With Season 2 completed, I can now safely say that I’ve really enjoyed my time with it and I find that somewhat surprising. I feel this season should have been a mess. For one, there’s a total of thirty major characters in the cast. It’s a huge leap from Season 1 exclusively focusing on Poppin’Party and it’s a lot for a single cour to handle. I also get the impression that Season 2 assumes you’d do a little bit of homework. It does formally introduce all the new characters but you are somewhat expected to already be acquainted with them via the mobile game, the chibi anime shorts, or a wiki. It is on me for skipping all of that stuff but I also imagine that plenty of viewers would just go from Season 1 to 2 so it’s kind of cheap to entirely account for that. As a result, Season 2 is far from perfect. Maybe you can give the spotlight to that many characters in one cour but that isn’t what happened here. A lot of them ended up getting the short end of the stick.
That said, what this season did manage to do is quite good. It successfully continues PoPiPa’s story while finally giving Roselia their time in the sun. The other three major bands get featured in some pretty solid one-off episodes. The formation of RAS is one of the most interesting parts of the story. Even though a fair amount of characters are underdeveloped, I somehow still thought they all worked well in their group chemistry and the show manages to use most of them effectively for its comedy. Season 1 is arguably more focused but Season 2 is less contrived and it has more interesting things going on at once. If we’re talking presentation, the current winner is easily Season 2. There’s a wider variety of music thanks to the larger number of bands and the songs are simply more memorable this time around. With PoPiPa in particular, you can tell that they’ve benefitted from having two more real life years under the belt. The CGI animation can be an acquired taste but I think it ended up being a very reasonable change as the animation really pulls through during the concert scenes.
The season finale is entirely dedicated to PoPiPa’s self-sponsored live show. Since all the major conflicts have been resolved last episode, this episode is very light on plot. It’s just the girls meeting up in Galaxy, hanging around in the dressing room, and performing for the big event. I suppose one bit of character development that does happen here is PoPiPa seeing Yukina smiling during the show. That alone tells PoPiPa that they proved her wrong about doing their own show and that she’s happy with what they’ve accomplished. It’d be nice if Yukina could admit all that outright but not saying anything is better for the script and more in line with her character.
Once the live show starts, the episode pretty much becomes a concert film. All five bands perform onscreen, with PoPiPa bookending the whole event. If you’ve enjoyed the music and the concert scenes this season, you won’t be disappointed here. All the music performed onscreen is entirely new to the anime. At the start of the show, Kasumi impulsively kicks things off with “Returns”. Everyone else decides to follow suit by playing their new songs first. That’s basically the excuse for why the episode only shows the new material and cuts cut to the next band for time. Honestly, it’d make more sense for the characters to make that decision while preparing for the show but whatever, the attention to detail is nice.
I really dig the decision to have PoPiPa bookend the show. You start with PoPiPa performing an emotional piece that reflects their recent experiences. Then, you highlight all the friends that helped them along their journey. Finally, you end things with an upbeat song that’s more the band’s M.O., effectively brining the show full circle. It’s definitely an odd choice at first glance, even Arisa acknowledges it as such last episode, but now that I’ve seen it all in execution, I think it works really well. Speaking of full circle, I also adore the choice to have the main OP play during the credits. That’s admittedly not anything new, plenty of TV anime have done this, but for some reason, it clicks a lot here. I thought the OP had this very strong sentimental tone to it, so perhaps that’s why it fits perfectly as the very last song you hear in Season 2.
There are a couple of plot threads left open in Season 2 and those will presumably be addressed in Season 3. For one, Rokka still doesn’t have her own band. It’s established in Episode 10 that people now think they can’t keep up with her skills so that’s why the struggle continues. Still, you’d think Rokka would have made progress by now. This girl can’t be that unlucky. There’s also the post-credit scene, where a jealous Chiyu declares to everyone that Raise A Suillen will surpass them all one day. I figured the show wasn’t done with this character. She still needs to get her revenge on Roselia and it seemed very likely she’d start to hold a grudge against PoPiPa after Tae chose them over RAS.
So kind of awkward but I’ll have to put this series on hold for now. The next BanG Dream! series, YUME∞MITA, is premiering very soon and that’ll obviously be my Bandori fix for the next couple of months. Once that’s over however, I’m down to cover Season 3 and anything else that released between that and MyGO!!!!.
Xenodude Scribbles 