The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 Review: A Horribly Mismanaged Disaster

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 has been a challenging season to watch for multiple reasons, the biggest among them being its quality. Let’s see what was the bad, the worse, and the worst thing about this season in this review!

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 Overview

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 or Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari Season 2 is an action, adventure, drama, fantasy, and most importantly, isekai anime that serves as the sequel to its highly acclaimed and fan favourite Season 1 that aired in 2019. The series is based upon a light novel written by Yusagi Aneko and illustrated by Minami Seira. We reviewed this season episodically, and you can read those reviews right here.

The show’s second season was adapted into anime by Studio Kinema Citrus, the same studio behind the show’s first season, and other highly acclaimed anime such as Made in Abyss and Barakamon. This season was directed by Masato Jinbo, an industry veteran who also directed shows such as Chaos Child and Restaurant to Another World.

– Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari Season 2 Review does not contain spoilers –

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 Review- The Plot

There were signs. As soon as Naofumi got through with his revenge on Bitch, things slowed down to a crawl in season 1 for around two to three episodes as it took a different path than most people were expecting. Since it was only a few episodes after a fantastic series of episodes, people let those segments pass by unscathed, as we cut the show some slack. There were definitely some eyebrows raised and concerns voiced, but no one expected things to get this bad in the sequel.

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The series never recovered from the slow crawl of the final few Season 1 episodes and maintained an atrocious pace throughout the new season. The action and intensity of the original season were gone without an explanation and are yet to return. This section of the story was slower and more deliberate in the light novel, building up to several plot points that were going to be important in the future. Deliberation is the key here, as the anime ended up cutting down the novel into “more digestable” pieces and cutting out several large sections filled with necessary details about the future.

In other words, this could be put as the showrunners wanting a shorter season, perhaps to deal with the slower pace of the light novel, and ending up shooting themselves in the foot by creating an even worse, more incomplete, and slower version of the same story. It was hard seeing the once-mighty Shield Hero being reduced to the laughing stock of the season, but none of that had been the case had we not known how good the series could have been. We know that the series had potential because of the great season 1, and season 2 couldn’t even come close to that quality.

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The Spirit Tortoise arc is infamous in the manga for its slow pace and being a different tone altogether than the rest of the series, but the showrunners managed to do it even dirtier than the manga. It was either too slow or too fast, depending upon the person you asked, featured a ton of information dumping, had a bad guy that came out of nowhere and made no sense as a villain, and left his remnants on the rest of the season.

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 then took the easy way out, putting our characters back at the beginning of their journeys alongside the only good addition to this entire season, Kizuna. It didn’t help that it all occurred due to a terrible reason that didn’t make any sense in the first place, but the show kept taking the easy way out over and over again. The plotline was tired and used the events of season 1 as a crutch to make even an iota of sense, which it still didn’t manage to do.

The ending was as contrived as it gets, as Naofumi and his connection with the rage shield was exploited yet again without any significant progress for any of the characters in the show. There was even a flashback episode at the absolute end just to drive the knife of the horrible pacing even deeper into the audience’s chests. There wasn’t even a single redeeming quality about The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2, and there are still tons left to complain about. Read the episodic reviews if you are not yet through with your vitriol quota for the day.

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 Review- The Characters

Oh boy, where do we even start with this one? The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 was on a mission to ruin every character arc that it could. No character was safe from being absolutely massacred by the hands of this show’s writers, and it performed this mission successfully. This season made you hate, or become indifferent to, every character you dared to like because of their actions in the previous seasons. Are we sure the showrunners didn’t want this season to fail?

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Naofumi fell into the same cycle of anger and revenge as before, with a much less effective resolution this time. He was less expressive and more stoic than ever, almost as if he had forgotten some of what he had learned in the previous season. Raphtalia and Filo didn’t fare much better, as despite being present throughout the entire season, none of them failed to leave much of an impression when the series came to an end. Raphtalia gained a new power, which the show stopped referencing as soon as it had done the one thing it was there for. I will not talk about the three other heroes and give them as much time as the show did.

The real problem here lay within the new characters, who were all terrible sans one. The one who was okay was Kizuna, who didn’t have much of an arc but was still pleasant to be around. Ost and Kyo, on the other hand, were terrible. Ost was a highly predictable and stoic character that slowed down the pace of every scene she was in and was just plain unpleasant to be around. It didn’t help that she ended up being the McGuffin the entire season was set up around. She didn’t have nearly as much presence in the minds of the viewer as she did in the minds of the characters in the show.

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The biggest failure of The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 was still the main villain, Kyo. He had terrible motivations, literally no connection to the show’s original plot, and served as just a way to introduce another set of heroes into the show that The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 still didn’t do anything with. He was annoying and was written as a Deus Ex Machina who was only ever as strong as the show wanted at any given moment. He was also likened to Naifumi in a last-ditch effort to give him some connection with the audience, which failed hard.

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 Review- Production

This category would usually be called “Animation and Music”, but there is something else we need to discuss here besides them. The show looked decent, but it didn’t stand out in any way with the animation. The only attention it got in that department was for how bad the CG turtle looked, which tells you everything you need to know. Kevin Penkin did the music, and his work was stellar as always. It’s a shame those fantastic OSTs were wasted on a show as bad as this one, but that’s anime for you. The opening and ending themes were also fine, but nothing special.

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 suffered horrible production delays that were also responsible for this season’s decreased length and the awful pacing. The anime and its fans suffered because some corporate personality in his cosy office decided that 13 episodes would be enough to tell a story like this one. Well, at least we all know who to blame for the horrible quality of this The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2, and this decision might just have sunk the franchise altogether. There might not be a The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 3 anymore. Good job?

Verdict

The Rising Of The Shield Hero Season 2 was unwatchable. The horrible plot, insufferable characters, glacial pacing, and rushed production have deprived the world of what used to be one of the better isekai and adventure shows ever made.