Feb 5, 2021
The first episode of The Promised Neverland Season 1 is one of the finest I've seen in all of anime. The dread and chills I felt at the end of that episode made me think I was beginning an amazing psychological thriller shounen.
The season lived up to the expectations I had, it was filled with horror with elements of gore, didn't shy away from death and had a very menacing atmosphere throughout, along with one of the greatest pieces of music I've heard in anime: Isabella's Lullaby.
Now the season wasn't perfect, because I wasn't a fan of Emma as a character, a feeling that stayed
...
with me right till I finished the manga; but as a story, TPN S1 was brilliant.
And now with S2, its all gone to shit.
As someone who read the manga, I knew this season wasn't going to be as good as the first one. The thematic shift from a psychological-horror to an adventure shounen wasn't the best decision in my opinion, but despite that I was looking forward to the new season in a stacked Winter 2021 calendar.
Looking at the individual elements:
Story:
Easily the worst part of the new season. After I learnt that the author was planning to do an anime original ending to the season, I had my hopes up. I expected that he'd maybe realise what made his story popular in the first place and he'd try to incorporate those elements into the story.
But what we have here is flaming pile of goop.
The pacing is horribly off, there are some episodes which rush the pacing while others that are snooze fests. We have already had 3 instances of ass-pulls in the first 5 episodes itself. The standard blueprint of every episode till now has been: first half we show the children and their lives and how they live and what all they do to survive and how happy they are, followed by a second half of them getting attacked and being saved by someone else.
It's terrible. It's disappointing.
Characters:
Despite Emma being the main protagonist of the story, the first season for me was carried by Norman and Ray. While Emma isn't necessarily a bad character, she' s extremely extremely bland. She's a one dimensional collection of all the good qualities of every shounen anime ever. She's a character who thinks they can save everyone without ever getting her own hands dirty.
Ray is Ray, all his character development and story happened in the first arc so I won't complain about him. All the side characters presented the author with an opportunity to explore the various problems the children could face living in the wild, but what we have is 20 odd children living a year in shit conditions with shit food and not complaining even once.
Idealistic bullshit.
Animation:
Not as good as expected.
People in general are happy with the level of animation, but I am disappointed. The characters aren't sharp and the CG in parts has been awful.
CloverWorks is a good animation studio which is also producing 2 other shows, Horimiya and Wonder Egg Priority which are both much much better both in terms of animation quality as well as storyline.
So the overall animation is not bad, but its not amazing either.
Sound:
Nothing special. OP and ED are decent, OST is nothing memorable.
To summarise. The Promised Neverland S2 had a chance to undo the mistakes the manga made and create an amazing continuation to what was a brilliant opening season. But sadly, what we have is one of the most disappointing sequels in anime history.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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