What They Say:
After the world was infected by a mysterious virus, a pair of orphans named Mikael and Yuichiro find themselves being enslaved by vampires. One day they try to escape alongside the other orphans and all end up being slaughtered by vampires leaving only Yuichiro to escape. Upon reaching the outside world, he joins a group dedicated to defeating the vampires and swears to one day have his revenge.
The Review:
Content (warning as some portions of this review may contain spoilers):
So after a season off, Seraph of the End has finally returned. The show was never particularly good as far as actual writing was concerned, but it’s bombastic sense of ridiculousness and cool visuals in the beginning were enough to at least keep it consistently entertaining. Unfortunately despite the long wait, the show doesn’t exactly return with guns blazing. Instead what we get here is mostly politics which is never really interesting in any show, but there’s just enough interesting stuff to keep this season premiere above water.
We jump back from where things started off last season quite literally as Shinoa gets locked into a brief duel against Guren concerning Yu’s fate. There’s not a whole lot to it though as the major takeaways are Shinoa’s now willing to do what it takes to protect Yu and something about Guen maybe being possessed by his Cursed Gear since the soul of Shinoa’s sister resides in it. After that strange opener and a kinda cute little scene between Shinoa and Yu concerning his recovery we come to the actual conflict of the episode. Yu’s been summoned by the Hiragi family for a meeting and he’s given various warnings concerning how he should deal with them since they’ll try to use him for their own ends. Of course Guren’s the one who really wants to make use of him and makes that explicitly clear so he can steer Yu clear of any temptation.
So if that sounds relatively dull so far, it might surprise you that the actual meeting is the most action heavy part of the entire episode. The Hiragis decide to test Yu’s “loyalty” through a quick series of duels involving a random vampire attack and the glorious return of the tiger shooting gun but none of them are quite enough to convince them Yu’s not a traitor (though how any of that was supposed to be convincing of loyalty is anyone’s guess). Instead they reveal the others have been held hostage and will be tortured until Yu gives them the information they want. Though since we already know Yu doesn’t know much of anything this results in some convenient exposition regarding the truth of the orphanage where Yu grew up.
Unsurprisingly it turns out to have been an facility for experimentation (just one more trope onto the pile) and Guren’s rescue of Yu as a child was directly related to this since Guren wanted to use him for his own ends. Interestingly though, when Yu confronts him on this personally afterwards, he’s not particularly upset about the fact since Guren saved him regardless of the circumstances which is a somewhat nice step up in maturity from how Yu was last season. Still, it does come off as a little weird to have him being so enthusiastic about the fact, but I guess it ties into the whole familial trust thing, even if the show hasn’t done the best job of selling that bit.
Ultimately Seraph’s return isn’t as wild as I’d hoped but at least we seem to have gotten the majority of the slow parts out of the way and the production seems to be back on track compared to how messy the animation got towards the end of the last season. We don’t see too much of out other protagonist Mika this week, but he’s still battling the urge to drink human blood despite claiming he’d accept his monsterdom earlier so maybe that’s for the best. Next week looks to involve training so it seems like it’ll be a while before we get to anything explosive on the action front but for now the show’s still decent entertainment so as far as that goes it should keep me satisfied.
In Summary:
Seraph’s second season opens up with a surprisingly slow episode centered around the various background politics. Since politics in any show is never any fun, this means that the show hasn’t returned to form just yet but there’s still a few glimmers of silly entertainment to keep things from dragging too much. Not sure if I’d say I’m excited for Seraph to be back but I’m looking forward to having a good time with it again
Grade: B
Streamed By: Funimation, Hulu
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