Impression
In all honesty, I had a bit of a gripe with the first season of this show. Unlike how it is with Little Busters! ~Refrain~, I have a pretty good knowledge of the source material and thus was appalled by how they handled the adaptation. With a second season announced so soon after the first ended, was there a need to construct this elaborate anime-original ending with a war and have Alibaba involved with the dark metal vessels? I really hope that’s not going to happen this time with the Magnostadt arc, especially as the manga’s just recently wrapped that up.
With that in mind, I must question the odd decision made by A-1 Pictures in handling the opening scene as they did. Maybe it was to create a lasting first impression, but… really? Did they have any idea how much spoiler content was in that first scene? We haven’t actually seen many normal magicians apart from Yamraiha in the series (usually the ones with power are the metal vessel users) so it was pretty weird to see loads of magicians along with a couple Fanalis in a wasteland that’s clearly the product of a massive conflict. It was cool seeing the three Ugo giants destroy a mountain range, but…I don’t know, it seemed unnecessary.
It seems like Sindria’s standard response whenever something good happens is to hold a massive feast and party the entire night – it’s not surprising that all the residents love Sinbad as a king. Unfortunately, Sinbad’s slowly revealing a darker side of himself, in line with how he’s already halfway fallen into depravity. He made the mistake of addressing Aladdin as “Sindria’s Magi”, as if he’s already allied himself with Sinbad – Aladdin was smart enough to not get caught in that trap. Then we have poor Kougyoku, who’s clearly been blinded by love. It’s quite evident that Sinbad’s plotting something, and he recognizes that Kougyoku would be a good asset to have on his side – but that’s all he sees in her. Taking advantage of someone’s love for you to profit in their position and power is a pretty immoral thing to do, you know. All that stuff he spouted while holding her hand was essentially a bunch of lies – the Sinbad x Kougyoku ship has all but capsized. Not only has Sinbad got the Seven Seas Alliance behind him, he’s now got the friendship of a Magi, as well as allies in Kou (Hakuryuu and Kougyoku) and Balbadd (Alibaba). All probably part of something bigger in the grand scheme of things.
There are also premonitions for a new journey! If the OP sequence didn’t already give it away, it looks like Aladdin’s headed off on his own journey, most likely to where trouble is brewing – in Magnostadt. It’s recently experienced a coup d’etat, and now they’re (secretly) producing dark metal vessels for Al-Tharmen, which has all sorts of terrible side effects when you decide to use them. Like death. As a Magi with connections to Solomon, there’s no way Aladdin’s just going to sit around and watch, is he?
As I’m covering three shows on Saturday, I’m unsure of whether I can blog this in the long-run, even though there’ll be some exciting stuff coming up in the next arc. The train crash last season isn’t very encouraging, either – the last thing I want to see is another derailing courtesy of A-1 Pictures. I’ll give this a think and see how things are next week.
Possibility of Blogging: Moderately High
I hope you do blog it. It seems like everyone and then some is blogging kill la kill and monogatari but I can’t find anyone blogging this or hunterxhunter. Definitely not impressed with the “show the end in the beginning” story telling but maybe they figure people who read the manga are going to watch it anyway, so they only really are concerned about keeping the fans from the 1st season who are just checking it out for now. Thus far, at least this hasn’t seemed to have hurt Monogatari as they’re doing this for the Nadeko Medusa arc.
Yeah, if nothing else I’d like to see some fights animated, as well as see characters move about and speak etc. I think some manga readers have actually decided to take the anime as a form of extra fanservice for the purposes of complementing the series xD
Monogatari is mainly driven by character interaction, so it’s strong enough to hold itself up even if plot twists are revealed. It’s pretty unique in its story execution. With a shounen like Magi, where battle scenes and power ups are important, it felt sort of cheap to suddenly show a bunch of factions in the middle of warfare when we haven’t been introduced to them yet, as well revealing that Aladdin has become insanely powerful.