ONE PUNCH MAN II (2019)

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i'm not gonna be that harsh on jc staff. make no mistake, one punch man's second season is atrociously ugly, sloppily paced, and has zero sense of artistic direction. but i also think it's legitimately the best this romance angled studio could have done. it's a case of "wow, they really, really shouldn't have been assigned this job". it's a case of "wow, the powers that be should've REALLY waited on madhouse to be ready". but what's happened has happened: the art is abysmal, shaded like an overly glossy urban streetcar straight from the chop shop. the music and sound is fine, and the characters are there, but the animation that ties them all together is a best effort put forth that's still, comparatively, worthless. even if i didn't consider the first season of one punch to be completely perfect, the highs of season two never breach the lows of season 1. but the biggest reason for this failure is, in fact, not related to jc staff at all: it's the manga. i'm dead serious, i think the manga's a piece of shit by this point in the story and there's nothing neither jc nor even madhouse could've down aside from dressing it all up in pretty animation. the truth is that the webcomic has been superseded by an impressive effort on part of murata and the anime adaptation, but that ends right here after episode one. from that point on, the manga spirals out of control forcibly delaying itself, focusing on the WRONG things (ie fights between two characters that aren't interesting in the slightest and dragged out for zero reason) and buying artificial time for one. the webcomic, meanwhile, expertly maneuvers the story of garou and paces it well to completion with a brilliant finale--something the manga will never do, and something the anime will never do. that's how it is.