|
I've marathoned S1 and S2 quite recently, and S2 flaws are actually more glaring in my books compared to 5 years ago.
Let's see if I can give a proper rundown:
1) Visuals: S2 started with sharper designs for the characters. While it looked like an improvement at first, it didn't last long, and you could see some derpy designs quite often (especially after the first third of S2) and a lack of expressions for a lot of characters, even main ones.
Fights were also pretty underwhelming most of the cases and they used a lot of tricks to simulate movements. Abyssal Shaft Raid had some intense things going on, but the animation wasn't exactly up to par, whereas S1 had better rendition be it on larger scale (Goblin King return raid), or smaller scale (Rookies against the direwolf, goblins and hopgoblins).
2) Pacing : Putting aside Kanami's adventure taking only 1 episode (instead of 2-3), the problem is how they segmented 3 specifics arcs one after another.
S2 started well with Shiroe's initial plan and recruiting William's guild, while we still have scenes from Akiba (the youngsters and Akatsuki). But then, the sequence of events went like that: Royal Guard Lander going rogue (Ep5-8), Abyssal Shaft Raid (Ep9-12), but then that pointless valentine episode (involving that weird love triangle between Shiroe, Akatsuki and Minori), Kanami's, then the kids (ep15-21), The Genius Monsters leading to the Shibuya raid (22-25).
While the first main parts were 4 episodes, with 2 "fillers" of 1 episode, we get 7 episodes about the kids going to fetch some materials for their magical bag. Sure, that arc gives you an idea what's going on in Minami with Plant Hwyaden, the problem is that it felt incredibly irrelevant to what Shiroe was accomplishing recently. There were a lot of downtime to boot and there wasn't really any development for them so to speak. This was following Kanami's episode, which felt incredibly weird because you could easily shorten the kids arcs to flesh out Kanami's interlude, OR more stuff about Abyssal Shaft or Shibuya.
3) Character development: this problem might be because of the source material instead of the anime per se, but S2 had some very wonky stuff, especially regarding Akatsuki. The way how her insecurity and romance were handled wasn't particularly great. While her arc was sort of satisfactory by the end of the Royal Guard/Akiba raid arc, Akatsuki's character went back to the statu quo. It didn't look like she really broke her shell in general aside of the "girl power" jokes a bit shoehorned in there.
Meanwhile, the kids arc wasn't particularly great either except for Touya's outrage regarding the Odyssey's Knights and Nyanta seriously attempting to kill Mizufa.
I personally think S2 did a serviceable job when it comes to Shiroe, be it during Abyssal Shaft raid or Shibuya raid, but aside of that, most characters were pretty much the same as in S1. Sure, not all characters need development whatsoever and a more "organic" storytelling is better anyway, but S2 had also very minimal character interactions to boot. So you had the characters doing "things" because the story dictactes them to do so, instead of being personnaly compelled to do that in comparison to S1.
|