Why is Season 2 so bad

It's a brutal cliché so it's not surprising to see it elsewhere.

Unless the island part had some significance.

ScarletWeather wrote:

So let's recap the story of the Soryuu family.

In a nutshell, they are living on a small, idyllic island which is closed off from the world. The oldest of a trio of three children has decided to believe in the possibility of escaping that island, despite the fact that he knows they are trapped. When he is offered a chance to break the boundary, he completely opens his heart to the darkness, loudly proclaiming that he is not afraid of it. The darkness consumes him and reduces him to its puppet despite the fact that he acts as if he's still the one in the driver's seat. He then causes untold misery for several worlds.

All hearts begin in darkness. And all so end.

...Seriously I can't be the only one seeing this.

Is that Kingdom Hearts' intro?

Set-up for Riku's arc from Kingdom Hearts, yeah.

Yeah I noticed the hamfisted Kingdom Hearts too. The sad thing is, KH isn't even the first. Not even close. Many many many other JP titles do this. This is like the hero's village burning down by the BBEG in levels of cliche.

Well, the major thing about that is that, while it's cliche as all get out, that is not neccesarily a bad thing. Not everything has to be completely original, a cliche is useful for setting the scene, or at least giving a sense of familiarity with the setting or characters, so you can introduce the more original stuff more easily, without leaving viewers completely lost. Also, cliches are necesary for good storytelling. Even if you don't use them yourself, they have to exist and be established before you can start playing with and subverting them.

What this has to do with Season 2? Welp, it's an example of cliche use gone wrong. Part of the fun of Season 1 was the fact that the writers played with a lot of your expectations for a card game anime, especially with Ren(The Big Bad is a goofy klutz.) and Aichi(Our hero, he's awesome, talented and did he just lose in the 3rd episode? WITHOUT ANGST?), yet they also lived up to them with others such as Kai, the invincible rival who only loses for plot reasons. This is an example of using cliches effectively, so as to highlight subversions, which is one of the major ways to do so. One of the other ways to use cliches is to throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, playing every single cliche to the bone. It isn't really thoughtprovoking but it's memorable and fun, just due to sheer intensity and the over the top characters it tends to produce.(Sound familiar to you?)

This second method is what I believe the writers were going for in season 2, which seems to have ditched most of the fun subversions of the previous season. Needless to say, this was not a very good idea. They didn't have the setup for it, and what setup they DID have, they didn't use very well. A shame, because this last season not only failed to be interesting, it failed at being fun. It has a few memorable moments(GREAT DAIYUSHA) but other than that was just a total flop, because they didn't completely throw away last seasons trappings. Frankly this season might of worked at least somewhat if they had thrown themselves completely into the realm of the absurd, with lots of melodrama and huge, blown out, ridiculously awesome cardfights, which could of saved it, but they failed to actually put enough of them in, do I even need to bring up the simultaneous fight thing?

Although the over the top thing could work if we made Team Caesar the main characters, have them be contracted into the Card Fighters Freedom Force, or CFFF for short, and give them a hilariously awesome boss who shouts stuff like "CROSSRIDE IS APPROVED!!!" and they have awesomely inneffecient decks with unique cards given to them by the crazy short guy on rocket powered roller blades and.... wait, that sounds familiar. Oh well, at least it would be parodying or making an homage or whatever this would be of something good.

Alice wrote:

Yeah I noticed the hamfisted Kingdom Hearts too. The sad thing is, KH isn't even the first. Not even close. Many many many other JP titles do this. This is like the hero's village burning down by the BBEG in levels of cliche.

What's funny is that I honestly think that in this case, this plotline could have worked.

Not season two in general, I mean Leon being the villain and his motivation being the dying Soryuu. If we had to have the Void as a villain, I could have outright accepted the motivation of "my people were going to die out on an island, so I took the Void's offer".

What makes it impossible for me to accept is that the build-up is wrong and the pay-off is weak. We really haven't earned this moment, at all, because at this point in the story nothing has really been building to this moment. We did not have a defined antagonist, we had no reason to empathize with Leon because his appearances up to this point were few and far between (if sometimes enjoyable), and there's not even any real reason to feel tension because all of us know going into this fight exactly what has to happen because of how high the stakes were set from the beginning. That's the problem with this whole scenario- there is nothing to connect to.

Compare to season one, where the fact that the fight between Ren and Aichi contained some terrifically awesome misplays was completely outweighed because of the emotional weight of the situation since we had not only received Ren's story well in advance, we had received Kai's story, and because of the connection between Aichi and Kai (and our investment in Aichi). If the show had been able to build that kind of investment in all the players involved, these episodes would have worked as a clumsy but permissible finale.

But it didn't. So they don't.

Well... that was... a thing.

Yeah this was horrible guys.

Here's how well Season 1 built up to its ending: Ren and Aichi were just two kids who played a card game. And Ren wasn't even evil. Just a dick. Yet we all felt the gravitas of it.

Alice wrote:

Here's how well Season 1 built up to its ending: Ren and Aichi were just two kids who played a card game. And Ren wasn't even evil. Just a dick. Yet we all felt the gravitas of it.

And now derpRen can't even get in a full fight scene :/

DerpRen is best Ren.

(Honestly he is like the one redeeming thing this season.)

And yeah, I swear this season could have been perfect if we had only had something or someone in it to connect to. As it is, as much as I want to see Aichi succeed still it's mostly just inertia from his development in the previous season, and his new conflicts really don't feel quite as dire in comparison to the old ones.

Despite the stakes being planet earth and Cray. Pfft.

I feel like he should lose this fight against Leon. Then Next season, he has to fight to save earth... DUN DUN DUN.



No but seriously, I cant stand his character.

Void using full Nubatama deck! With Nubatama Triggers!

inb4 Final Episode.

(EDITED) Summary of shit:

1. Kai and Aichi lost Character Development.

2. Aichi bullied Kamui into coming back.

3. Premise that Kai and Aichi won with Crap decks up until Nationals.

4. Misaki's shit first half of series.

5. Boring simultanious Triple Battles.

6. Bullshit special rules.

7. Milking previous season's success by giving Ren Psyqualia back.

8. Kyou being a retard.

9. Leon's nonsensical Kingdom Hearts backstory.

10. Chris loses Psyqualia before actually doing anything with it.

11. Crossrides explosion.

12. Kai and Leon's showdown of misplays.

13. Lack of Kai.

14. Misaki switched to Souless OTT.

15. Kyou lost to specific Trigger sack to Leon even though he played a lot better.

16. Last minute Earth in danger plot.

17. Barely any indication of increased skill.

18. Extremely predictable plot-related wins and losses.

19. Lack of Chris and any development he could have gotten.

20. Q4 spending three quarters of the season getting curb stomped at the finals, leading to deck advancement, but little plot advancement.

21. The fact that we're expected to just roll with it.

Missed anything?

I love you.

tl;dr version:

Writers didn't bother to do anything to build on the characters or give them a significant new challenge viewers could relate to. Investment in the series dies.

Here's to hoping that either Linkjoker Arc is good again, or if it isn't that somebody is a fan of Revolutionary Girl Utena and we get nothing but ridiculous acid trips for an entire season.

Lich_Lord_Fortissimo wrote:

9. Leon's nonsensical Kingdom Hearts backstory.

Every light must fade... Every heart return to darkness!

Also
18. The overall theme of the season which has been "I'm an amazing player because I get triggers when I need them." There has been no real increase in skill, just more empowered speeches followed by final turn triggers. If anything everyone has started playing worse, however, everyone acts like they're getting stronger and stronger every time that crit shows up on the final turn. Best example being Aichi's sacktastic comeback against Jun.

19. All the "leader" decks get a crossride except Chris, who gets a bear.

20. The overall predictability of this entire season. Everything can be summed up with:
1. Does anyone care about Aichi's opponent?
No > Aichi wins
Yes > Go to step 2

2. Does the result of this fight matter?
No > Aichi loses
Yes > Aichi wins

>tl;dr-ing a list

Seriously.

No, facetiously.

I can't believe Season 2 ended like this...

Based Mr Invincible getting lines.

Based Diamond Star as best ED.

Everything else made no fucking sense at all. Royal Paladin got fucking NTR'd by Aichi but apparently they're all Golds now so it doesn't matter. I'm still wondering about the whole memory thing. Like does everyone remember his original Royal deck or was the season 1 finale Spectral Duke vs Garmore.

Hoping for Season 3 to be a return to original form with Aichi using a vanilla first vanguard and calling triggers all day.

>Kai regrets not being there for Aichi more
>At the end he just walks away without saying anything or joining in

>Aichi NTRs Royal Paladins
This was the biggest fucking insult of all. I don't even LIKE Royal Paladins and this fired me up.

Bushiroad confirmed for disgusting NTR fetishists. I hope they all contract sexually transmitted diseases.

Last episode:

Aichi HEAL SACKS GEE WHO DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING FROM 1.2 QUINTILLION MILES AWAY!?!

But at least it's finally goddamn over...

I think the purple puff of smoke that is Void gave me Cancer.

This season had a severe lack of Miwa and sub-manager. That's probably what killed it. Hope they fix this next season.

Does Aichi talk about Kai as much in season 2?
...For some reason I feel like rewatching season 1, then watching season 2 just so see if the amount of times Aichi says Kai's name is greater than the amount of cardfights there are through out entire series.