The first and most obvious change would be in the artstyle. Most of the character went through a completely unnecessary redesign. I don't think that a single character looks better, most are about on par and there are some real stinkers. By far the worst would be the Lizardman. His body looks fine, but what the hell did they do to his face? He looks like he got run ower by a road roller. Some of these changes even have unwanted character implications. Case in point, why the hell is Goblin slayers' armor so fucked up? In the first season, the armor had clearly seen some heavy use, but it was still in good shape. Does the preparation autist no longer care about his gear or what? The voice acting went through a similar change and, once again, some are more affected than others. Keep in mind that these are the same people who voiced the first season, so this clearly is a direction problem. The worst offender would be the Witch. In the first season she comes off as the femme fatale seductress, but now, because of her design getting severely nerfed and her voice actress completely toning it down, she comes of as mentally retarded since ... she ... still ... speaks ... slowly ... like ... this. The rest of the show doesn't fare better. The brutal violence and gore has been severely toned down and many of the edgier effects (like the famous glowing eye) don't get used nearly as often and when they do, they are nowhere near as cool as they used to be. The soundtrack is similarly disappointing. Both the opening and ending are complete ass. I am honestly shocked that Mili produced a song this boring. The rest of the soundtrack is fine and there were a few tracks I would consider to be above average, so it's not as bad as the rest of the presentation, but man, the opening really stings.
So what about the story? The second season continues with the episodic approach, covering three separate arcs. The first arc is about helping some newbies. In all honesty, this arc had some potential. Goblin slayer helping people (albeit indirectly) was a thing in the first season, so him taking a more hands-on approach could have worked. The wizard boy having a connection to the party and becoming a new member of the cast could have worked. Sadly, it doesn't. The Wizard boy is way too annoying and up his own ass to take him seriously. His connection also never gets revealed to him and fundamentally leads nowhere. The arc ends with some goblin slaying as is the tradition, and then the newbies fuck off to bother someone else. In short, this arc had some potential but it doesn't go anywhere with it. The other two arcs cover an elven wedding and a missing princess. Both of them are complete waste of time with little redeeming about them.
Another problem with season two would be the world in general. In the original, goblins were a weak but cunning race that mostly just killed farmers and beginner adventurers. The silver adventurers didn't fight them, not because they couldn't handle it, but because they simply didn't give a fuck. Goblin slayer wasn't some big shot adventurer who overwhelmed everything he fought with raw stats. He was in fact quite weak when compared to people of similar rank, and he mostly got by simply because he had his preparation down to a fetish-like level, and he fundamentally knew what he was doing. It wasn't exactly competence porn, but it was close. This, combined with the occasional thinking outside the box, made him really fun to watch. He also had his "Florida man too angry to die" moments, but there were relatively few of them and they were very much the exception. He was an intelligent but mentally broken /pol/tard who knows goblin on farmer crime statistics by heart and can't help himself but think about goblins every waking hour of his life. Now, even the first season wasn't exactly blameless here and the conga line of women who can't wait to get it on with a mentally deranged creep was a bit awkward at best. The second season pretty much completely gives up on this premise.
The goblins are now a nation-destroying threat that everyone ignores because they don't like being alive, I guess. This is by far the worst in the third arc when a princess gets abducted by goblins, and they hand this job to Goblin slayer. They try to explain why the army can't interfere (although very poorly), but it's not like they can't hire some higher-ranked adventurers. I mean, it's not like the king himself is a super ultra legendary turbo knight megalodon 3000, who could solo the entire thing in a minute or anything like that. What a shame. Goblin slayer has also gone through some changes. No longer the cunning professional, he has turned into the one stat checker to rule them all, putting old Aatrox and Sion to shame. Even the studio realized that this simply wasn't going to work, and so they attempted to give him some 200 IQ moments, but they were lacking at best and completely nonsensical at worst. I mean, I am not exactly a font of practical knowledge, but even I know that drinking alcohol to get warm during a blizzard would not only not make you warm, but seriously speed up your death. How that scene made it into the show is beyond me, but I guess it might be in character for the new Goblin slayer, since he had a personality change as well. No longer the anime version of Doomguy (or that chaos dude from Final Fantasy), the new goblin slayer could be described as a mentally unstable boy with a dark past from Tumbler. Of course, the ladies love this new version of him even more than the old one, with Sword maiden pretty much throwing herself on her knees and begging him to fuck her. It's bewildering.
In short, the second season of Goblin slayer has abandoned its own premise and did away with most of the more "problematic" parts of the story in order to appeal to a wider audience. This resulted in the season turning into a gray fantasy sludge with its only distinguishing feature being the name of a once beloved franchise. Not recommended.
