People who haven't read the manga but have watched the two seasons and thoroughly enjoyed them should not be surprised at all to see this mess of a review section. Yakusoku no Neverland Season 2 has met the same challenge that many other popular shows struggled to deal with, shows such as Game of Thrones and Attack on Titan Final Season. The issue for these adaptations was that there was still too much story to cover with very little time to do so. And so the producers of this show were inevitably met with the challenge of packing in what could've been a 60 episode anime into a mere 11 episodes, an impossible task to accomplish without angering a segment of the fanbase.
Don't go into the second season expecting it to be a psychological/horror thriller like the first season, the producers looked at the remaining storyline and decided that the second season would be better suited being more shonen-like, and I commended them for that as once the children leave the farm there are very few horror elements the producers could exploit to enrich the viewing experience.
Story : 8
The story definitely felt rushed as most people have mentioned, but it was still enjoyable as what truly harmed the plot of the season was the constant cliches you would expect from the typical shonen anime and not the storyline itself. Years of watching garbage like SAO have hardened me to this.
Art : 7
The animation is lacking compared to the first season, but the visuals of the show are beautiful nonetheless. One issue is that often large segments of the story had to be summed up quickly with a few images and could not be fully animated, and as I mentioned previously this was inevitable as the only alternative would've been to make several other more seasons when clearly the studio had no plan for this.
Sound : 10
The soundtrack is amazing, and is in my opinion one of the few places where the second season beat the first. Great addition of a few new tracks.
Characters : 6
There are many new characters we meet throughout the second season. Most of them are boring and clearly only exist to provoke a certain emotion from the viewers that the show is trying to push. However there have been a few pleasant surprises although this really doesn't make up for some of the protagonists being made almost entirely irrelevant.
Enjoyment : 9
Nothing more to say, thoroughly enjoyed it and glad I didn't bias my enjoyment of the show by reading the source material first.
Overall : 9 - GREAT
All in all, the sense of entitlement that is seen here from people who are giving this amazing anime a score of 1 or 2 should not be surprising at all, the anime fanbase is notorious for stuff like this. Movies and TV shows in general are plagued by man-children who often give great shows a score of 1 or 2 (or 1 star out of 5) solely because said shows did not meet their expectations or interpretation of the source material.
Anime producers have 0 obligation to faithfully adapt source material, and are often given creative flexibility by the authors, and this should never be forgotten. I would've preferred if this show had gone the Attack on Titan Season Final route, with another season being announced at the last episode, but unfortunately this will have to do. Thank you for reading.
