Second season of One-Punch Man
Genre(s): Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Age-Appropriateness: 15+ (Violence, suggestive themes, profanity)
Platforms: Hulu
Episodes: 12
TheAwersome Rating: 7.8 / 10 (Has great moments, scattered at others)
Premise: Saitama has returned to his unremarkable everyday life in Z-City. However, unbeknownst to him, the number of monsters appearing is still continuously on the rise, putting a strain on the Hero Association’s resources. On top of this, a mysterious man calling himself Garou makes his appearance. Claiming to be a monster, the mysterious Garou embarks on a vengeful quest against the Hero Association, crushing every hero he encounters. Intrigued by this puzzling new foe and with an insatiable thirst for a challenge and money, Saitama decides to seize the opportunity and joins the renowned martial arts competition with the hopes of encountering Garou.
As the tournament commences and Garou continues his rampage, a new great menace reveals itself, threatening the entire human world. Could this finally be the catastrophe predicted by the great seer Madame Shibabawa?
TheAwersome’s Thoughts: It’s no secret in the anime community that this second season was made by a different animation studio than the first. Having been over three years since I watched the first season, I didn’t really notice much in the ways of an animation quality decrease (not saying there isn’t one). What I did notice was that this season had three primary arcs running simultaneously and it really should have reduced it to only two. I never felt that I could adequately invest in any of the arcs because I was constantly fretting about the other two. Whenever we’re following Garou I’m wondering about the monster surge, and vice versa. It still has a lot of great comedic moments, and many of the fights are excellently animated. Not as many emotional moments as first season though.
TLDR: Feels a bit crammed, but still good.
No official word on a Season 3 yet.
I do have to say that my primary disappointment with this season was its non-resolution. It didn’t end on a cliffhanger, per se, it just ended in the middle of the primary arcs. It’s the difference of teasing with a definite reason and desire to await the return of the series, versus someone just hitting pause in the middle and saying, “That’s enough for today.”
While I have been doing some ragging on this season, I did enjoy it a lot, it just falls short of its predecessor in a number of aspects.
You’ll likely enjoy this if you enjoyed:
- The first season of One-Punch Man
- Interesting Villain/Anti-heros such as in Overlord, Dorohedoro, and Tanya
- Ridiculously larger than life fights such as in Toriko
At a Glance Anime 
I’m surprised you ranked it highly, especially considering how few interesting moments this series is as opposed to the previous, and how high the bar was set for that. For me, I couldn’t get past that Saitama’s tournament arc was so dragged on (and spread out over several episodes), the lack of deep character building as well as the lack of brilliant fights as in the former.
LikeLike