Grand Magic Games/Eclipse: 8
Eclipse Celestial Spirits: 5
Sun Village: 8
Tartaros: 8
Zero: 7
Avatar: 5
Continuing from the first season, which cuts off part-way through the Grand Magic Games arc, Fairy Tail takes an impressive step forward, breaking through its rehashed faults (for the most part) to create a thoroughly captivating arc- segue culminating in one of the most powerful moments in the entire series, contested only by the Tartaros arc.
Unfortunately, the series quickly falls back to its old ways with the mediocre Eclipse Spirits arc, but the interest quickly builds again with the highly underrated Sun Village arc, which very effectively paves the way for what the creators intended to be the climactic arc of the entire series: Tartaros.
The Tartaros arc does indeed deliver. Our main characters each have a long-standing antagonistic issue settled in quite satisfying ways. However, it ends with the watcher wanting more due to its heavily cliff-hanger-esque ending. It's similar to the feeling in Pokemon after you beat the last Elite 4 member, only to discover that there's one more challenger in your way. But then the game ends without even giving you a chance to fight him. That's how Fairy Tail feels, but I will admit that it is done in a clever fashion: by swerving and backtracking to the beginning with the Zero arc.
The Zero arc has a lot it has to deliver; it would be a massive disappointment if it was filler. It does deliver, and in a quite unexpected fashion, by linking forgotten ends together and allowing us to be content with the established antagonism created at the end of Tartaros evaporating.
The short Avatar arc which ends the series was inevitably a disappointment, since the developers wanted to end on a cliff. Props to them for ending the show in the most unsatisfying way possible, but still in an acceptable manner.
Overall, the second season has greater highlights and less swampy arcs to trudge through to get to the good stuff. It was a struggle at some points, and I took multiple long interims during the unimportant arcs, but it was worth watching all 272 episodes (even though I went through some arcs like Key and ECS at 2x the speed on Youtube)
