One-Punch-Man-Review-2
It's not a very hard task to tolerate with low production values, but when the heart and soul of a beloved franchise gets destroyed by directing that completely misses the point of the series, it becomes near impossible to overlook the massive amount of problems we have at hand. Welcome to the 2nd season of One Punch Man, sequel which inferiority is beyond comparison, show which is not only terrible but an absolute disgrace towards its fans. This is simply not acceptable.
This review will cover 3 main points explaining why I personally found this series to be complete bollocks. These are 1) Comedy 2) Directing, and 3) Art.
1) The comedy doesn't deliver due to poor comedic timing. It's a hollow, near dead version of what it used to be. Scenes end before they reach their climax. Nothing shines or stands above the rest. The content is never pushed to its limit or even tried to. There is no pinnacle to be found as the show is flat like the chest of those countless loli tsunderes J.C. Staff is most famous for. It's like the entire thing has been made without any vision, possibly by someone who never thought there was anything fun about this series to begin with.
Season 1 played around with its comedy, waited for the right moment and even pushed the overall comedic resolution to its utmost limit. It was the type of content that constantly showed respect to its audience, and this was done to an extent that made it very easy to respect it back. After all, making a series about a dude who -- most of the time -- wins everything with a one punch is a risky move which could only ever work if there's a perfect harmony and the strongest merits are polished. And that was done and achieved. With this 2nd season, the presentation is bad, the execution is worse, and its overall form is, at best, like a parody of its predecessor; The punch is still there, but it doesn't have any impact.
2) Immersion is the key, and it's best achieved by atmosphere because with atmosphere comes awe, and awe is something that limits disbelief and gives us the basis that is needed to forgive all sort of flaws, problems and questionable choices any series contains and does. Experiencing the gar-like awe this series is famous for and getting into the show at all has been hard, if not impossible. Action comedy series (and visual comedy alike) tend to be on par with blockbuster action by default. They in generally are build around empty and soulless ideas that don't have much good things going on. This weakness needs to be countered to create this so called "genuine entertainment" that has minimum amount of annoying problems that ruin the fun. This is typically done with written details (such as oneliners or unique characteristics), audio directing, and visual execution that solely exist to make the series seem better than it would otherwise be. I.e. value is placed on details to carry the otherwise lacking content. This job is what the director is supposed to do. But OPM S2 did nothing to fight against its own flaws, rather, it only created more of them, poisoning its own core.
Audio choices, audio directing and directing itself are some of the most important things when it comes to turning mediocrities into something outstanding. But it isn't there. Rather than playing around with the mood and teasing the audience by making us wait -- or alternatively doing the opposite by throwing in some ridiculously energetic beats -- the series is more like "let's get this over with" and then they do. End of story. It promises to reward the viewer but never does. No real value is given to any scene or moment with the comedy (like mentioned earlier) and the same thing applies with the story board, the action scenes, the visuals, and music choices and seiyuu work. To get completely serious here, nearly every scene could be used as a material for Every Frame a Painting videos as an example of the unpreferred way to do shit.
Perhaps the best example of all of this are the first 8,5 minutes of episode 09 which are so poorly made I doubt anyone who gets into film school, but hasn't even taken any lectures yet could manage to do worse job even if they tried to. Heck, I doubt there are even many graduates who could purposely achieve this level of awful. Pay attention to the lackluster sound mixing, monotonous voice acting, the near complete absence of SFX and note the music choice that would be tagged as (mellow piano) in hearing impaired subs. Perfect mood for a scene where some incredibly socially awkward dude tries to kiss his crush with whom he has never spoken with, right? Guess again! It's the most badass fight scene in the first half of this arc! And this is only the audio we're speaking of. What the actual krukk? Talk about failed delivery. Life of an art house visionary, I tell you. This can hardly be called "directing", rather, it seems like a serial production process for products that should've been buried deep under ground and sealed away in cement. Tho a better example of how awful the SFX is is a fight scene from episode 11 where the sounds of landing punches were most likely created by someone repeatedly hitting church organs with a wet sock.
3) Art. When we asked for "loyal adaptation", no one meant "keep the webcomic art as it is", but that's all we've got. MadHouse's art and animation cannot be overhyped. One Punch Man is the single best animated action anime that has yet been made, one may disagree but not change my mind. I saw it 4 times, own it on blu-ray and it looks glorious, visually one of the best things that are called anime, especially when looking into modern productions. Season 2 is a generic J.C. Staff production where still artwork flows around the screen, cheap effects and camera tricks are trying to create the illusion of animation and movement; Even the most basic scenes are done with voice-over narration to ensure there is no need to even animate mouth movements; If there is a way to save money and time, it's chosen every single time; Character models are only few steps away from sanic-tier, purposely terribly drawn memes; The color pallet is not only bland, but inconsistent to a point that the episodes could have as well been made by completely different teams who never shared any data between each other. Just compare the colors of episodes 3 and 4. Let me repeat what was said in the opening paragraph: low production can be forgiven, but One Punch Man 2nd Season's production is a heartless piece of industrial waste, anime that has not known love or passion.
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What J.C. Staff is doing here is despicable as it's making their creation seem like an attempt to use this entire medium as an investment platform. Minimum effort and risk to ensure profit. The ultimate safety route. "We missed out Bitcoin so let's see if this can cash us some." I guess that's why they couldn't even color metals properly since those aren't gold or silver. This is the furthest from a work of passion, driven by creed alone. Saitama is not "ok" anymore like in the meme, rather, it's a full turn around with a K.O. (sorry, I just had to put this here somewhere)
When series comes with such obvious and serious issues, I don't think there is any real reason to go in depth with the story and characters because OPM S02 is fundamentally so broken that no amount of pros falling under these categories could fix it. I will only talk about them briefly. Keep in mind that the technical aspects of the show lessen the entertainment value of its story and characters -- and ultimately they are just an inferior version of the re-drawn manga, which I personally recommend reading instead of watching this anime -- but since they are a part of this anime and not an entity that can be completely taken out of context, and considering this review is not aimed for the manga, you will face criticism that is only relevant to the anime. + This anime is not 100% loyal to canon anyway.
The story type changes during this season. The monster of the week formula is put in the background when new type of elements and side-plots are expanding the verse and moving the main focus from Saitama to other characters. At first, the series seems to be quite lost when the storyboard is all over the place, introducing characters at episodic speed and following wide range of different pov's in each, offering fights that don't seem to have real substantial value and showing monsters that are partially making the entire idea for the series seem old and outdated. It takes over half of the entire run time before the story finally tightens up, the supposed build-up phase concludes and the filler-ish feel of the past events start seem significant. Most of this run time is used to make the viewer understand the characters better and see what type of people they are, the actual means used to achieve all of this being secondary. Despite everything there is to criticize, the characters are not a missed shot. Fubuki is strengthening her role as the best girl for anime only watchers, King especially is portrayed to be an actual real human, and Garou "The Hero Hunter" is shown to be an actually very well-thought out villain. With mild issues in the storyboard (and major in their execution, of course), the story knows where it is headed and majorly improves towards the end. From these departments, the series seems bearable even under its massive problems listed above. There definitely was room for improvement from these departments, too, but even so, at least they managed to make watching this series more tolerable.
This review will cover 3 main points explaining why I personally found this series to be complete bollocks. These are 1) Comedy 2) Directing, and 3) Art.
1) The comedy doesn't deliver due to poor comedic timing. It's a hollow, near dead version of what it used to be. Scenes end before they reach their climax. Nothing shines or stands above the rest. The content is never pushed to its limit or even tried to. There is no pinnacle to be found as the show is flat like the chest of those countless loli tsunderes J.C. Staff is most famous for. It's like the entire thing has been made without any vision, possibly by someone who never thought there was anything fun about this series to begin with.
Season 1 played around with its comedy, waited for the right moment and even pushed the overall comedic resolution to its utmost limit. It was the type of content that constantly showed respect to its audience, and this was done to an extent that made it very easy to respect it back. After all, making a series about a dude who -- most of the time -- wins everything with a one punch is a risky move which could only ever work if there's a perfect harmony and the strongest merits are polished. And that was done and achieved. With this 2nd season, the presentation is bad, the execution is worse, and its overall form is, at best, like a parody of its predecessor; The punch is still there, but it doesn't have any impact.
2) Immersion is the key, and it's best achieved by atmosphere because with atmosphere comes awe, and awe is something that limits disbelief and gives us the basis that is needed to forgive all sort of flaws, problems and questionable choices any series contains and does. Experiencing the gar-like awe this series is famous for and getting into the show at all has been hard, if not impossible. Action comedy series (and visual comedy alike) tend to be on par with blockbuster action by default. They in generally are build around empty and soulless ideas that don't have much good things going on. This weakness needs to be countered to create this so called "genuine entertainment" that has minimum amount of annoying problems that ruin the fun. This is typically done with written details (such as oneliners or unique characteristics), audio directing, and visual execution that solely exist to make the series seem better than it would otherwise be. I.e. value is placed on details to carry the otherwise lacking content. This job is what the director is supposed to do. But OPM S2 did nothing to fight against its own flaws, rather, it only created more of them, poisoning its own core.
Audio choices, audio directing and directing itself are some of the most important things when it comes to turning mediocrities into something outstanding. But it isn't there. Rather than playing around with the mood and teasing the audience by making us wait -- or alternatively doing the opposite by throwing in some ridiculously energetic beats -- the series is more like "let's get this over with" and then they do. End of story. It promises to reward the viewer but never does. No real value is given to any scene or moment with the comedy (like mentioned earlier) and the same thing applies with the story board, the action scenes, the visuals, and music choices and seiyuu work. To get completely serious here, nearly every scene could be used as a material for Every Frame a Painting videos as an example of the unpreferred way to do shit.
Perhaps the best example of all of this are the first 8,5 minutes of episode 09 which are so poorly made I doubt anyone who gets into film school, but hasn't even taken any lectures yet could manage to do worse job even if they tried to. Heck, I doubt there are even many graduates who could purposely achieve this level of awful. Pay attention to the lackluster sound mixing, monotonous voice acting, the near complete absence of SFX and note the music choice that would be tagged as (mellow piano) in hearing impaired subs. Perfect mood for a scene where some incredibly socially awkward dude tries to kiss his crush with whom he has never spoken with, right? Guess again! It's the most badass fight scene in the first half of this arc! And this is only the audio we're speaking of. What the actual krukk? Talk about failed delivery. Life of an art house visionary, I tell you. This can hardly be called "directing", rather, it seems like a serial production process for products that should've been buried deep under ground and sealed away in cement. Tho a better example of how awful the SFX is is a fight scene from episode 11 where the sounds of landing punches were most likely created by someone repeatedly hitting church organs with a wet sock.
3) Art. When we asked for "loyal adaptation", no one meant "keep the webcomic art as it is", but that's all we've got. MadHouse's art and animation cannot be overhyped. One Punch Man is the single best animated action anime that has yet been made, one may disagree but not change my mind. I saw it 4 times, own it on blu-ray and it looks glorious, visually one of the best things that are called anime, especially when looking into modern productions. Season 2 is a generic J.C. Staff production where still artwork flows around the screen, cheap effects and camera tricks are trying to create the illusion of animation and movement; Even the most basic scenes are done with voice-over narration to ensure there is no need to even animate mouth movements; If there is a way to save money and time, it's chosen every single time; Character models are only few steps away from sanic-tier, purposely terribly drawn memes; The color pallet is not only bland, but inconsistent to a point that the episodes could have as well been made by completely different teams who never shared any data between each other. Just compare the colors of episodes 3 and 4. Let me repeat what was said in the opening paragraph: low production can be forgiven, but One Punch Man 2nd Season's production is a heartless piece of industrial waste, anime that has not known love or passion.
-----
What J.C. Staff is doing here is despicable as it's making their creation seem like an attempt to use this entire medium as an investment platform. Minimum effort and risk to ensure profit. The ultimate safety route. "We missed out Bitcoin so let's see if this can cash us some." I guess that's why they couldn't even color metals properly since those aren't gold or silver. This is the furthest from a work of passion, driven by creed alone. Saitama is not "ok" anymore like in the meme, rather, it's a full turn around with a K.O. (sorry, I just had to put this here somewhere)
When series comes with such obvious and serious issues, I don't think there is any real reason to go in depth with the story and characters because OPM S02 is fundamentally so broken that no amount of pros falling under these categories could fix it. I will only talk about them briefly. Keep in mind that the technical aspects of the show lessen the entertainment value of its story and characters -- and ultimately they are just an inferior version of the re-drawn manga, which I personally recommend reading instead of watching this anime -- but since they are a part of this anime and not an entity that can be completely taken out of context, and considering this review is not aimed for the manga, you will face criticism that is only relevant to the anime. + This anime is not 100% loyal to canon anyway.
The story type changes during this season. The monster of the week formula is put in the background when new type of elements and side-plots are expanding the verse and moving the main focus from Saitama to other characters. At first, the series seems to be quite lost when the storyboard is all over the place, introducing characters at episodic speed and following wide range of different pov's in each, offering fights that don't seem to have real substantial value and showing monsters that are partially making the entire idea for the series seem old and outdated. It takes over half of the entire run time before the story finally tightens up, the supposed build-up phase concludes and the filler-ish feel of the past events start seem significant. Most of this run time is used to make the viewer understand the characters better and see what type of people they are, the actual means used to achieve all of this being secondary. Despite everything there is to criticize, the characters are not a missed shot. Fubuki is strengthening her role as the best girl for anime only watchers, King especially is portrayed to be an actual real human, and Garou "The Hero Hunter" is shown to be an actually very well-thought out villain. With mild issues in the storyboard (and major in their execution, of course), the story knows where it is headed and majorly improves towards the end. From these departments, the series seems bearable even under its massive problems listed above. There definitely was room for improvement from these departments, too, but even so, at least they managed to make watching this series more tolerable.
