Feb 18, 2018
This is my first review on MAL, and I felt like it just had to be the second season of this show. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I really enjoyed the first season. I also really enjoyed the film, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. I also managed to enjoy the latter half of season two. What I did not enjoy, however, was the Endless Eight arc.
Endless Eight is an attempt at the tried and true Groundhog Day formula, in which a certain series of events is repeated over and over again. Think Edge of Tomorrow, or, the movie Groundhog Day. Our heroes are stuck
...
in a time loop. This certainly isn't a new concept, so you'd think that the writers would be able to create an entertaining arc out of it. That assumption is completely and utterly false. What we ended up with was an abysmal death march of repetition and monotony. Over the eight episodes that this arc spans, nothing significant happens besides the development of one character, which leads into the events of the film. Was wasting eight episodes worth that development? No, because the same thing could of been accomplished in a far more entertaining way.
Nothing changes over these eight episodes. That's the nail in the coffin. There are small details, such as minor dialogue changes, or characters wearing different outfits, but outside of those small changes, it honestly feels like the studio was recycling old art and dialogue to save on the budget. That's not the case either though, because most scenes have been drawn from a different perspective, which would require the whole thing to be drawn up from scratch. This wasn't a money saving scheme, it was an intentional creative decision, which to me is just unfathomable.
Besides that, our heroes also turn from likeable to outright frustrating. We have our main character who experiences unusually prominent bouts of deja vu and despite knowing all he knows about the supernatural events around him, ignores it. We have Yuki who not only can remember all the previous timelines, but is also willing to share this information but chooses only to do so when asked. The icing on the cake is that when she does share this information, nobody thinks to ask her to tell the other characters earlier in the cycle the next time everything resets.
At the end of this trudge, what do we have to show for it. Yuki is a bit more developed as a character and we now have a motivation for her actions in the movie. This could of been accomplished in half the episodes. This could of been accomplished without the focus on repetition. The Endless Eight arc, is a bad arc. It's possibly one of the worst arcs I've seen in any anime. Despite it, I still managed to enjoy the rest of the season, and the film. If you do watch this show, I'd recommend watching maybe the first two episodes of Endless Eight, and then skipping to the end of the last episode of the arc. You won't miss anything.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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