Oh OPM, you never make it easy. Even in your finale, you can’t just let me love or hate you. You have to show some good animation besides terrible, good sound design beside horrific, good CGI alongside bad. It’s enough to make a man wanna scream. Lucky for you I suppose I get to write a review about you in full this week. If you thought Dororo was scathing, watch this. For now though, OPM S2, lets jump in.
Starting off, the production. This was a wild ride. Everything 2D was sub-par, disappointing even after episode 11’s showing with Garou. Meanwhile the CGI for Centichoro actually looked quite good! There were some moments where it seemed like it wasn’t fully rendered, but hey. This thing almost killed Murata just to draw it. I imagine making a CGI model for it wasn’t much easier, nor was rendering it. So kudo’s on that front at least JC Staff. Specifically, thank you Kenichiro Aoki, for doing your best to save this season. If nothing else, OPM S2 burned your name into my memory, for making a majority of the best scenes of it’s season. Sadly, even your heroic effort cannot save it. Because however good your scenes, almost everything surrounding it was just trash.
Completely skipping over all of the pacing, sound effects and framing issues we normally see, lets just talk ending. I have long feared this would be an issue with this season of OPM. Regardless of who adapted it. That the ending, isn’t an ending at all, but rather a jumping off point. It feels like nothing is resolved, because nothing else. All the plot threads are still hanging, waiting to be completed in an arc Murata is still adapting in the manga. One of the longest, though best, arcs in the original webcomic. This means that any fans left after this season will be waiting a long time for an arc that just started. It would be like ending a Shounen in the first round of a Tournament arc. It just doesn’t work.
So, all in all, how was OPM S2? Well you will have to wait for the full review for that one. But for this episode, disappointing pretty much sums it up. Episode 11 was a better individual episode by every metric. Meanwhile this one just leaves the viewer with a lot of unanswered questions. A fate that was locked in from the moment it was announced as 12 episodes. Assuming the same production as season 1 however, this wouldn’t be a huge issue. OPM is a spectacle show, people come to for the animation and combat, not the story. That’s just a bonus. However, the lackluster animation combined with the poor ending placement mean neither have a distraction. They sort of reinforce each other, like a loop of increasing terrible. Drawing attention to how bad the other is. A terrible shame, for what starts the series best arc.
We may not have agreed on the Dororo ending but, on this I am with you.
ONE’s writing which sets up Garo as a foil (almost a deuteragonist) to Saitama in the narrative, still shined through dissonance between moments of both great and lackluster animation/sound design. Shame that the season ended on what felt like an origin story for Garo, a really interesting one at that.
ONE is crafting a story with important social commentary on individuals let down by Japanese society. Saitama’s presence was aimless this season but perfectly encapsulated the daily existence of the oft underrepresented “lost generation” sect of society, driven to apathy and stagnation. While Garo, driven to what is effectively delinquency in OPM’s world, represents people who react violently and personally to society’s offences against them. The efforts ONE went through to humanize Garo, and by extension all rebels without a cause, did not go amiss despite this season’s missteps.
Hopefully, should the OPM team at JC Staff be sticking around, they’ll have become more comfortable in adapting the story ONE is trying to tell. I’ve got higher hopes for the next batch of episodes (whenever they arrive) than I did going into 2019’s batch.