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[This review assumes you’ve seen S1. This review is spoiler free for S2, but not S1.] [TL;DR at bottom]

When discussing the Fruits Basket anime, I almost like to regard season one as a prologue. This is not because the story and themes shift heavily from where they begin, but rather due to a dramatic tone shift that occurs roughly a quarter into Fruits Basket S2. While S1 had its flashes of more sobering, dark moments, for the most part, the series maintained a comedic and lighthearted tone. S2, after a brief set of episodes designed to set up events for later episodes, essentially reverses this—Fruits ... Basket becomes a character drama, with flashes of comedy to relieve tension. If you enjoyed S1 for cute zodiac antics and are uninterested and uncomfortable with themes of domestic abuse and a whole lot of trauma, you probably don’t want to continue with Fruits Basket.

With that said, however, the tone shift does not come out of nowhere. As Fruits Basket is a character drama, it develops along with the characters, and strengthens the themes established in S1. It dives deeper into its complex and quite frankly beautiful characters. Excellent characters are complicated people who feel real and motivated—their goals are clear, and what they need to grow and change is evident to the viewer as they witness their arcs. Season 2 expands on these characters’ wants and needs as it begins to answer the series’ questions of family and the future. Tooru is perhaps the best example this. In Season 1, what Tooru wanted was to find a place where she is needed and to care for the ones she loves. Now that Tooru integrated into Shigure’s makeshift home, her motivations expand to wanting to hold onto that, in spite of everything that comes her way. This is also how we, the viewer, learn more about the inner workings of the Souma family and the motivations behind the cursed characters and their own familial ties. In this way, Tooru’s motivations contrasts the cursed Soumas—in them, she found solace and family, and yet, for the zodiac members themselves, such a curse ties them to their family and restricts their futures. This contrast is what creates the true conflict in Fruits Basket… Tooru working to maintain the life she loves against the familial ties that work to ruin it.

While Tooru’s arc continues, the cursed characters get a lot of expansion on their own characters as they approach their future as a cursed zodiac. Among the supporting cast, certain Soumas, like the briefly introduced Isuzu, get more of a focus than others, though all tie neatly together in a beautiful, complex patchwork that is the Souma family. In terms of the main cast, the show quickly gets to addressing Kyou’s own feelings directly after the True Form Arc that wrapped up season one, discussing how he contrasts his own role as the exiled cat with someone like Tooru caring for him. This results in some beautiful episodes and moments that were, for me, some of the highlights in an incredibly strong season.

In particular, though, most of the latter half of season two gives some much-needed development to Yuki. While Yuki was never a simple character, season one focused more on Tooru and Kyou than Yuki. Season two gets very deep into Yuki’s own perceptions of himself and his role as the “strongest” zodiac member. Yuki’s arc is excellent and filled with some incredible turns throughout. They really inform his character and even recontextualize his actions in season one. This arc introduces Yuki’s student council duties, as well as the four colorful characters who make up his staff, including the ever lovable Kakeru. Kakeru is a great new foil to Yuki, and seeing their relationship grow into one of the most likable and interesting dynamics in Fruits Basket was an excellent experience. In particular, though, what I really love about Yuki’s arc is the way that Fruits Basket addresses the age-old romance trope of the “flawless prince” character. It goes deep into how and why Yuki would present as such a person, and what it does to his own ideas of self-worth.

One thing I love about all of these arcs is Fruits Basket’s approach to link them all. Instead of covering one character’s growth before switching to the next, Fruits Basket opts to show bits of arcs between others, making one, connected interpersonal story. While this might bother those who prefer faster pacing or feel character moments must have instant gratification to be meaningful, Fruits Basket shows how strongly such characterization can work to expand the complexity of a story. In fact, I’d consider certain moments from this season to be a masterclass in setup and payoff—every important moment from the start of the season (and even things from season one!) return to inform the story and reinforce its themes. This makes the series feel incredibly gratifying.

In terms of visuals, Fruits Basket remains gorgeous. While its animation is nothing too complicated (there’s not many action scenes here to show off), the visual design is detailed and consistently great. Characters are expressive, and the show compliments its dialogue with great, subtle indications of emotion. The backgrounds remain stunning as well, and the show’s lighting and color design have some standout moments, like the numerous beach scenes in the first half of the season.

Music also remains well-utilized in the series, as it often serves as a means to cue and foreshadow upcoming events. The first opening as well is a great song, and one I highly suggest listening to all the way through! The seiyuu work is equally strong as last season’s, with Nobunaga Shimazaki’s Yuki and Takuya Eguchi’s Kakeru being particular standouts. The series also has a dub, and, as someone who tends to be quite lukewarm on dubs, I’m happy to say this dub is excellent. I was incredibly impressed with the quality as I watched it alongside the sub, and even prefer some dub performances to their sub counterparts. Laura Bailey’s Tooru comes to mind in this regard.

One unfortunate note I have add is that the main translation floating around, Crunchyroll’s subs, have a number of awful mistranslations that vary from removing character vocal quirks to blatantly rewriting lines. This changes their meaning and harms the characterization of the speaker. As dialogue matters so much to this series, this is incredibly upsetting. To emphasize how bad certain translations got, Natsuki Takaya, author of the original manga, found out about one particular mistranslation and commented on it. The dub, somehow (I’m assuming they work from a different, better translation?) managed to actually fix most of these issues, putting character quirks back in and fixing mistranslations. So, if you’re the kind of person who can stomach dubs, I would suggest it on translation alone as the more accurate version of the series. If you do opt for the sub, I would make note that if a character said something wildly out of character, it’s probably a mistranslation.

Overall, though, Fruits Basket’s ability to expand on its sweet, episodic first season into a complex character exploration is something you rarely see executed this well. The show’s combination of fully realized characters growing and changing over the course of their arcs set the stage for an upcoming bombshell of a third season that will (hopefully) live up to what’s established in season two. If you can handle the darker themes, I cannot suggest this series enough.

[TL;DR]

+ Excellent, fully realized characters who grow more complex as their arcs continue.

+ Strongly paced arcs that weave together naturally.

+ Great visuals, with good character expression and stunningly detailed backgrounds.

+ Well-utilized music with good OP and ED themes.

+ Excellent voice cast who add to their characters and a solid dub.

- Crunchyroll’s subtitles are horribly mistranslated at certain parts, harming characterization for a number of important characters. Dub translation corrects these.

- Transition from comedy-leaning to drama-leaning results in some much darker themes that might upset certain viewers who prefer their anime lighthearted.

Recommended? Yes

9/10

**TL;DR at bottom* *Spoilers are clearly marked*
The fact that this series is getting rated so low really saddens me. To put it simply, the King's Avatar is great, and hopefully, in this review, I can provide a reason to convince you.

Before I begin, however, I want to preference this is NOT an anime about eSports. This anime does not deal with, nor care about the struggles of, eSports players. It has eSports elements to it in order to logically and naturally bring in the topic of video games and how the main character Ye Xiu is so good at them. Elements of this are glorified ... quite often, if nothing else as a love letter to eSports in general. It is not about the struggles of players and the industry. If you're looking for something like that, I suggest Valve's eSports documentary Free to Play.

So, if TKA doesn't deal with eSports, what does it aim to do? The answer, quite simply, is to watch a likable character and his friends be good at video games. That may sound boring, but it's really not, due to the sheer quality of TKA.

The only real and only main character is Ye Xiu, who is, like many of his contemporaries in video game anime, a total God at this universe's most popular game, Glory. The justification for this is that Xiu is a former leader of one of the best professional teams of the game, and after a decade of leading it, is maliciously kicked off from the team and is forced to make a new account and grind his way back up.

If the fact that he's spent a decade playing this game confuses you, then let me inform you on one of the bigger selling points of this anime -- all characters are adults. Xie is said to be between 25 and 26 in the series, and he only plays with adults throughout. That allows the majority of the annoying, overused anime tropes such as excessive fanservice, stupid love triangles, a high school setting, etc. to be totally vacant from the anime. This really helps the series both focus on being about games and also have a fresh feeling to it, as it's not super interested in feeding into the wish-fulfilment teenager crowd many video game anime target.

Ye Xiu, (Western order Xiu Ye) is a really well written character, which is important since he's the only one who gets a major amount of screen time. A big element of the series is watching Xiu grow from replaying the game out of spite (and simply not knowing what else to do with his life) into loving it once again, which is done very subtly but ends up being satisfactory in the end.

A big element of Xiu's character is subtlety, primarily considering the air of "I am better than you" he frequently puts on, however, the series shows time and time again that he has doubts about his own skill, fears, and goals of his own, even if he could easily wipe the floor with anyone he battles.

A fantastic example of this, and a great example of the amount of care put into the show, is Xiu's smoking. Both a symbol and an indicator of his stress, the cigarettes always come out when he is put into a situation that upsets him, notably when he's reminded of his eSports past.

**MINOR SPOILER WARNING** In episode five, he does just that -- Xiu, a character still keeping this sense of superiority around him, makes some remark about a professional event going on, before leaving the net cafe he's in to take a smoke outside. The way he does it in private, and the stance he takes, including his expression, show simply how upset he is about the whole thing, and that he's not the one up there in the tournament.**END SPOILER WARNING** It's subtle--quietly great--but tells so much more about Xiu's character than any dialogue saying "he feels this" could ever do. TKA has so much of this sprinkled throughout, and it works great to really make the audience sympathize with Ye Xiu.

I've spent so much time talking about the lead simply because the series focuses on him, but for anyone interested in both interesting side characters and fantastically animated fight scenes, TKA does both well.

No supporting character gets as much development as Ye Xiu does, but some do grow quite a bit from the introduction to the conclusion, notably Rou Tang, a friend of Xiu's. All of these side characters are still very likable, and none are some dumb anime trope designed so heavily to be liked, they just come across as artificial.

As for the animation, TKA's is both experimental and well done. Many of the smaller scenes are where the series falters, having to opt to use 3D models for background characters to allow for room to the incredible animation during in-game fight scenes. Absolutely all of them are extremely well done -- great fight choreography, framing, and extremely detailed animation, especially during the bigger fights. If you're the type of person who loves good fight scenes or animation, this series will more than please you.

Regarding the voice acting, yes, this is a "Chinese anime", more properly referred to as donghua. Donghua has a bit of a bad name to it, considering it's known as both invasive to Japanese anime and lesser quality, to which TKA is neither. Yes, the people in the series speak Chinese. If you can get past how odd it's going to feel initially, the voice acting is very good, albeit different, than Japanese. Rather than the bigger, more campy style voice acting that tends to come out of a series like this, the Chinese opted to do something a lot calmer and natural sounding, which definitely helps the series stand on its own and makes the entire show seem more grounded.

(TL;DR)
Overall, the King's Avatar is a fantastic series about skilled video game players. It uses a logical setup, interesting and developed characters, and well done but easy to miss symbolism and character development, while not slacking on the action and animation in the slightest, to bring a great story about adults who love games. While it may not be the best representation of the eSports scene, it doesn't aim to be, and still manages to have compelling characters and growth.