The story continues right where the previous left off and our heroes are still on the quest to find the remains of Chaika’s father, even tough she is now facing some serious existential questions as she now knows she was just a pawn her father’s scheme.
After the loss of their captain Gillette’s squad is back to their usual business, tracking down Chaika and her companions. Well not all is the same as Mimi has turned into a half Chaika (how we never get to know) after the loss of her beloved Gillette.
The red Chaika has a more serious role now as they are also trying to get back the remains before the others do and we can se quite the rivalry between the two teams.
The main selling point for the previous season was the interesting story and while here the story is not bad, it loses almost all the uniqueness it had before. Now it is just a regular action anime where different teams are after some treasure and then later they have to fight together to defeat an evil villain. The next great thing about the first season was its portrayal of the peaceful world as a dull and boring place and seeing people longing for the excitement of battle and killing, here we go back to the black and white portrayal of war is bad, not that I disagree with the statement, but it was one of the most original things about the first season and now everyone, other than the villains, want to stop fighting. On the positive note they do manage to explain many of the things they forgotten in the first season, but some explanations are still left out. The pacing has also improved significantly and the whole structure of the anime was really well thought out and it managed not feel rushed even with its ten episode runtime. The ending is also well done if a bit to cliche for my liking.
The characters have also gotten worse than they were before. Chaika has in my opinion, lost most of her charm as she lacks any kind of progression. Tooru seems to have gotten the most development as he faces his teacher in battle and has a few tough decisions to make. His sister Akari has managed to change from a perfectly fun character into an even more annoying version of Mikasa from Attack on Titan, which I did not believe was even possible. The side characters have not changed all that much from the previous season and are still perfectly fine, but they do not stand out. As for the antagonists this time, they are uninteresting and seriously unoriginal.
The art is once again completely on par with other similar anime, but nothing exceptional. The soundtrack itself is adequate but the opening and ending themes were nowhere near as good as in the previous season and got skipped after having heard them them three or four times.
I said in the review of the first season that it showed promise but never managed to get quite there and in the beginning I thought that this was, what the first season should have been, but soon it managed to loose all its previous charm and become this generic action anime, which is in my opinion just sad as it showed so much potential. I am going to give it the score of a high 6 as it still managed to entertain me but it had so much more potential. I am not sure if I can recommend this to the people who watched the first season as it is significantly worse, but on the other hand it still explains some of the opened questions from the first season so it might be worth watching the first few episodes and them maybe skip the ending.
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