In terms of comedy, KonoSuba S2 has more of what S1 offers. Which is both good and bad. Comedy through failure was core in making the first season such a hit and most of the second season was just that: comedy through failure. It’s the same food in different packaging. Some will like it. Others won’t.
Where the first season subverts our expectations and kept us guessing, making for a very fun ride, the second season is to some degree one note and predictable. Where the first season continually pokes fun at the many isekai tropes, the second season opted to ride the “Darkness is a masochist” stick so hard.
Instead of finding new ways of interaction, like a certain bath scene in the second season’s second episode, S2 sticks to what is safe: the same old character defects already exploited in S1. Aqua’s dumbassery and Darkness’s masochism are especially grating because they keep falling back to it for the humor even if it’s been done to death. Yes, the cast of KonoSuba are a bunch of likeable failures who bumble their way to victory most of the time and it’s part of their charm. Asking them to lose their defining character defect is changing the nature of the show entirely. The problem isn’t their defining character trait. The problem is that the show relies on it too much instead of introducing inventive interactions and concepts.
The villains introduced add virtually nothing to the show. Heck, Verdia’s dead and done and he still managed to funnier and much more interesting with less than a minute of screentime. And since the villains and the background characters add so little, the main cast is left to carry the show’s comedy. In the case of Aqua and Darkness, they failed spectacularly.
And while S2 didn’t have a time jump like that one time on S1, the continuity feels more jarring. The comedy breaks the narrative a lot. Certain events and plotpoints tend to get nowhere. I don’t want to spoil anything so just observe Darkness -she is by far the biggest offender. It’s amazing how stagnant her character is in spite of everything that occurred since the first episode of S2. There are a lot of interesting ways they could have taken her character with everything that happened so far buuut noooo they stuck to the same old gag.
tl:dr I ragged on Darkness so hard she orgasmed, repeatedly.
