Was One-Punch Man’s Second Season Really That Bad?

One-Punch Man Season 1, is one of the best-looking anime to ever grace our screens. Its energetic camerawork, zapping brawls, heart-stopping action scenes, and dazzling animation cleared out fans dribbling after each episode. At that point, the news came that Season 2 would switch animation studios from Madhouse to J.C. Staff due to time restrictions and the group who made Season 1 having their hands full with other ventures. Alert bells started ringing, and after that, the trailer dropped, which appeared with stilted animation, deadened shot composition, unbalanced facial animations, and a lot of black screens.

So, after all of this, does Season 2 of One Punch Man hold up? Well, the reply to this generally depends on what you need from your anime, and what you’re willing to sacrifice.

One-Punch Man is characterized by three things: intense and exhilarating battle scenes between fun and campy heroes and villains; reasoning based around looking for a reason in life and feeling unfulfilled; and jokes based on both the battles and the philosophy. In Season 2, just as in Season 1, we get the latter two. The jokes are still there, conveyed expertly by the voice cast, particularly our protagonist Saitama – in any case, numerous of the jokes in Season 1 depended on physical comedy and slapstick, but with poorer animation, a few of that’s lost in Season 2. And the reasoning is still there, but that’s all taken care of by the writer of the manga, so the story, themes, and big thoughts are reaching to be carried forward easily, in any case of how the show looks.

In case you love One-Punch Man for its characters, connections, gimmicks, costumes, identities, and agendas, at that point there’s nothing to disdain here. If you’ve contributed to the story and need to know how it can build on the ultimate sucker punch that’s the finishing of Season 1, at that point, you won’t be disappointed by Season 2. But if you’re trusting for Season 2 to provide those same visceral battle scenes that we were lucky enough to see in One Punch Man’s freshman outing, at that point the new episodes will likely leave you underwhelmed.

The liveliness is slow and apathetic, taking unpleasant easy routes to induce the battles done and dusted in as basic a way as conceivable. Gone are the unpredictably detailed character action shots, with energetic slow motion and constantly shifting camerawork. Instep, we have flashes, cuts to dark, and machine-gun punches all reminiscent of the drawn-out battle scenes of Dragon Ball Z from more than twenty years back. For appear with “punch” in its title, not a single blow leaves any lasting impact.

Generally, the plot is built upon pleasantly, as are the show’s center subjects – in spite of the fact that they’re explored with distant fewer nuances this season. For case, there’s a minute in scene 9 where the recurring theme of unfulfillment and boredom is spelled out in a tête-à-tête with King – a modern character presented in scene 1 as a coincidental (and fake) legend. It’s exceptionally patronizing, suggesting that the audience has not been taking after Saitama’s predicament all along. King’s words are wise in spite of the fact that and reminiscent of the message given by Zeus at the end of Disney’s Hercules, as he comes to terms with the truth that extreme strength does not rise to genuine heroism. This, at the slightest, turns an unbalanced moment of exposition into something a small more worthwhile that does advance Saitama’s character, just not in the richest of ways. And there are moments of tonal discord like this peppered all through the season.

When it comes to the climax of the season, the ultimate scene of Season 2 doesn’t feel final. In spite of the fact that fans have been clamoring for the second batch of episodes, Season 1 still feels like a total story, whereas Season 2’s finale seems to have been the conclusion to any other episode, instead of offering any closure. And, although it doesn’t have to fundamentally matter, the ultimate three episodes are almost completely one long and arduously drawn-out fight, with barely any Saitama to be seen.

Again, usually reminiscent of Dragon Ball Z, particularly that one notorious moment when Frieza debilitates that Namek will detonate in one minute which minute is at that point some way or another drawn out over a few twenty-minute episodes. It’s 2019! This kind of poorly-paced storytelling shouldn’t be happening. Not when Season 1 of One-Punch Man reliably conveyed on its jokes, its battles, its music beats, its plot, and its character growth.

One Punch Man Season 2 is uneven compared to its forerunner, but it presents enough new characters, thoughts, and subjects to stay new. Since the show centers so intensely on Class-S heroes, a few fan favorites are pushed to the wayside. Mumen Rider, Amai Veil, and Speed O’ Sound Sonic make token appearances, but they have no enduring impact on the plot. The bend of this season was a lot of setups, with exceptionally small payoff. Whereas the character improvement is curious, fans can be disappointed by the need for monster punching. Ideally, the writers will make up for this in Season 3.

As regular, the art is fabulous, in spite of the fact that it lacks Season 1’s smoothness of expression, instep opting for a more traditional Shonen anime style. This gives the show more consistency, but at the fetched of the wildly exploratory mish-mash of styles that gave Season 1 so much of its flavor

In case you’re a fan of Season 1, you’ll likely appreciate Season 2. There’s a lot to like. In any case, it may be best to keep practical expectations. One Punch Man came at American gatherings of people like a punch to the face. Season 2 might never hope to recover that feeling. Instep, the show admirably shifts center away from Saitama but loses a few of its charm within the process. One Punch Man Season 2 may be a compromise, but a great one. One Punch Man Season 2 is available on Toonami, October 12, 2019.