Obviously the big news is that entire limbs have been hacked off of this story. The one part of the manga post-season 1 that was actually good is skipped entirely, and the remaining material is covered at record speed. They technically achieve a complete story out of it, but the damage from taking an axe to the story is catastrophic. Character motivations make significantly less sense and plot holes from the new structure are plugged up with insulting contrivance.
And yet, it gets worse. TPN Season 2 occasionally flirts with making more direct changes to the story, and what's crazy is that almost all of its ideas are good. The parts of the anime that add to the manga near universally address aspects of the original story that were poorly justified or just plain stupid. But the problem is, at this breakneck speed, none of these good ideas have time to properly take root. They're crammed in next to all the bad ideas and ultimately mean nothing. I've always said that "almost good" gets more hate from me than "bad", but this anime is a rather staggering case of both.
Despite the pace, this anime somehow feels like its dragging its feet. Many episodes are mostly dialogue presented in the most bland way possible, in drab environments with zero fanfare. The production values in general feel significantly worse. On top of lowered visual fidelity and animation quality, there's no life to the directing anymore. The music very rarely feels like it really takes off. Season 1 thrived on its intense moments but Season 2 delivers none. Even when the story really seems like it should be making you feel something, it doesn't.
On my rating scale, the negative ratings go like this: A 4/10 could have been alright but went wrong somewhere. A 3/10 isn't entirely awful but still leaves you thinking "wow that sucked". A 2/10 fails entirely in what it sets out to do. A 1/10 goes the extra mile to be bad and draws immediate comparisons as an exemplar of awfulness for years to come. At times, TPN Season 2 feels like it could be any of these, but what really clinches the 1/10 is how unnecessary this all is. No one asked for an abridged season. Just adapting Goldy Pond and telling us to read the manga would have been better than this. Literally doing nothing would have been better than this. We really all thought that Tokyo Ghoul-level adaptations were obsolete and a thing of the past, but this anime really had to bring them back for one last awful hurrah.
