Ousama Ranking: Yuuki no Takarabako

This is a tough one. Ranking of Kings itself is one of my favorite anime of all time; but it was noticeable from the first episode that this was not the same. It jumps from side character to side character, and plotline to plotline, rarely ever giving the viewer anything relevant to what made the first season special. There were a few genuinely great episodes thrown in here that continued the plot or supplied important context, but there was a large amount of pointless filler, as well. I almost dropped this at one point.

A better idea than making this a full pseudo-season would have been ... to make a special or two where they included the good ideas that they clearly had, and eliminated half-baked and fillery ones. It would have made it look a lot less like they were just trying to throw anything out there to tide us over until the true season two.

I am not a fan of Ranking of Kings. It was decent until the ending just ruined everything. I wasn’t too excited for this anthology season, but I just said why not.

The first 4 episodes were boring as these small stories didn’t add much of anything. It’s only episode 5 afterwards that I found enjoyment in this season. The background story of Ouken and the brothers was actually very interesting and grim. The stories became more relevant and added more motivation to the characters. They still didn’t help the ending of the original show tho.

Overall, there’s some enjoyable stories that helped the ... original show. 6.5-7/10

It’s difficult to rate this one because the episodes are all so variable. Aside from the very last, every episode is broken into fragments covering often entirely different characters at distinct points in time. On occasion, this really works, with episodes 1, 4, and 10 being particular highlights, and portions of the others working pretty well. It also gives the animators room to do some pretty extra stuff, including making part of two episodes in a much more storybook style that kind of works despite the lesser fluidity of the animation.

But that’s just it: this show works in part, but not so well as a ... whole. Some of these parts would have been great inserted directly into the show, some would have dragged won the pacing, some are just repeats of things that happened in the series and some are expansions on concepts from the series… though some expansions are a lot less necessary than others.

There’s a lot of interesting here with some really good ideas lumped in with a lot of meh. And that’s disappointing because these characters are still excellent, the animation quality remains high, and this is still the same great story I fell in love with before, but I have to evaluate it based on what they gave me this time around and… it’s kind of a mess. A mess with great moments, but it’s hard to recommend beyond just enjoying seeing more of these characters and these settings.