Congratulations OPM, you found a new way to disappoint me. This time, OPM actually straight up cut content from the manga to try and fit it all conveniently into a single episode. All the while, gloriously screwing it up. Lets jump in, I promise this will be fast.
Starting off I would like to say, thank you Kenichiro Aoki for making this watchable. This man is responsible for every reasonable looking cut in the season. From Tank Top Master vs Garou to part of this week’s Seiryu vs Saitama. I don’t know how much work they have given him, nor is it the best I have ever seen. But by god is it the best animated parts of OPM S2. Everything else is just littered with issues. From ridiculous, almost sped up seeming pacing to weightless combat and flash fades, god the flash fades. I don’t know how much more I can say about OPM S2’s production before I start repeating myself. Assuming I am not already repeating myself, which I suspect I am. Suffice to say, if I do repeat myself I apologize. These posts have mostly become venting about the death of a series for me.
Some of you many want specifics this week though, so let me give you some. Starting with the Atomic Samurai scene, so much was wrong here. So much dialogue and scenes leading up to this, only for it to be a poorly lit mess. With half the screen covered in darkness, making most of it impossible to see. Even the single cut was done terribly, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Somehow a single panel can do more than an entire animation team. Were this but a single instance, I might be able to ignore it, but OPM somehow managed to once again screw up a sequence of scenes already made for them. Burning through the entirety of the S-Class heroes, cutting maybe an entire chapters worth of content across the whole episode. I just don’t get it.
The other half of the episode was the Seiryu fight which was… serviceable, as a whole? With only Aoki’s cuts being anything resembling what I would call good. The rest consisted of floaty animation and terrible flash fades. However that isn’t even the worst part of this segment. No, that dubious honor goes to the VA’s, who just sound so done with everything. Saitama in the first season was deadpan yes, but it was more… expressive? There were different levels of deadpan for each scene. Sometimes coming off as excited, angry, or just plain exasperated. Now though, it’s all the same voice. Like he knows what this series has become and is just cashing in a paycheck. It’s upsetting to say the least, and reminds me of the recent decline of Game of Thrones, another series pushed forward by a paycheck at the end.
To sum it all up, I detest what this series has become. I would drop this series right now were I not writing for it here, and didn’t have a slight morbid curiosity on how it will end. Every aspect of this production have become such a mess, I am legitimately curious how it came to be. You would think that even for a cash grab, a minimal level of effort would be put into it. Instead it seems like there is only one person on the whole production staff with any sort of passion for the project. For those few who are still watching this, I am sorry. For those few who live vicariously through me, know I suffer so you don’t have to. Read the manga, don’t watch the show. It’s a waste of your time.
I share your bafflement at how a studio could invest so little in a property like this. I mean, the first season of any show should be the real gamble, right? When you know you have a beloved hit, ie. season 2 after huge success with season 1, how can you not at the very least try to replicate that success by following the same game plan? It’s all so confusing–literally, in episodes like this. (Guy starts eating the medusa monster but then we need an antidote but then she’s dead and what just happened okay let’s cut to blurry kicking from a character we barely know and aren’t invested in at all but now it’s time to see how Saitama really loves being a hero and nope there’s a monster king and have we all forgotten about Genos’ sideplot but it’s fine because he has shiny arms now.)
The amount of cut content in this episode was staggering. All of those make more sense when not cut and moved around, but here its just a mess.
Re: that final paragraph, I’ll pick this up for the last five episodes if you want to stop covering it. I’m not a fan of this season, either, but at least I haven’t read the manga, so I’m not familiar with a superior version of the story.
I appreciate it, but I will see this through. I need to finish it to reem this season on the final review.
Wow, just how the hell did that first image get into the finished product?
It looks like bad fanart.
The reason why the animation, pacing, voice acting, and overall production are so low quality is not because of the studio.. but because of the production committee. They own the rights to One Punch Man, and wanted a sequel season early 2019 lest OPM lose the casual fans from a 4 year wait, like Attack on Titan Season 2 (which was far better productionwise than OPM S2, but had little impact). Which is the original director, Shingo Natsume, didn’t make it, he was already working on Boogiepop for January 2019. So the production committee got JC Staff to make Season 2.
That said, JC Staff was simply contracted to make the anime. They didn’t start working on it til fall last year, so only had 6 months pre-airing production (since the manga wasn’t far enough til after Volume 17 was released August 2018). The animators, even with this low quality product, likely have been overworking just to make it not complete garbage (Aoki is only one talented enough to keep up with the heavy work load). If there’s anyone to blame, it’s not the animators, but the production committee for giving them such a short time frame to make Season 2. If they had, say 9 months (50% more time), I have no doubt this anime would be much, much better produced. But they didn’t have that long, so this is what they could do.
So, I understand the Production Committee are the ones who decide when an anime gets made and by who. Yes, that jumped the gun.
However, the final product is still being made by JC Staff and there is a minimal level of effort I would expect. Everyone knew from the start it wouldn’t be the same as Season 1, and accepted that. I thought OPM S2 was doing pretty well back in Episode 3, so it wasn’t like JC Staff couldn’t do it. If they couldn’t do it in the timeframe given, well, maybe they should have turned down the contract?
Do I give JC Staff a lot of crap? Yes, but they are also the only ones I have a name for. Give me the names of the Production Committee that made this decision and I will rail on them to. I just don’t know them.
All that said, lets be real, JC Staff is hardly an animation powerhouse. OPM isn’t the only series to suffer from animation downgrades under them. There is also Food Wars and Danmachi from what I understand. Plus the loads I don’t watch, because I am not a fan of JC Staff productions as a whole. I simply don’t find them or their works to be that good, with the possible exception of Bakuman.
Lastly, I want to be clear, I am not trying to blame the individual animators, though I suppose it is unfair that I praise Aoki individually at the same time. At the end of the day for me, JC Staff are the ones who are going to have OPM 2 on their record. I don’t believe it unfair to hold them accountable for it.
I appreciate the comment and the looking for the little guy (animators). I am glad that your looking to inform me on this. However, in this case, I am well aware of the production conditions of the show and at the end of the day, JC Staff made this bed. They need to lay in it.
I’d recommend dropping it before it causes you even further insanity.