Poor Medaka Box. Its second season had the worst timing imaginable. Here’s the thing: for the past few years, me and Shounen Jump Adaptations didn’t have the best relationship. Sure, there was the occasional gem with Level E, but most series got on my nerves like no other by taking so many ages to actually get somewhere. There are so many of these adaptation that are paced out too long in order to keep the story going in their constant fear of getting cancelled. The first season of Medaka Box actually took advantage of that by actually doing something interesting within the first 13 episodes. It didn’t take ages to change and move somewhere. There was variety.
And then the past autumn season happened. And the juggernauts of Hunter x Hunter and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure came and challenged just about every boundary of the shounen genre, showing among the best of what Shounen Jump has to offer. And Medaka Box tried to air is second season alongside those two. Yeah, it paled in comparison, unfortunately.
The first season of Medaka Box was a generic school series that at a certain point goes over 9000. The second season is different, though: it consists out of a collection of fights between people with all sorts of powers. You can see that a lot of thought was put into these powers, how they work and how they can be beaten. It goes further than most shounen fighting series do, and you can see that the series has quite a bit of fun in analyzing all of these powers along with their stories. And that’s about all this series does.
The problem with this series, like most other nisiOisin’s works, is that the balance is lost. The problem is that this series spends so much time and focus at talking and explaining how all these powers work, that it forgets to put focus on the rest. This show aims to break some traditions of the shounen jump genre with how elaborate these powers, but at the same time it also falls in the same pitfalls by having way too many characters pointlessly talking and analyzing the fight.
And the fights themselves… it’s not like they are of the kind that remain interesting for 12 episodes. The first season had novelty: the characters did other things than just fighting. Here, they don’t and it becomes obvious that Gainax didn’t put their top people on this series: for their standards, the animation is rather bland, and feels too much like they directly copied and pasted manga panels and moved a few things here and there, that ends up looking a bit bland.
Then here is another thing: the characters of this series have their wrong priorities.I mean, this series understands that characters need to have back-stories, and those stories are indeed often insightful and all. The show is not good at all at fleshing out its characters, though: most characters jus have one or two sides to them. They’re not fun to watch because all of them are defined by their powers and backstories, instead of their actions, if that makes any sense.
I am indeed a tsundere for nisiOisin: up till now despite my annoyances of him, I have watched every adaptation of his that came out so far, because I do think that he is a talented writer. The tsun in me though is starting to win terrain because of how unbalanced all of his stories are. I really care about the big picture how all the small pieces are used together. I’m missing that a lot with his series due to the obsessive focus he puts on his dialogue and Medaka Box is the same: it had some very interesting ideas. But did I enjoy myself for the most part with this series? Well, only the final two episodes really ended up catching my attention to be honest, but they did not succeed in making up for the rest of the episodes, especially because this season was supposed to be the part where the story really started, and to be honest I prefer the variety of the first season over the second.
| Storytelling: |
7.5/10 – Lots of dialogue that is well-written, but also gets in the way of the rest of the show. |
| Characters: |
7/10 – They’re not interesting, they have backgrounds, but aren’t fleshed out enough. |
| Production-Values: |
8/10 – Gainax does a decent job. Nothing outstanding, but nothing bad either. |
| Setting: |
8/10 – Lots of interesting ideas being explored. Not interesting enough to really lift the series to a higher level, though. |
Suggestions:
– Law of Ueki << This show is pretty much Medaka Box if it did focus on actually being fun. Yes, this my favorite comedy ever. That's a big difference there...
- Hunter X Hunter
– Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
