slight wall of text:
From a week to week standpoint, this season was not only weaker than the first season episode for episode, the overall pacing of this season was thrown off so hard thanks to catching up to the LNs that it literally tortured, and then killed off it's own hype. After watching it all the way through in a marathon though, this season wasn't actually too bad, it was just that we had to wait for episodes that we already knew were going to be lower quality than the 1st season, making the wait for something interesting all the more painful. LGS2 is actually not too far from the first season as a whole, it's clearly the weaker season yes, but taken as a whole, it's more like the buildup to season 3 than it's own thing. It fleshes out every overlooked character, and got us through the painful, but arguably necessary development of the junior characters. during the children's arc, (best girl) Nureha got her own development, Roe2 came into the plot, the world got a new song that actually gave stat buffs and protection to the town even though the anime didn't show it, and the levels of the children themselves are finally at a high enough level to be somewhat useful to the plot.
Then there's Akatsuki's development arc, which was also somewhat stretched, but gave the spotlight to other lesser known characters as well. and during the raid arc, we got development to the game functions, an introduction to (trap) Tetora, and all of the northern city characters got an entire arc to be the good guys (not to mention the item that Shiroe got during that raid is probably going to become important to the plot later if the flavor text was any indication). Yes we lost Krusty for over half the season, but contrary to peoples complaints, there wasn't much the main cast could do about that at the time, and it introduced the concept of flavor text becoming real for the arc that followed. As the final few episodes showed, practically everything done or introduced this arc was just for leading up to the grand finale, which as i stated before, will more than likely take up all or at least most of S3
Now onto the criticisms, i get that the pacing was bad due to a lack of novels to go off of, but that was no excuse for the poor animation or the terribly long arc centering around the children. That was the undisputed most terrible pacing in the entire season, and i do not think it's a stretch to say that it was also what dragged the whole of S2 down. The children themselves were not completely to blame for it, it's expected that they'd be incompetent to a degree, and they really were, but the way each episode was handled just drew out the worst parts of LH and ruined everything decent that S2 (and the children) had going at the time. then again, the show is being broadcast on a children's channel, so how much of that pacing was intended and how much was just actual mistake is debatable.
S1 had a children's arc as well, but the difference is that while S1's arc moved at a fairly brisk pace and the children were only part of the bigger picture S2's arc dragged out about 1.5 (at least) episodes longer than necessary and made the children the main focus. it DID introduce a major character(Roe2), and it also fleshed out another major character (Nureha). aside from those 2 and Rundelhaus, I really didn't feel like the characters gained, or showed anything worth remembering (aside from Isuzu's song, but by that point they made overused her songs enough that I personally was more annoyed than pleased by her most important song)
Summarized though; S2 was not as good as S1, but it was still pretty damn good. and S3 is more than likely going to be the best of the 3 seasons so long as studio DEEN is NOT in charge of the animation or if they step their game up (but it's DEEN, so that's about as likely as me winning a Gundam build fighters tournament.)
Season 2 gets a 6/10 on it's own, it'd be 8/10 if the children's arc had been sped up a bit and if the animation had been better(fixable in the blu-ray hopefully), but as it it just doesn't follow the first seasons level of glasses-pushing awesome as much. |