As a big fan of the first season, I was excited to see where things went. The first season provided a solid base of well defined characters, relationships and world.
This season just seemed to have less heart, and the story beats felt like they had a lot less context from the overall story. Backstory was brought up and explained without much contextual reason to what was happening in the episode and the story at large, major character revelations were just casually dropped into conversation and the relationships seemed to be a bit all over the place.
Firstly, the introduction of Ilulu. It was a great introduction to a new character and I was interested to see how she would fit into the show, but she didnt really get developed much and within a couple of episodes had been largely forgotten, which made it hard to care about her character. I think this gives weight to the opinion she was brought in to provide yet another source of big bazonga scenes and jokes, whereas if she had been developed and included a bit more it wouldnt have felt like that so much.
Kobayashi drops a complete and personal story and reason as to a lot of her personality, relationship with Tohru and her maid obsession with not enough context to justify a story beat that integral, and then the story moves on without giving time for it to settle or be developed properly.
Elma is a bit all over the place for most of the season, it felt like she started to lose quite a bit of the character the first season spent developing to just become a source of jokes and screaming.
Speaking of which, the animation style went through some changes. The whole vibe is faster, faster cuts, bigger effects, more shouting and a lot less chilled SoL than the first season. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that, but it was a noticable change from the vibe of the first season which was for me one of the big draws of it.
Dialogue took a bit of a hit in my eyes, a lot more was said not shown, which is another thing I liked about the first season. The first season had less dialogue, and more scenes of the characters being which you could draw more of your own conclusions from, rather than characters explaining in full what they are thinking, either to eachother in often stilted dialogue, or in some cases straight to the viewer in internal monologues.
Speaking of drawing our own conclusions, in the episode where Ilulu messes with Kobayashi, her surprise at her attraction to Tohru kind of made me sad. It felt that the implication was that Kobayashi had never felt like that for Tohru, which for me felt like it retroactively altered feelings in important season one scenes. I will also second the opinion in other reviews that the concept of being changed in that way would suddenly make you act like that is a weird one.
Episode 10 felt most like the first season, some nice addition to the world building, a little bit of action then balanced with some time spent with Kanna and Kobayashi just being.
There were good scenes, I laughed at some jokes, some of the character development worked well. I thought the Elma and Tohru backstory was well done, but their relationship bouncing all over the place outside of that set of flashbacks kind of detracted from them for me.
I'm a really big fan of the first season, and was really looking forward to this one. However I felt a lot of what drew me to the first season; the atmosphere, character development, relationships and pace arent quite there for most of this season and I felt a little empty after finishing it.
