I apologize in advance, as this will be less of an actual review and more of me nit-picking at each aspect that made season 2 slightly less enjoyable in comparison to season 1. While season 1 more or less established Celestial Being's role, season 2 delves even deeper and attempts to explain its origins. The ideas are fresh and promising but the style of execution was not.
The story was not bad. A lot of the elements that made the previous season enjoyable (complex characters, well animated fight scenes) were still reminiscent. You have Setsuna and his crew dealing with new and highly advanced mobile suits while balancing the antagonists from the previous season as well as a new threat, the Innovators. Not to mention characters still tackling down the reoccurring theme of "war is bad, we have to use force and we're hypocrites because we don't know how else to solve it." So yeah, you have some exciting new elements but at the same time you can't help but feel that most of it is a bit overdone. I'm referring to your generic 'have a problem, find enemy, battle enemy, level up' on a continuous cycle. While this issue was only minor in the first season, it becomes more problematic in this season because you have too much to discover, most of the episode time allotted to fight scenes, and a huge cast that is rotating on screen time yet barely anything is learned about them. Which leads into what I'm going to discuss next.
My other biggest concern was with how they handled the characters. They used lots of screen time to introduce new characters but not so much towards developing them. What little development time they had was often rushed so it could transition into another battle scene. Not saying that character development can't also take place in that type of setting but having a one on one conversation is much different than shouting angrily from a mobile suit with bad communication lines.
Also without going into too much spoilers, I have to say that the most insulting thing you can do to a well developed character is to have them replaced with a carbon copy that looks and sounds the same but all under a different name and personality. Seriously? I thought Sunrise had more respect for their characters but I guess it's been proven otherwise. Don't even get me started on the romance subplots because some of them were just downright awful.
I realize that what I'm saying in this review doesn't exactly match with my rating but I still thoroughly believe that Gundam 00 season 2 is enjoyable and worth your time if you liked season 1. While it's not as successful as its predecessor, the all around feeling of seeing the original cast return and 'grown up' is worth it.
