Hikari no Ou 2nd Season

After escaping a violent encounter, Touko finds herself lost in the chaos of a city under invasion by Spiders, a tribe of people with dangerous supernatural abilities. Touko has traveled to the city intending to return the possessions of Haijuu, a fire hunter who died protecting her. She is aided by Haijuu's dog, Kanata, and Akira, a fire hunter who has protected her on her journey so far. When Akira is drawn away by an important task, Touko is swept into the battle's confusion to begin a new journey of her own.

Meanwhile, Haijuu's son Koushi fights to defend the city. Though physically unremarkable, Koushi's ingenuity has aided in the development of a few useful weapons. These include a powerful cannon capable of casting down ungodly lightning to smite the invading forces. With such destructive force seen as an offense to the gods, the deity Hibari seeks to stop him.

As they are both drawn into the unraveling plans of scheming gods and humans alike, Touko and Koushi struggle to survive.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Touko Main

Kuno, Misaki Japanese

Koushi Main

Ishige, Shouya Japanese

Kira Supporting

Hayami, Saori Japanese

Hibari Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Yururuho Supporting

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Yanagi Supporting

Ohara, Sayaka Japanese

Kiri Supporting

Shimamura, Yuu Japanese

Ruri, Matsuri Supporting

Ichimichi, Mao Japanese

Hitou Supporting

Watanuki, Ryuunosuke Japanese

Narrator Supporting

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Terakawa, Hidekazu Producer

Nishimura, Junji Director

Wakabayashi, Kazuhiro Sound Director

Kise, Kazuchika Episode Director, Key Animation, Chief Animation Director, Animation Director

Reviews

Jun 28, 2024

Boliro

Recommended

This is a very deep and and slow burning story even though this second season is more action packed. The biggest issue is clearly the animation, not only it's "poor", with a lot of still frames and powerpoint effects, but the art style is all over the place in every possible way being very distractive. It's hard to fully immerse in the story and "forget" we are watching an animation. However everything else shows a a lot of passion with deep and intricate plot, without the need to explain every single thing to the audience. It's neither a predictable shonen or a nihilistic seinen.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Mar 20, 2024

CaptainKenshiro

Mixed Feelings

Informative

“As for what’s in the upcoming season, this one makes it seem like only the war is left to shown, but if the visual quality of the second season remains the same, the fights will look ridiculous.”

I wrote this at some point on my review of the first season and it looks like I was mostly right, except for the fact that the visuals somehow became way worse. There are almost no moments when the artwork looks good and there are a lot of inconsistencies in the character models, the backgrounds were improved from the previous installment, as they no longer have the bad CGI ... from earlier, but that is still present for some special effects. The actual motions, as I implied, are a lot of worse now and makes every fight look ridiculous, and even the ones during scenes without action are done very poorly. The moments with special looking stills are used less randomly at first, but are just as prominent as the series moves forward, and it’s even quite obviously used to save some animation, plus they kinda moved to have an AI assisted look instead of the almost painting like from the previous season. They look good however, not like the AI horrors you can find out there, but the difference from before is worth pointing out. The directing keeps doing its thing but can’t save the visuals much, especially because it seemed like it got rid of the black screen moments with the character names spelled out on them, only to bring them back at some point.

What didn’t change was the atmosphere of the show, which remains the same from the previous season, with soundtrack, sound effects and voice acting being as good as they were before. The only thing that’s worse is the opening and ending songs, which are inferior compared with the previous ones, but still good on their own.

As for the plot, there is still some world building going on but it’s nowhere near as much nor it has the dull infodumped presentation from the first season, most of the story now is all the parties involved in the war doing their own thing. The good part is that previously passive or mysterious characters are finally doing something, and on paper everything is epic when described since after all the humans are setting on fire the spiders, who in turn lead a full on attack onto them, the gods move around kidnapping hostages for making them their host for their ultimate goddess or something like that, and the tree people go around and below the capital city trying to save as many of their own as they can. It doesn’t stop there as the series also bothers to show common people as refugees and even some humans siding with the spiders for their cause against the deities, and this way the conflict doesn’t feel limited to just the important cast.

On execution, however, since a lot of things are happening at the same time, the transition from one thing to another doesn’t feel very organic, especially compared with the previous installment, and it becomes questionable if some things were properly introduced or anticipated in the previous season, or even during this one, with the answers to that being mostly negative.

As for the characterization, well, Touko becomes more involved with the conflict, Akira reluctantly and slowly accepts what she has to do and Koushi has his own Oppenheimer moment after he realizes the effects of what he has done ever since the first season and what it led to. But just as it happens with the aforementioned elements, the character focus might feel, ironically, unfocused, because of how jumpy the plot became, with scenes dedicated to them coming off as short or too apart from each other through the series, before moving to something else completely different. As for the rest of the cast, some old faces reappear in very awkward ways, literally to say hello before disappearing from the show once again after a short scene, or to tell the others about their backdrops and motivations all along in equally awkward ways.

As for the resolution, it was ok I guess but it also felt quite easygoing and done after a lot of infodump and lacking in impact, the world goes back to how it was and all the enemy parties reach an easy agreement after so many years at war, leaving you with a “ah, that’s it” kind of feel at the end.

As a whole, the whole series is kind of interesting to follow for feeling like an anime from another era and the people making it, but in terms of execution it’s not really something I consider worth watching nor would openly recommend outside of people wanting something kind of different.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 27, 2024

JoexySun

Not Recommended

Funny

Short review: Sustaining a narrative made up of 20 episodes split into 2 seasons across 1 full year cannot be easy, can it? Don't get fooled by this awful show which is an absolute insult to the big names attached to it.

Expectations before watching: script and series composition by Mamoru Oshii who made Ghost in the Shell 1995, directed by his Production I.G. colleague Junji Nishimura; theme song by Maaya Sakamoto. With such a dream team, what can go wrong?

Reality after watching: WTF did I watch?

Recommended to: No one but those with a morbid curiosity to see how bad it actually is.


Pros: ...
+ Maaya Sakamoto's song is not bad.
+ Premise from season 1 was intriguing at least for me to want to know how the story ends.

Cons:

--- Probably the laziest anime production ever, and yes I have watched Ex Arm. With Ex Arm, you have a team with nearly zero experience in making anime struggling to make an action series. Terrible compositions aside, you can actually make out some decent mo-cap fights at least in Ex Arm. With Hikari no Ou, you can't use the same excuse like Ex Arm because your project is spearheaded by industry legends. Yet barely any action sequences here in Hikari no Ou pass as "motion picture". Characters move in twisted proportions and tumble around the screen in random directions as if the team was going for a homage to Chargeman Ken. The suspenseful mystery in Season 1 at least sustained the narrative for me, but every new episode in Season 2 takes away a tiny chunk of hope and respect from me.

--- The story is a terrible ripoff of Shinsekai Yori (From the New World). While Shisekai Yori also had one poorly produced semi-coherent episode among its 25 episodes, imagine someone taking that one bad episode as the gold standard for their whole series. That is Hikari no Ou in its essence. The premise of Hikari no Ou is just a clone of Shinsekai Yori with its insidiously hazardous post-apocalyptic future and remnants of humanity surviving on the edge and at the mercy of the "god race". Yet the story of Hikari no Ou is ultimately a huge letdown, with all the incoherent jargons and poorly written mythology all stewed together in abandonment towards the end of the story. The grand finale is also one of the most inconsequential I have ever seen. I was going to give the whole series a 3 or 4/10 before getting to the end, but the ending made it even worse.

Like I mentioned, this show is an absolute disgrace and insult to the big names attached to it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Hikari no Ou 2nd Season Episode 10 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 17, 2024	28 replies	by WolfWood37 »» Aug 10, 2024 12:22 AM
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