The next arc (up to pt 2 of the manga) starts slow but is the strongest material in the entire manga by far*, and could easily be another 2-3 cours. Anyone complaining about fushi's powers in / post Renril et al doesn't know WTF they're talking about, since the entire *point* of the manga is to explore immortality w/ a character who's basically a god, and it does this through shifting perspectives (and challenges / limitations), that change as the story goes on. Fumetsu was *never* intended to be just straight up suffer porn; it was intended to explore the idea (and blessing/curse) of immortality -and the meaning of human existence- in general, which everything through act 1 (and hopefully acts 2, and 3?) does very well. Act 2 so far is very ehhhh, but season 2 onward to the end of Renril is a solid 10/10 w/r to the source material as far as I'm concerned, and the manga has a perfect, 10/10 climax and ending at the end of act 1.
* caveat: yes, I'd agree w/ OP that parts of the manga leading up to renril felt very slow (and bon starts as an insufferable character that makes you question why tf the story is spending so much time on him, iirc). In fact, I think I was actually close to dropping the manga around that point, but was glad I didn't, b/c Bon (and everything in renril) pays off ten-fold when SHTF, and everything the story had been slowly building up up to that point comes to a head all at once. Sure, this maybe could've been done better, but sometimes you *do* just need some downtime to build up characters and plot elements, and sometimes there just isn't any way around that.
That said, to say that I'd be very concerned about this upcoming adaptation would probably be an understatement.
Given what we saw in S1, I quite frankly have zero confidence that brain's base has the animation resources needed to adapt S2 properly, and since we don't even know what studio is producing this it'll likely either be brain's base again, or another studio w/ even fewer resources than they did.
Now bear in mind, I really don't want to knock brain's base too hard, particularly since eg. S1E1 was fantastic, and they have done some great work in the past, but there was a clear dropoff in quality in S1 after that the first episode, and S2 will simply have way, way too many characters, locations, and action happening to make a proper adaptation of S2, given the amount of resources, direction, etc., that we saw on S1.
S2, *particularly* the Renril arc, is just nuts in the manga: I really don't think I can understate how many characters, action, setpieces, etc., there are in those later chapters compared to anything in the first half of act 1. Hell, I'm not sure that *any* studio could fully adapt some of those chapters properly, let alone a studio w/ the kinda halfhearted and budget limited approach we saw in S1. Getting a 10/10 adaptation of Renril, in particular, is pretty much impossible, although some of the other sub-arcs leading up to that point might be much more feasible.
This is quite unfortunate, since the fumetsu -manga- is really, really quite exceptional (through act 1), but as for the anime... eh. S1E1 actually -was- an exceptional adaptation that actually exceeded the source material. Everything -else- in S1 was very, very mediocre, and everything from poor episode direction to clear animation budget constraints (particularly as a 2-cour season) really, really did not do the S1 adaptation any favors. Overall I think it'd be fair to say that S1 was *only* somewhat good thanks to the strength of the source material it was adapting. Unlike, say, the 86 or Attack on Titan adaptations (or 2003 FMA and FMAB, for that matter), which took their source material and elevated it to new levels.
I'd love to be wrong, but my full expectations are for S2 to be even worse of an adaptation than S1. Whatever studio that's adapting this will likely be working with the same or an even lower budget, under what may not exactly be peak morale (S1 wasn't exactly critically acclaimed, and did not stand out much outside of S1E1), and that has a f---ton of material to adapt, with a ton of scenes and chapters that are way, way more character dense and animation heavy than *anything* in S1.
This isn't necessarily to say that S2 will be *bad* for anime onlies (again, the arc(s) they'll be adapting are fantastic), but I don't have high expectations for them to be adapted well. And we'll probably see some -severe- drops in quality if S2 tries to adapt all of the remaining arcs in act 1 at once. Splitting Renril off into a final one-cour S3 (or film!) would -probably- be a better approach, but who knows.
/2c |
