News 5m3o10

*There will be spoilers*

This season was so much of a disappointment for me that I'm writing a review just to express how much I hated it.

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't read the manga but, after going through so many other reviews, I have a general idea of what they cut out. I won't go too much into that though because I haven't read it for myself.

Story - 2/10
Oh TPN, what have they done to you? The first season did such a good job at building a tense and suspenseful atmosphere. I there being times that I genuinely didn't know how the ... characters were going to get out but I was so intrigued to find out. This season said hold my beer and threw all that out the window to try this "anime original" angle instead. By anime original, that meant cutting out a bunch of time-consuming arcs that covered all the lame stuff, like world-building and character development, to make room for awesome stuff like random new characters with no established motivations and conflicts that make no sense. Seriously though, as an anime-only watcher, the fact that I could tell they were skipping stuff is not a good thing. Everything is so rushed and nothing gets the chance to be fleshed out before they jump to the next conflict. Every conflict is resolved almost immediately with no real effort made from the characters to resolve it. Nothing was developed in of the Lambda group, meaning I did not care about any of them in the slightest.

Quick note about that whole mess. What even happened to the guys from the Lambda farm? They were tortured and we got a quick still of them looking hurt but that's it. Norman lies and says he was never tortured but then reveals later on that he was and is dying from it but? We never saw that? That whole backstory was shoved into a 10-minute exposition piece and we were expected to take it.

Then there was the absolute travesty that was the ending. I don't think I've ever seen an ending done in such a lazy way. The entire finale of the show was just images of a manga arc that look more interesting than the entire season I had just watched. The fact that the first thought in my head when the PowerPoint slideshow started was that it seemed like a major manga arc is not a good thing. I shouldn't be able to tell what is and isn't a manga arc if it's supposed to be anime original!

Okay I'm moving on because I could go on forever about how bad the story was. The rest will be shorter, I promise.

Art - 6/10
I have no real qualms with the art. Yeah, the CGI monsters looked janky, but they were such a small part of the anime that I didn't really care too much. It wasn't great, but it was certainly better than the story

Sound - 8/10
This is the only thing I think this season got right. It was pretty bland to begin with but in the final episodes, we were given reduxes of OSTs from the last season and it genuinely seemed like they were trying for an emotional reaction. If only the story had been better, I might have actually felt some emotion when they played these songs

Character - 2/10
I'm skipping the plot armour because I think everyone can acknowledge how stupid it was that no one died or was even hurt. My biggest issue with characters was two things: Emma's optimism and Norman's supposed crazy mission. Emma coming in with the bs wish of saving everyone, both humans and demons, is one of the dumbest things I've ever had to sit through. You guys were literally raised to be meat for these things and you want to go out of your way to try and make peace? I could've understood not wanting to kill anyone, but actively trying to save them and make peace? Absolutely not. No one, no matter how nice they are, would do something that stupid.

And Norman, oh my god. I knew from the second they revealed him being alive that they had skipped so much in the manga and I was right. This guy was gone for all of 5 episodes and you want us to believe that he turned into some genocidal maniac bent on eliminating all of demonkind? With the 10-minute exposition where we never even see something that makes him shift to this mindset, it was totally unbelievable and ridiculous. Not to mention that these kids are supposed to be highly intelligent, not god, so how is he coming in here saying he was able to develop a serum that can alter a demon's whole brain? It's so dumb.

Enjoyment - 1/10
This was a struggle to get through. The first four episodes had promise, but it went off the deep end. I had to force myself to finish it and that was only because I had already watched more than half of it and there was no point in dropping so far in.

Overall - 2/10
This season ruined the show so much that I don't think I would even recommend the first season to friends anymore. Knowing that, if they like the first season, they'll want to continue it to see how the story ends, I couldn't subject them to something like this. If you absolutely want to know how the story goes after season 1, read the manga. Don't suffer through this. It will ruin your whole perception of the series.