We deserved better.
What They Say:
“The Wiping of the Disciple’s Butt”
Silverfang and Bomb catch up with Garou while the hero hunter is battling Genos, starting a whirlwind battle that draws in more and more combatants as it marches towards its hair-raising climax!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It’s been a rough three months. After waiting more than three years, we finally got the follow-up to the first season that also spanned twelve episodes, but while that initial adaptation was perhaps the single most beautifully animated cour of anime, its successor was an incredibly mediocre production, especially in comparison. As I’ve gone into each episode trying to muster some optimism, I’ve found myself invariably disappointed, even as those hopes have deteriorated over the course of the season.
Now we find ourselves at the finale, the last chance for the staff to pull out whatever they might have up their sleeves to make it all worth it. However, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations, though. In case eleven consecutive episodes of disappointment weren’t enough to squelch any remaining glimmers of hope, the rumors of production woes that have yet to subside made me pretty confident that we weren’t going to get a mind-blowing final episode. Here’s where I’d like to say that I couldn’t have been more wrong, but I got pretty much exactly what I was expecting, which is unfortunate in this situation.
To be fair, no twelve-episode second season of One Punch Man was ever going to conclude as satisfyingly as the first. In the material adapted for the original series, the stories were very short and everything could easily be wrapped up with no real loose ends. Everything past that point was inevitably going to cause problems with finding a stopping point, because even though it took so many years to come out, the arc that started with the very first episode of this season is still not complete in the current manga. If they got the kind of Madhouse staff that made Hunter x Hunter possible for three years straight, maybe a second season could’ve been longer and still stood up to the first, but not only was this season already twelve episodes too much for this team to handle, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. They could drag out the pacing and pad it with filler and only cause it further harm without any benefit. All things considered, this was the right choice under the circumstances.
That doesn’t change the fact that it was an anticlimactically underwhelming way to end the season, though. If anything, the previous episode served as a better climax, as it featured Garou, the most central new character of the season, brawling it out with several high-profile heroes, including Genos. Instead, this episode takes Garou right out of the action from the get-go, as if to tease fans still hopeful for an intense final battle. In his place we get Centichoro, a big, boring bug that isn’t going to excite anyone no matter how much it’s hyped up. This is a season full of monsters with increasingly dynamic personalities, and we’re stuck with the personality-less bug as more interesting villains talk about it.
Every time I talk about this season of One Punch Man, I end up being very negative because of what could’ve been (and was), but I always try to acknowledge that every episode does have moments of solid animation. That’s more than can be said for some series, so I appreciate the little that we get. The final blow of the season is indeed one of the highlights from its run, just as we’d hope for. Except… everything that makes it compelling is essentially lifted right from the first season. Yes, it finally looks like our beloved Madhouse One Punch Man because… it basically is. So after all of that, our grand finale is hardly even new material. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still exquisite to watch, and I’d take even fully reused Madhouse animation over some of the painfully stilted original work of the season, but it’s just hard to feel that sense of freshness from a sequence that comes across as nearly identical to something we saw in the OP before every episode of a series from 2015. The most notable difference is that it feels more out of place here.
In Summary:
I can’t help but think about the previous season finale, with many of the greatest animators in the industry, including the easy #1 Yutapon contributing despite being a full-time employee of Bones, working under an alias because he just couldn’t let the series end without being a part of it. That’s the kind of show One Punch Man used to be; it was where the best animators would gather to push their masterful skills beyond all limits and create the perfect visual representation of that content. This season feels like the opposite in some ways, like the least remarkable way to present it, albeit with some startlingly impressive work from one otherwise unknown animator. And hey, it could be a lot worse than unremarkable. I’ve been chanting one constant mantra to myself for the past three months: “At least it’s not Berserk.”
As we look to the future, I know people want a potential third season to return to the original Madhouse team. That would definitely be a good first move, but with this second season so far below the level of at least the first season, I’m pretty sure I’ll just be recommending that everyone watch twelve episodes of One Punch Man and then stop. Read the manga; it’s so much better than this!
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Hulu
Review Equipment:
LG Electronics OLED65C7P 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K
