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On a general level, I'd say this does it's job pretty effectively. You're throwing a bunch of young Japanese girls (and one boy hiding out among them) into the figurative meat grinder, starting by putting them to work and slowly wearing away at them before unleashing them on the horrifying world beyond as American soldiers invade the island. That can't help but evoke a sense of despair to some degree.

One of the more controversial choices that others likely take issue with is presenting the blood and viscera as flowers. This is one aspect that works for me. There's a surreal nature to it that is ... still pretty horrifying, particularly as the petals pile up around them or stream out of wounds. It's also a good way to transform San's perspective on flowers into something distinctly darker as the series goes on. And the generally Ghibli-esque animation in general evokes a connection to a set of movies that include the likes of Grave of the Fireflies, so it does lend itself well to this kind of darkness. From what I hear of the manga, this does denude the anime of some of its more palpably brutal scenes, but it gives the special an identity all its own.

The cocoon and silkworms as metaphors are... OK. I think they work fine enough, but they don't really assist the story meaningfully. I would have rather taken more time to get to know more of these characters because, in the end, we really only get a little insight into most of the characters in this special. Mayu and San get more attention than most and you worry most for them, so Mayu's death does hit particularly hard (as do a couple of others, in particular that first death among them just outside the cave), especially as it comes so close to the end. And that can work well enough...

...but I think it falls short of working consistently.

The series does a good job emphasizing the sort of inhumanity of both sides in this conflict, but it goes to extremes that seem particularly unlikely given the circumstances. When the girls are thrown out of the cave, there's little rhyme or reason to it, especially given how essential they've been to tending to the wounded and supplying the commanding officers with water and food. When they're being chased into a cornfield, the decision to start burning down the corn to get at a group of three young girls seems like an excessive response, particularly if the soldiers are aware that one of the girls is wounded. And finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the decision of the remaining group of girls to end themselves with a hand grenade is... a lot. I can see how they might have built up to this with propaganda about the Americans imparting a strong belief that their soldiers would just do the worst things possible to these young girls, or if we'd heard more about their value system and their views of sacrifice, but absent that, their relative lack of hesitation on the basis that they are likely to die anyway just seems to come from nowhere.

Finally, I do think San's development into someone who can speak up for herself is good, but it's weakly delivered upon. She has good instincts and intuition, which work well when harnessed by someone willing to take charge. The decision not to go into the forest and instead going into town had major consequences, but it was the decision of those around her not to take her view into account. Later, she stands up to her fellow girls when they plan to just kill all of them together, saying that she and Mayu didn't make that choice, but it changes no minds to do so. Does that mean the value of her standing up is that she gets to decide her own course? I suppose that follows at the end when she decides to stare down the barrel of an enemy soldier who had just killed Mayu, even if that decision did not feel in character for her.

Overall, I think there are some good ideas in here, I think they're just muddled in their delivery. I can see what they were going for, but the themes could use some work, as could the sense of realism and build-up through better establishing these characters and how they think.

This series has been slowly smoldering in my ptw list for a long time, and not just because it’s 110 episodes long. There are many series of that length and far longer that are roller coaster rides full of rises and falls in pacing, and while this certainly does have those kinds of pacing differentials, it’s more of an exercise in patience than most. Frankly, in a series full of incredibly choreographed and carefully articulated space battles animated with far more care and attention than many of its contemporaries, LotGH is not about those space battles.

Well… it necessarily is to some degree. The series’ battles ... often feel sterile and removed. We watch a variety of ship models undergo explosive decompression in space, see the same laser beam patterns criss-cross a battlefield, observe little triangles and patterns move across a screen as though they’re playing Asteroids or Galaga on ultra hard mode. After each battle, the narrator gives you a rundown of all the battle wounded and dead, ships and people, using sterile numbers. At the same time, the series never really lets you forget that these are lives being lost, not just numbers. It’s reflected in the pained expressions of the admirals who send their soldiers in to die, the loss of named characters, many of whom have gotten substantial screentime and characterization. It’s delivered through visuals of the people onboard these soon-to-be destroyed ships, in some cases through people actively trying to put their organs back inside of themselves. Perhaps the series most effective delivery on these deaths, though, comes from the aftermath as governments and militaries grapple with a dramatic loss of life, often encountering major consequences in the form of a populace that is absolutely devastated by the sudden loss of so many lives for no obvious purpose.

And that’s why I say it’s not about the battles.

This series is about consequences.

It’s about schemes on top of other schemes as various forces play outside of the battlefield to assert dominance over the universe, whether to enforce a long dead ideal regarding Earth’s control over outlying colonies or simply to maintain a place of dominance in universal trade.

It’s about competing philosophies and societal ideals playing out on a grand scale chessboard with human beings used as so many pawns. Over the course of the series, this shifts from the battle between democracy and autocracy to internal battles over who should have the reins of power to struggles between the central personalities as each vies for a means of control.

It’s about big personalities who desperately want to demonstrate their military acumen on the battlefield against the most brilliant opponents, and also about trying to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

It’s about what happens in the void those big personalities leave behind when they pass on, figuratively passing the torch in more ways than one onto friends and loved ones.

Honestly, there’s so much that I could unpack in this series, particularly about the various relationships involved.

I didn’t even know I wanted romance in this series, but the slow build of the relationships between the leads and their eventual wives feels so genuine and subtle in a way that most series don’t have the patience to handle.

The brotherly bond between Reinhard and Kircheis is one of the closest relationships of the show and one of the most inherently tragic as the series marches on, rivaled perhaps only by Reuenthal and Mittermeyer’s friendship.

Julian and Wenli have a great mentee/mentor relationship, but also a family bond that grows stronger as the series goes on and as the former finds the footing to stand on his own, often in ways Wenli would prefer he didn’t.

There are so many small relationships I could draw attention to that I love throughout: Sitolet and Julian, Merkatz and Bucock as wise mentors to so many, Mueller and Wenli,

And yes, at the core of this series and buttressing everything else that happens, the relationship between Reinhard and Wenli comes full circle throughout this series, giving us some of the absolute best dialogue I’ve heard in any series. They’re rivals; they’re adversaries; they hold a deep mutual respect and aversion for one another. In many ways, they represent two sides of the same coin, and regularly mention how, if they had been born into different circumstances, they may well be standing where the other is. Without this relationship, the series wouldn’t work.

It’s not just about close relationships, though. Oberstein constantly feels enigmatic (for once, an enigmatic character done right as each action makes you question his motives and could lead to different answers), yet his part in the plot is one of creating distance and making himself a target in place of others. Schönkopf plays the bombastic rogue so often in the series that it can be easy to miss the subtle influences he places on those around him, particularly his estranged daughter. Truniht is a bastard of a character throughout, yet the motives of his final days in the series remain a mystery. And he’s not even the biggest plotter with Rubinsky, Heinrich von Kunmel and De Villiers all playing arguably bigger and more consequential roles.

And even all this doesn’t take into account how many little plots were in play throughout. Susana von Benemunde, De Villiers, everything surrounding Jessica Edwards and Andrew Fork, Dominique Saint-Pierré’s plots… there’s just so much to cover that it’s not surprising at all this series is 110 episodes. The fact that all these characters are memorable even after so many episodes is a testament to how well written they all are. And unless they're dead (in some cases, even if they are), no one ever disappears from the plot, even if they manage to escape playing any significant role for dozens of episodes.

I loved the experience. I wasn’t riveted for every moment (there were a couple of episodes in there that are basically just extended exposition dumps to give background, which are certainly helpful, but a slog to get through), but when this series grabbed me, it wouldn’t let go and I can’t stop thinking about it. A classic for a reason and well worth the time.

Hey, it’s House M.D. with a loli in the lead role. Sure it was kind of derivative, but a medical mystery anime isn’t terribly common. Of course, one of the few examples just so happened to be airing this season in The Apothecary Diaries, a series that already had a lot of steam going with substantial worldbuilding and a palace intrigue plot to boot. However, I’m not here to compare. What makes this series special?

It features a lot of modern medicine and remains relatively realistic throughout. I say “relatively” because the first case involves a man with blue blood having his leg bitten off by ... a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and a later one involves spontaneous combustion, but most of the mysteries in here are more grounded. There’s even one I was able to puzzle out before the titular Ameku could do it. Nice to see that Microbiology PhD is paying off. Even the more outlandish cases have a certain allure to them, basically dragging you by the nose to the end just to see how it all comes together.

And it’s not just grounded in its mysteries, but occasionally in its drama. Ameku spends a substantial arc dealing with the realities of a child dying of cancer, someone she formed a relationship with but abandoned to isolate herself emotionally from the reality that she can’t save everyone. It’s not exactly a deep emotional journey and I’ve seen it explored better in a single episode of Scrubs (“My Super Ego,” well worth the watch).

The animation is pretty good throughout. They do a surprisingly haunting job with the flames in this series and many of the visuals really pop, particularly in the OP.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I’ve got for the positives.

While this series does get some of the basics of House M.D. right (a genius doctor who does his own thing to save the lives of his patients, often flouting rules), it spends a lot more time dealing with forensic science than actual medicine, more often dealing with cases where someone has died and trying to find the killer. It’s not a surprising turn, but it is disappointing, as the show becomes more a series of murder mysteries than anything else, and we’ve got plenty of those in anime.

What makes that more frustrating is that its mysteries aren’t things you can figure out by looking at a crime scene. You have to have the necessary medical knowledge to be able to put together information at the scene with diagnostics, which means that unless you have a very technical set of expertise, you’re not resolving any of these mysteries (much less the more convoluted ones mentioned above) before or at the same time as Ameku. Mystery shows can still work OK if you can’t predict what’s going to happen, but part of what makes a great mystery is being able to put the pieces together. If this was just a medical mystery, it might be interesting to just watch them puzzle these things out based on a variety of test results and analysis, but we’re solving crimes here as well and it feels like a large part of that is just a giant shrug and “leave it to Ameku to figure this out.”

None of this is helped by having a lead character who just isn’t Gregory House. To be clear, I wasn’t looking for a carbon copy of House in loli form, but I was looking for a character who had more personality than this. House is interesting in part because he’s got a lot of problems and is generally abrasive to everyone, including his patients and staff, all of which barely conceals a lot of damage in his past and present. By contrast, Ameku just isn’t much more than a very self-confident young doctor with a complex about being called small who struggles with the deaths of her patients and doesn’t understand the word “no.” It’s not exactly a distinctive character archetype in anime, and it wouldn’t stand out among a sea of medical mystery dramas in live action. Really, the only thing that seems to distinguish her is the almost “mind palace”-like deductions she does while sketching out connections with her fingers, both of which heavily evoke Sherlock Holmes… and as someone who has gotten very frustrated with how much mystery series lean on the legendary detective, this did not help my perception of Ameku as a distinctive character.

It’s not like this series doesn’t have interesting ideas, either. That’s part of the problem: it knows how to do a good medical mystery drama, it just doesn’t spend a lot of its time doing it. There’s a short mystery involving a child and their mother that was particularly interesting to follow and did, in many ways, feel like an actual episode of House M.D. An episode involving the excavation of a tomb and the belief in a resultant curse (before the fires start) wasn’t too far off, either, even if it did feel a bit extra. It’s just a shame that these feel more like the exceptions rather than the rules, with each of them spanning single episodes while other mysteries cover multiple episodes. And the split between these and the more over-the-top-crazy mysteries didn't help. It ended up doing the worst of both worlds: never feeling so absurd that you could just turn your brain off and roll with the crazy, nor so grounded that you could really get into the mysteries and how the characters explore them.

Even the final little arc, which brings some personal stakes back to Ameku and Takanashi’s doorstep, feels like it puts an arbitrary and weird time limit on an investigation for something that doesn’t feel all that heavily consequential after watching the series tackle so many cases of death and near-death, though they certainly try to sell it as more. Adding a ticking clock to a mystery can sometimes work, but it didn’t work here.

There are good ideas in here that I can see absolutely working out for the better over a broader span of episodes with more diverse mysteries. It’s just a shame that so much of this feels so humdrum with a cast of characters that are fine and mysteries that average out to fine without ever really pushing the strengths this series should have in spades.

Where do I even start?

I feel like any review I give of this is going to be a losing battle because I’ve got two very different opinions on this one at war within my head.

Why the split?

My view of the series changes a lot depending on what factors I evaluate. Probably my hottest take on this series is that it kind of fails as a mystery. My view on mysteries is that they’re at their best when you can puzzle them out. At the very least, I feel you should be able to get satisfying answers to the central mysteries of a show in the ... end, yet many of the mysteries of this show remain hopelessly out of reach in the end. Why did all these “this worlds” exist? What was The Principal’s (effectively God’s) aim? What was Ms. Aki’s aim? Why was she just “gone” in the end? I understand what War was, but why was he so pivotal that he had to be eliminated? Why did they fuck with Asakaze so much? Why could some characters die (like Nozomi) while others were immortal? Is that because some were copies and others weren’t? This is just a small sampling of questions I’m left with in the end and there are no clear answers.

Before anyone mentions it, yes, I’m aware there are extensive discussions over the mysteries of the show that have taken place since it came out and some of these questions might have answers carefully hidden in the narrative. I’ve discussed some of them, but I’ll say that getting those answers just hasn’t felt satisfying. One example that seems kind of emblematic of my issue with the mysteries of this show: the show uses visuals to establish a connection between the second compass (the one Asakaze handed over to Nagara near the end) and another student who we don't know much of anything about. There may be some connection between that student and Ms. Aki or Nozomi, but that’s speculation. So... why does this matter? It hints at broader schemes still in play by the end of the series, but not what any of them are or why they are important. They’re just details you might notice that spawn more theories.

So as a mystery show, Sonny Boy fails for me. For so much of its run, it doesn’t let you sit with any of its mysteries and puzzle them out. It just moves onto another mystery, layers another mystery on top of that, goes down a warp pipe to a new mystery, then circles back to a mystery from the start of the series, then takes a space elevator to nowhere. I might notice more and puzzle more of these mysteries out on a second or third watch, but I’d almost certainly just have more questions based on those answers. None of its mysteries lead to any kind of satisfying conclusion. They’re all rabbit holes with no bottom.


…But I still like this show. Why?


Because narratively, it isn’t all about these mysteries. It wasn’t until those last two episodes that I found myself setting aside issues with understanding everything that was going on and just focused on the character journeys and themes, and I chalk that up to the series changing tacks a bit as it enters its back half (roughly episodes 6-12, though some of the episodes, particularly episode 9, double down on the mysteries). Even then, I can’t really say I was fully onboard for what it was doing until the last two episodes, which is part of what makes this review so difficult. The series itself emphasizes the mystery over so much of its runtime that teasing apart the elements that work is that much more difficult. I can’t really talk about what worked in the narrative without getting into those elements, so onto characters and themes.

The best character development in the series comes from Nagara and Mizuho, both of whom experience dramatic turnarounds from self-isolating, often difficult students to more three-dimensional characters willing to put it all on the line just to get back home. Nagara is the stand-out between the two, though. It was easy to criticize Nagara as relatively passive and frustrating early on, but he literally and figuratively stepped up to the plate and took a swing. His journey through the story is perhaps at its best in Episode 7, where, after a while sticking to the reload most traveled, he refused to go along with the crowd and bucked expectations to return to the island. And I particularly liked how the examples of birds - at first, those that were dead or dying that he ignored, before spending the final episode focused on the same nest as Nozomi and showing an interest in something he would have otherwise turned his eyes away from - demonstrated Nagara’s development and initiated something small but meaningful in the end with Nozomi to boot. I had my issues with both of these characters, but their journeys were a major part of why the experience worked for me.

Meanwhile, there are several main characters and side characters who are just great throughout. Nozomi is so good and so central to the plot that you’d almost believe she’s the main character at times. Kossetsu does a lot with only one episode of development, showing mainly the downsides of having a peek into the minds of others. Her friendship with Nozomi, despite the other girl being object of her crush’s affections, feels genuine and I really bought into her journey through episode 10 even while I didn’t really understand the search for War. Hoshi is also a fascinating character who remains a little enigmatic, but the decision to part ways with The Principal and chart his own course showcases some interesting growth.

Yamabiko was such a fascinating character to splash in about halfway through the series that provides some important context and external insight into everything that’s happening. Even with over 5000 years of experience, though, it’s his story with Kodama from his distant past that hits the hardest. It’s not a surprise at all (at least not to me) that an episode directed by Keiichirou Saitou with key animations from Keisuke Mori pops off this hard (the tracking shot from within Yamabiko’s eye is just incredible) with a one-off character for the ages, but the tragedy of Yamabiko and Kodama’s relationship hits hard and yields important lessons for Nagara, even if I didn’t get all the intricacies of how the plague worked on first blush.

But let’s be real: no character in this series really compares to Rajdhani. Not often I know I have a new favorite character on my hands from the start, but his curiosity and scientific exploration of this world is part of the reason that the mysteries didn’t fully get away from me as he solves several of them (particularly the cats). He also grows with the series, making peace with the many “this worlds” and his exploration of them and even turning into a forest in the end. Love that for him, giving his new macaw a home. However, the best part of Rajdhani is how he shows such a deep wisdom borne of experience. I’ll get into this on the themes, but Rajdhani’s contributions are a big part of the reason I recommend this series despite being baffled by so much of it.

Unfortunately, these also contrast with other characters who range from enigmatic for the sake of it (falling into the mystery camp) or are just frustrating.

The ones that matter most in the former camp are The Principal and Ms. Aki, both of whom play huge roles in the plot but remain black boxes when it comes to their motivations. I’d even include Asakaze in this camp despite understanding him because he’s the subject of so much of their manipulation that he mostly functions as a means of meting out their enigmatic plans, and he’s not the only one. So many other characters are tied into the central mysteries and plots of those two enigmatic characters, which means even really interesting inclusions like War just kind of peter out after they’ve had an episode to shine.

The latter camp includes Ace (I know he’s supposed to be a representation of the blue monkey, but dude is so vain it’s absurd), Cap (interesting for about an episode where he’s trying to assert control over his classmates before just learning his lesson and never being all that relevant), and Pony (interesting mainly as a vehicle for exploring Mizuho’s early characterization and just kind of the worst). They’re less characters and more parables.

As for themes, the basic one for the whole series slots well into their character journeys: it’s transition. These are high schoolers moving onto the next stage in their lives and struggling with that. You could argue that this is somehow The Principal’s efforts to assist with that, to help them understand themselves and decide on a path forward, even if that means spending thousands of years wandering or turning into a jungle. It’s a bit abstract, but I can see what they were going for generally.

However, if we’re talking some incredible theming, this is where Rajdhani and his part in episode 11 in particular really shine.

We get two stories from him about other “this worlds”:

The first is practically an encapsulation of both the central theme (moving on in life and being ready to do so) the positions students take in the end: they either accept reality and want to move on or live out their lives in a fantasy, trying to recreate a utopic vision of what they had.

The second gives us some surprising closure on Hoshi’s story as the inventor of death in a deathless realm. It seems time warped his mind. He created a utopia, a world of fasting. Hoshi may have been the one who helped realize it, but he wanted to break up the static nature of this place with death, rejecting the rules of this place. He committed experiments on his fellow classmates, and was eventually successful in creating a sort of death that shifted his worldview. He rejected everything he was by accepting everything, transcending earthly desires and achieving a form of death as a result.

As Rajdhani says:

“Life’s a constant cycle of vain endeavors. But at the same time, since it is meaningless, then this moment of becoming, is a precious and beautiful thing indeed.”

I definitely don’t claim to fully understand this story or its themes. Accepting reality, recognizing the pointlessness of so much of what we do, and embracing it all anyway, finding something to care about in the mix, is a strong sentiment. Even parsing out what I have here required writing out some pretty detailed summaries and thoughts on each episode and getting some insights from various sources outside of my watch experience. But I can say that my take-aways from the series were far better than I expected while I was trying to parse each episode. It’s a series that comes together well, because even as the number of dangling threads only got larger, there was something cohesive to take from them nonetheless.

S1 of this show was a vision, a great example of how to do video games in anime with low stakes that still invest audiences. So, why does S2 feel like a step or two down?

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed this season. The characters haven’t changed and, if anything, they get more excellent character moments this season. There’s still some great animation, albeit not the peak moments that the previous season boasted. The fights are still pretty good and creative, wielding a lot of game logic, and there’s plenty to enjoy in the worldbuilding and going through a wider variety of games than ... we did back in S1. But it does feel… different.

It’s taken some time for me to think on the difference and I think it mainly comes down to one word: momentum.

There was a sense of momentum throughout S1. Sunraku joins Shangri-La Frontier and has a blast taking the road less traveled, power-leveling past obstacles that no one else could manage wielding his experience with trash games. He stumbles into an endgame boss and has to run around half-naked, stumbles upon a rabbit village and has to grind hard against a variety of challenges brought by the Rabbit Boss Vysache. He runs around trying desperately to avoid attention with his new rabbit familiar Emul only to draw a lot of attention and have to escape max-leveled PKers. Then he gets involved in the first scheme of its kind to take down another endgame boss, yielding what remains the best fight in the series with some real emotional heft.

Are there side-tracks? Sure. Sunraku visits other games and participates in other fights that give him ideas for the main game. He lives a life outside of the game. We get insights into other players he allies himself with and antagonizes. They draw some attention, but they feel like minor side-tracks to a central quest line.

As for S2, well... Sunraku reaches max level and there’s little sense that he’s still on some central quest line. It feels more like a set of side-quests all aimed at getting things he wants: empowering the Ether Reactor, going into Nephilim Hollow to face down an old rival in a mech suit, facing off against Lycagon again because they ran into her on the way to their destination and finding their way to the Abyss City. That last one has the makings of a central quest line, the fight against Lycagon is obviously consequential, and a lot of this is connected to his larger goals in the game, but so much of this season just feels like disconnected pieces. They’re fun enough, particularly as Sunraku has to use different tools to overcome seemingly impossible odds, but they are mostly side-quests or the early stages of a larger quest. And even the Abyss City arc is interrupted by the Global Games Competition. They all interrupt the momentum of the series in a way that events in S1 never felt like they were. Maybe that’s not fair to say, since there were a lot of small asides in S1, but they never dragged attention away for too long. It really doesn’t help that the GGC is where this season ends, leaving us on a cliffhanger that, honestly, I’m not super invested in seeing play out. It also doesn’t help that they arbitrarily made things more difficult at the last minute and their opponent is still mostly an unknown entity beyond their leader's quirky personality.

The more I thought about this, the more I related it to my experience with World of Warcraft. Getting to the endgame and experiencing the content for max level players was a large part of why you played the game, but whereas the leveling portion could often feel like a chore, there was always a sense of momentum to it. You were following a quest chain that led you down a path to that max level along an interesting journey. Endgame content meant bouncing around to various locations engaging in raids or PvP or what have you. I’d dump hours of my time into an individual event and just switch over to something else. It works great in a game where you aren’t necessarily driven by following a linear narrative and you choose how and where to invest your time, but not so well for a show like this where it makes the choices for you.

So yes, I still enjoyed this. There’s a lot to like about the wild ride that Sunraku took me on week after week, and if anything, his experiences were more diverse this season than last, so we got to see him really stretch his skills to cover a variety of games. And much of what he did played into the larger narrative of what he wanted to do in Shangri-La, so it’s not wasted. The pacing goes through some rises and falls, bottoming out with a prolonged meeting between guilds near the beginning of the season and occasionally dragging through its arcs that take place off SLF, but every arc still manages to keep me invested on some level. Still, after a stellar first season and despite all the new elements, this S2 just doesn't work as well.

I don’t really care about figure skating. The vast majority of my knowledge of the sport starts and ends with a ridiculous song about Brian Boitano from the South Park movie. I didn’t watch Yuri on Ice (I know, travesty), and the only times I’d watch figure skating would be when my wife was streaming that part of the Olympics (she’s a fan). So when I heard that Medalist, a manga about figure skating, was winning all the awards and was set to get an anime adaptation, I thought it might be interesting, but didn’t think much of it. Might be an opportunity to see ... some solid sakuga with a decently strong “get better despite all the odds” narrative.

…so how is this series so good? Why was it persistently in my top 5 for the season along with all the heavy hitters?

It’s easy to just point to the excellent animation of its skating. CGI animation has come a long way over the years and the different skating styles of its many performers is on full display. Even as someone who just isn’t interested in it as a sport, it was dazzling to watch.

I could also just chalk this up to being a good underdog story. The whole idea of having a character who is “past their prime” when it comes to starting figure skating (difficult to accept for an 11-year-old, though starting early is a must to join the upper echelons of many sports) demonstrate a combination of innate talent and a willingness to work hard and work smart to rise in the ranks is always going to draw audiences in.

But let’s face it: the series would not work without the excellent cast. The characters truly make this experience. It is a breath of fresh air that they let the kids feel like actual kids, but it’s not just down to that.

Obviously, the leads are it’s most elements. Inori doesn’t just feel like a kid, though: she’s got a lot of uncertainties and hang-ups juxtaposed with a real desire to succeed and prove herself. Searching for worms is a sort of comfort for her, a means to succeed at something that she knows she can do and get a tactile sensation that brings her calm, even if most people wouldn’t describe wriggling worms as calming. It also serves as a means to an end, necessary for the limited training she has before the series starts. She has to overcome a sense of dread, both from her and her mother, as they’ve had to experience her older sister’s successes in figure skating only for her hopes to be dashed by a sudden injury. And this doesn’t get glossed over or easily solved, as her mother not only wants to protect Inori from injury, but from the pain of going through so many trials and tribulations only to have them dashed in an instant. It’s great that she and not Tsukasa ends up being the one to convince both herself and her mother that she can do this, accepting both success and failure and coming out stronger for it, and her mother ends up strongly backing her despite continued reservations. Her drive to succeed pushes her to new heights and it’s great to see her believe so strongly in her coach and bounce back from missteps, something many of her fellow skaters struggle with.

If I had to pick, though, Tsukasa is the character that stands tall as my favorite throughout. We don’t immediately learn of his background in pairs skating, the difficulties he had to overcome as someone much later to the sport, or his own feelings of inadequacy drilled into him over the years (the one I can most relate to), but we see hints of all that play out slowly over the course of the season. It’s exceedingly rare for a series to not just give us insight into the athletes, but their coaches and their struggles as well, and there’s a lot to appreciate in how it’s portrayed here. Even better is that, when confronted with someone who actively disparages his credentials in Riou, he wins him over not by wanting to prove himself, but in how well he understands his new pupil and his concerns. Tsukasa’s story could have been the focus of an anime all on its own, and it makes me want to learn more about what specifically happened towards the end of his short skating career.

Though, of course, that isn’t here in this season. We’re not at the point where the real competition is at hand, even though we spent all season working toward it. If anything, though, I think it got there a little fast. I’d have preferred to see more of Inori’s incremental growth rather than skip past several levels in the middle. I think the promise of competition is more interesting than the reality of it, with Hikaru in the background serving as a supportive rival and showcasing the best skating in the show. In the interim, Inori had plenty of competition that served partly as a showcase for her growth and skills, and partially as lower bars for her to aspire towards. The nice part is that they’re all characters with personalities as well, and though we only get to know a few of them (shout out to Riou, Ryouka and Ema in particular), they’re faces I want to see again and again, as are their coaches (particularly love Yuudai, Mario and Shinichirou - man is deadpan even when he’s extremely emotional and it’s amazing). Really, only Jun Yodaka stands as a consistently antagonistic (if occasionally hilarious) foil to both our leads, and likely one of the highest bars they’ll have to reach in the future.

So yes, this series slaps and I love it. Particular shout-out to that scene where Inori pours hot soup on both Jun and Tsukasa’s heads believing they died falling down the stairs. Pure comedy gold.

There was a lot of hype for this season and, for the most part, it pays off well. It’s kind of crazy how good the animation in this series looks on the regular, but it’s especially amped up during its action-packed fight scenes. That’s no surprise to anyone who watched S1, so what’s changed? The answer is mostly for the better, with a few exceptions.

I’ll start with those exceptions. Sung Jin-Woo feels even more untouchable this season than he was last season, quickly moving into the upper echelons of known S-Rank Hunters. Sure, he faces off against opponents who give him a run for his ... money, but they’re the exception rather than the rule this season. This isn’t helped when he’s walking away from virtually every fight largely uninjured and when one of the biggest fights of the series so far ends because he suddenly unlocks a new ability. Season 1 had a sort of rhythm to its fights that ensured that you always knew how they’d play out even if you didn’t quite know how they got there, but this season feels a little more predictable and Sung Jin-Woo’s arrival on the scene starts to feel a little bit more like Saitama’s arrival in One Punch Man than I’d like. He’s not that OP, and the series shows that this is the result of his efforts and the care he takes in his fights, so it might not be fair to compare the two, but it’s how I think about it in the end.

But that’s really the major knock I have against this season because it does a good deal better than S1. Sung isn’t exactly an easy character to invest in since he’s mostly just helpful badass who happened to be walking by, but this season gives us a whole episode to humanize him, taking the time out of its fight sakuga to give us a very cathartic episode involving his mother. It may be among the season’s lowest rated episodes, but it’s a moment to remind the audience (and perhaps the character himself) that there’s more going on than just “fight powerful monsters, win, level up, collect loot.”

And in general, this season just does more with its side characters than the previous one. Sung joins a crew of powerful Hunters who I would love to follow through some of their earlier adventures because there’s a sense that they’ve been through a lot, with one even prepared to give him a last will and testament to deliver to her family should she die. Whereas Sung’s fights feel a little less impactful on this level, those around him have their fights very well grounded in the reality of what they’re doing and the risk it poses this season. It also helps that there are fewer out-and-out assholes this season around him, which might explain the lower body count at his hands. That was supposed to make him look edgy, but all it did was make everyone around him look stupid and petty.

It also helps that the fights go significantly harder. In particular, Sung’s match-ups with Baran and Beru are sights to behold, though several of the earlier fights are visual spectacles (if not so much dangerous to Sung himself). Of particular note: the fight against Baruka is one of the best for sheer choreography in the series and I love the snow-swept setting, and Vulcan, the second boss in his climb up the Demon Castle who just has so much heft and speed that his fight that it manages to stand out as well.

That being said, this season is still plagued by many of the same flaws as its predecessor. The narrative pretty much remains the same throughout with some changes to the status quo (not like he could keep his power hidden for long), with the focus mainly focused on excelling and raising Sung’s level while everyone marvels. It’s not solely a basic power fantasy, but that is its core. The story isn’t helped by some pacing issues as it dances between planning for the invasion of Jeju Island and everything Sung’s doing, the latter of which is consistently more interesting. It does finally converge in the end, so it does find the strength in that portion of the arc eventually, even if the subversive plans of the Japanese team seem to go nowhere in the end. The introduction of Il-Hwan Seong is potentially huge, as are a couple of characters introduced right at the end, but we don’t get much time with any of them, so they’re set as hurdles for the next season.

Let’s face it: this series is mostly flash and little substance. That’s not a bad thing since it knows exactly what it is and leans into it, which means it gets the most out of what it has, but it does limit how high it can climb. I’d say this is a clear step up from S1, and look forward to where the series takes it from here.


Edit: Seems like there are a good number of people who somehow decided to watch this season despite absolutely despising the first season. I've never really understood that, but for those who have this rated so low that it would rank among the worst anime they've ever seen, I can't understand your perspective. I'm a lover of great narratives and characters. This has neither. That being said, this is a very entertaining series and, like many other forms of entertainment, anime can wow without being deep. This is more flash than substance by a wide margin, but the flash is the point and there's nothing wrong with that.

Trillion Game is one of those shows you appreciate a good deal more after you've helped found a company. I've had some experience in that regard and, while this is significantly more absurd in the execution, a lot of this just feels more grounded as a result. You feel the pressure on these characters, particularly in the early portions of the series.

And I think that's a great deal of what makes the series work for me for much of its run: it feels like there's a sense of momentum as our leads throw themselves into opportunities to carve out a name and then a company ... for themselves. They couldn't be more different doing it. Haru's willing to do whatever it takes from the outset, lying and cheating his way to the top and clearly enjoying himself along the way. He's not a bad person (at least... I don't think he is), but he is uniquely driven to achieve his aims, sometimes willing to sacrifice others for the purpose... or maybe not. It's honestly hard to tell with him sometimes. Meanwhile, Gaku is very much an open book, honest and forthright to a fault. But he's also driven and skilled in ways Haru isn't, filling in gaps in experience while Haru aces all the charisma checks in the series. They fit together impressively well.

They're joined and countered by a number of interesting cast members. I won't go through them all here, but in particular, Kirika and Rinrin stand out, the former for the way she recognizes the talent of our leads and forms a rivalry of sorts with them (it never feels wholly antagonistic, and her interest in them is as much personal as it is professional) and the latter in how she organizes the chaos that Haru and Gaku create, becoming a stabilizing influence on what is clearly a very unstable ship.

I'd say where this series either survives or flounders is usually in its narrative. Sure, much could be said about its animation (it's not great, I admit), but it's not a series that requires anything impressive on display. You're either taken for a ride along with these characters through the roller coaster that is trying to get their company off the ground or you're getting bucked somewhere along the way. I found roughly the first half of the series really engaging. There's a sense of continuous momentum as they struggle hard to get a product, hire people, and get investors with hardly anything to show them. It's painful at times, but Haru always keeps things moving forward at a rapid clip. It's about the time that they acquire a very large building for their purposes that, at the time, they absolutely do not need that it starts to lose me. There's a sense in the middle of the story that Haru starts making large purchases and investments just because that's the next step, even if it feels entirely unwarranted. We also spend a lot of time in game development, and while that's interesting, it stops the momentum dead for a while. It lost me for a bit in there, and while it righted itself towards the end of the series and got me back onboard, I can't say the experience had the kind of constant engagement I was hoping for.

Still, I think this was a worthwhile watch. I wasn't sure what to think going in, but it had me reeled in with a surprisingly solid cast of characters and a sense of forward movement. I'm not sure if it will get more material, but I'd love to see these characters take on bigger and bigger companies, and have their rivalry with Kirika kick into high gear. There are a lot of opportunities there. For now, I'll just enjoy what we've got.

This is all excellent setup to an amazing clash between scientists for control over the future of humanity itself.

The challenge that this season presents to Senku in particular is pretty unprecedented, in that he's fighting not just someone from his own time, but a person who is (potentially) his intellectual superior who has had plenty of time on his hands to prepare for other humans to arrive. He and his allies, particularly Stanley, are ready to go to war and are easily better equipped to win this fight, wielding a broad assortment of firearms, airplanes, submarines, and the manufacturing capacity to meet the moment ... wherever they need to. Senku and crew have equipped themselves decently well, but they're not at the level to be able to challenge these new foes. That makes this a very distinct battle from the rest we've faced so far, whether that was a society of warriors led by an erstwhile classmate or an island run by corrupt natives who have only a limited concept of what technology is and how it works. It helps that this is also an existential fight, and not just one over motivations, but one over access to essential resources and the capabilities to use them to revive all of mankind.

Dr. Xeno really shines this season, as does Stanley. It's incredible that, after so many seasons introducing incredibly imposing characters from a physical standpoint, they feel immediately outclassed and it makes sense that they are. Much like in previous seasons, this becomes a race to outthink the enemy, but it feels more pressing this season. There's less of a sense that any single invention or modification will solve for the challenge they're facing as well, and with the group often split up, there's more of a sense that everyone's contributing to their actions.

Really, the main thing holding this season back is that it really does still feel like a lot of this conflict is in its early stages, which, as a manga reader, I know it is. I fully expect the next part to be my favorite in the whole series, but for now, I'm satisfied with the setup.

I went into this one skeptical, though that may not be entirely fair. I watched through the first season of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! and enjoyed it quite a bit, glomming onto the reverse harem approach it took. When I picked up S2, I expected similar investment, but fell off about halfway through; suffice it to say that the lack of momentum in the plot (with Katarina constantly nervous she’ll trigger doom flags in S1, but not so much here) just didn’t work for me. I tried Villainess Level 99 last year and fell off that as well. ... The power fantasy just didn’t engage me at all. So when I picked this up, I was hoping that the humor of the 52-year-old civil servant in the body of a young woman would carry it and, after a few episodes… nope, I wasn’t really invested. It was just taking a lot of obvious steps to try to elicit humor, and while I liked some of the setup (with Grace wielding the Elegant Cheat to effortlessly win people over is just an amazing idea), but I just wasn’t laughing at the interactions with bargain bin otome game characters. I thought for sure I’d drop this by episode 3…

Then the dad jokes began. Alright, I’m a 38-year-old male and their pun game is on point. Also, Grace was quickly winning me over as a character, so there must be something worthwhile here. Then we got to episode 4 and the series blew me away, setting things up so that Kenzaburou’s wife and daughter would actively interact with him while he was isekai’d. It helps a lot that everyone in this family is a fount of knowledge for nerd humor that gets me, citing everything from classic anime to The Neverending Story.

And the series wasn’t done introducing very interesting concepts that break from usual isekai/villainess standards. Grace (the original personality) isn’t just gone, she’s present inside of a cage alongside Kenzaburou, though she hasn’t spoken yet in the series. The existence of Grace’s mother in the story, who clearly has more going on, sets up for some interesting dynamics that weren’t present in the original game, particularly as she has powers of her own.

However, that’s also where the problem with this series lies: it has a lot of good ideas that it never explores all that deeply. Remember that scene in episode 4 where Kenzaburou’s daughter reached into the screen, combined a model of her father and Grace, and made his dragon familiar? That’s the high water mark for that interaction, and it happens early. Kenzaburou can interact with the original Grace in his mind, but that hasn’t gone anywhere yet. And most of the headway with her mother starts and stops in the final episode. And the general vibe of the series doesn’t get any better for me. I can’t say I laughed at many of the running jokes or found it all that humorous that, despite all Kenzaburou’s attempts to avoid it, Grace remains the center of attention and affection for the series. That’s all pretty standard for this type of series, just a little frustrating that a series with so many good ideas would keep defaulting to these, and that’s not helped by a supporting cast that doesn’t have a whole lot of depth to it. I get that that is kind of the point (they’re video game characters), but it means Grace has to really win over the audience a lot more than most MCs, which she thankfully does.

None of this is to say I disliked this series. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to, I just don’t think it capitalized on some of its better elements. At least in one respect, the Elegant Cheat, the series did show its writing chops, turning it both into a boon for Grace and introducing some drama later when she couldn’t turn it off during the play. I love stuff like that, and I really hope this series gets a S2 so it can delve into some of these concepts more.