man in city understands the situation very well and he assassinates King of Langya in order to survive. Just after that he persuades people of city to stop this rebellion. They surrender city to General Qiu before war start and beg for his forgiveness. However General Qiu has bad experiences in past that he believe that killing is necessary to prevent further deaths even others say it is cruel. Therefore he massacres whole Bozhou city people while they were sleeping at night. He wanted to make it example to rest of people of country; he wants others know that if ever those who slightly think about join any rebels in future will be punished very heavily. We saw few seconds of Bozhou massacre scenes in opening of season 1 if you remember. Rebellion ends here however once general returned back there were some absurd rumors started by unknowns that saying general is secretly preparing for treason. someone is plotting against him. And since there was almost no survivors in Bozhou city, they are almost no witnesses who can talk what really happened there, giving advantage to sinister guys who were plotting in background
---spoilers end here--

All characters are interesting with their distinct personalities and have equal roles in story. Just few characters have some supernatural power, other than that story is realistic. This season, a new character name has been mentioned once, Xu Youcai, directly from General Qiu's mouth and probably very related to his case, but hasn't introduced yet. Season 2 mostly focused on General's case, his story and childhood backstory of our main character cat lord.
Some questions answered, some left unanswered
we still don't know:
-how our main character, Li Bing, turned into cat
-what kind of witch magic does queen do to keep her young appearance
-nor what kind of monster that mysterious freak assassin is
and neither i think we'll learn about those any soon.

And finally i want to say that production is in movie quality. Compared to others it could be say that none any other manga/manhwa/manhua adaptation got better treatment this one has. Studio kept the story same, but they changed every scene to better and added many more new scenes. Animation is so fluid, choreography is best, musics are beautiful, voice acting is top notch. What could i ask more for..? Highly recommended!!

Disappointing sequel are the only words i can use to describe this

There is a difference between being episodic and being disconected, and unfortunately this season falls in the latter
It is oversaturated with flashback scenes that happen abbruptly with little to nothing coherant leading into them, this makes it hard to follow the various time jumps leaving the audience questioning what is the chain of events

Pace ranges from overly dragged out info dumping to choppy a million different scenes per second with barely any inbetween, it does slightly inprove by the second half of the series, but by then the time that should've been used to ... create a connection to the new characters has been utterly wasted dulling what should've been a very emotional ending
There's not even the satisfaction of getting to see the OG characters again as they're mostly sidelined and stripped of what made them special

The tone is very different from s1, scrapping most of the slapstick comedy and showcases of life in that era for an attempt at a more serious and dark storytelling style, this shift in style however fails without being backed up by compelling character explorations and a good story structure and ultimately leaves potential emotional scenes coming off as just shock factor

I feel like it's such a pity to say all this, as the core of the story was beyond great and heartwrenching, but the way it was poorly executed it just couldn't be pulled off