chicken crockpot recipes: Anime Review: Valvrave The Liberator Season 2

Ah, this anime…I am glad that it’s over. I’ve put waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much emphasis on this show ever since I started blogging and making videos concerning media. Seriously. Now, as a more experienced reviewer, I can safely say that this anime is not as bad as I made it out to be in my review of the first season; I’m sure mecha fans will enjoy it. But for anime watchers that don’t watch the genre often, it’s not the crowning achievement of the genre, or of anime in general. Valvrave the Liberator is an anime that you watch when you have too much time on your hands, but even then I could recommend better anime if you just want to kill time. So, how does Valvrave hold up in the end, after voicing my opinion on it through a review of the first season and reactions posts and videos of the second season? Sit back, relax, and read on as I review the second season of Valvrave the Liberator.

The Setup:

I can’t give too much away about the setup for the second season because this is, after all, a sequel. All I’m going to say is that it continues off from the first season, but it also finally starts to explain some of the plot points that were barely glossed over from the first season, raising my hopes that this season will be better. Well, it was, but not by much.

The setup is practically the same as the first season

The Characters:

Boy oh boy, the characters. Spoiler alert: a lot of them die. I mean, it gets to the point where at least one character dies per episode. It was almost as if the creators saw how popular Attack on Titan was and the fact that the show had a lot of characters dying and thought, “Hey, let’s kill off the vast majority of our characters, because that’s exactly what Attack on Titan did!” The main problem with that, however, is the fact that it got to the point of the show having so many character deaths that it reached ridiculousness. In Attack on Titan, the deaths both matched the tone of the series and had a lasting effect because the tone was dark, and you expected people to die. In Valvrave, you have people dying next to giant sparkling robots. Yeah, it’s that silly. The worst part is that the characters, for the most part, remained the same as they were in the first season, the three exceptions being Akira, L-Elf and Haruto. Akira is my favorite character within the show, mainly because her backstory was really relatable and she was the only character that I was able to make a connection with. L-Elf and Haruto’s relationship also kept the story interesting, even if their personalities remained generic. It was interesting to see their conflicting opinions, and seeing L-Elf break down after the death of a loved one added some needed characterization. Overall, though, the cast remained uninteresting and not that memorable.

Akira was the only character that really stood out to me

The Story:

I think that the main problem with the story of Valvrave is almost the exact same as the biggest problem I had with Sword Art Online’s story: conflicting tones. As I stated before, people die alongside robots who are fighting with huge, sparkly robots. There was also this scene in one of the episodes where the series decides to take one of the darkest turns I have seen in an anime, but it didn’t match the tone at all, and its cruelty shocked me. I’m sorry, I didn’t know that I was watching either Code Geass, Madoka Magica, or Fate/Zero, I thought I was watching a show about fighting robots. The main point that I’m trying to get across is that you can’t have dark and mature content without some sort of buildup or having it match the tone! If you don’t follow this, then it just comes off as edgy and unconvincing. As for the story itself, it just continues off of the end of the first season. I would like to give props to it, however, for not making me wishing something important was going to happen or some question to be answered, because pretty much all the questions I originally had were answered in the second season.

People die in the same anime that features imagery like this

The Animation/Sound:

You could pretty much copy-and-paste what I said about the animation and sound towards this anime that I said in the first season. Nothing has really changed; the animation is solid, the CGI used for the robots is well-incorporated, the OST fits. There is one thing I would like to bring up, however; why did you change the opening?!Seriously, why?!
The second opening is done by the same artists, but WHY WAS IT CHANGED?!

Final Judgment:

I know that this review is a lot shorter and not as in-depth as my normal reviews, but to be perfectly honest, I can’t really talk about the second season without veering into spoilers. I can’t even recommend this show without saying that you have to watch the first season beforehand. So, to conclude, I give Valvrave the Liberator Season 2 a 2.5 out of 5, and overall I give the entire series a 2.25 out of 5, and a final recommendation to only watch it if you have too much spare time. It’s not that amazing in my opinion, and there are much better mech series than this one. Like always, however, it is up to you to decide. I also will not be including further recommendations in this review, because the same recommendations I made concerning the first season still apply.
The same scorecard also applies.