Beef Stroganoff B- Live and Learn Edition
. I was impressed in how the second season followed up aspects of the first season in terms of consequence such as Hibiki undergoing bullying due to the concert fight in the first episode of the first season. This threw me for a loop as the first season never even hinted at this. In some ways this season worked as a companion piece to tie up some loose ends from before and I appreciated that level of narrative cohesiveness.
The writing for the villains, if you can even call them that, seemed as if there was a major rewrite somewhere or that someone realized that they needed to pad out the episode count.
. Also Fine had a strong thematic connection to the show and so her goals worked to deepen the message of the first season. Vers had nothing except maybe being so comically buffoonish which might have been fine by itself except everybody else plays along which just makes it frustrating. His creature
His character design also was pretty weak too which didn't help matters.
Well this is interesting, as while the sequel fixes almost all of my standing issues with its predecessor, it also introduces some new ones. Directorially the show is better almost on all fronts. There is no severe tone whiplash that the original series drowned on which makes the episodes feel less overly melodramatic. In fact there's less melodrama in general despite a few sequences. The show drops the school aspect except for the school festival and the show is much better as a result as instead it focuses on the 'saving the world' aspect and takes itself less seriously in contrast to the prior season. This helps the pacing in that the show doesn't drag except for the middle due to the writing of the villains. The conclusion was pretty cool too in the usual shounen way. Not to mention it doesn't have a try-hard pretentious ED, as seen in the first season.
I liked how there was much more effort to make the villains sympathetic in that Maria and her troupe have a very good reason for their actions. So good in fact that it made me wonder why the protagonists weren't helping out.
I had jokingly thought at the end of the first season that even that chunk of the moon should have been enough to fuck up the Earth significantly and low and behold, the second season is about preventing the moon crashing to the Earth due to a change in orbit
The animation was surprisingly better than the first season although the production values slipped in the later episodes. I was hoping for more from the final episode and while it wasn't badly animated, it also wasn't particularly impressive either. Apparently my desire that the rest of the season be close to the quality of the first episode, was left unfulfilled. Still there were stand out fights such as in episode 4 and episode 11. The fights themselves are more intriguing in that the Symphogear users are largely fighting each other and human vs. human fights are usually more interesting than humans vs. monsters/creatures. The storyboarding even outside of the fights was vastly improved such as the singing sequences or the concert in episode 1. Not to mention the design work surpassed the original season as the character models look sharper and sequences 'pop' more. It's just an all around better quality production visually in contrast to S1. The music itself also took a huge jump from the quality of the individual insert songs such as Chris's battle song and Tsubasa's music altogether (Nana getting dat work I guess). Maria's transformation song is pretty awesome due to the strong male chorus. The general background music exceeds the quality present in the first season, partially due to the larger variety.
My only major issue with this season are the villains (I'm talking about the new Symphogear squad). Now while I appreciate making them sympathetic and the audience being able to empathize with them, it also appeared that many of their actions were unnecessary and only served to muddle their goals. So they want to
save the world from the moon. Fine, but why then are they pretending to be terrorists? How does that help their goal? Why would collaborating with the Americans later help them achieve their means? If all it took was one person using the Anti-Symphogear Symphogear to reach Frontier, why weren't they just searching for a person in the first place? Why did they need to trick Ver with the whole Fine thing?
Now as for this fucker, he was a complete step down from Fine. Fine was at least intimidating while Ver is closer to something like a petulant child. He loses any sort of threatening demeanor after the creature gets pwned by Berserk Hibiki and never regains it. It's obvious that he's going to backstab people yet they play along, such as
Chris. Why Chris? Why did you let him put an explosive bomb collar on you? Girl you should have known better
biting Hibiki's arm off was a good way of making it scary but the show promptly undoes that by having Hibiki roflstomp it into oblivion the next episode.
The old cast was much more likable this season as they aren't being dragged down in C rate drama. Hibiki is still my favorite though as I like that stupid side of her, it's cute. Why though does she have the worst fucking songs? It's aggravating as her VA clearly can't sing worth shit. Tsubasa improved dramatically as she takes on the cool senpai role the entire time.
So definitely better than the first season but the writing got too meandering, not only with the antagonists but some things with Hibiki, which ultimately ended up hurting my impressions.
