Anime 55692 Feng Ling Yu Xiu 2nd Season Suggestion

After an amazing season 1, I was at first excited to see this, but was very disappointed. Then I forced myself to watch it, hoping it would get good again, but without much luck. To understand my disappointment, I should review what made the first season so great. We had two interesting and pretty characters thrown into the action, with lots of beautiful martial arts choreography. You had masters fending off dozens of attackers in crowded restaurants in Hong Kong action flick style mayhem. And Feng Ling'er and Bai Yuxiu were super cute together. Well, S2 pretty much throws away all of that.

The main problem ... is that Feng Ling'er and Bai Yuxiu are basically background characters in this season. Until a bit near the end, they simply don't participate in any of the action or story at all. It's really strange; can we even call them main characters here? All of the fighting is done between undeveloped side characters who we don't care about. Most of it is one on one and in a flashback or something. And the worst part is that Feng Linger and Bai Yuxiu spend most of the season apart from each other.

And the power creep is terrible. Somehow everyone is a grandmaster now, and there are supposedly higher ranks, I guess to raise the stakes and reduce Feng Linger and Bai Yuxiu's significance. The fighting doesn't look like martial arts anymore, since everyone is just flying around and shooting qi instead of using real technique. Exposition is used explain attacks rather than simply showing.

The story is mostly an extended training arc, only ending when thing start to get interesting. Rather than having an interesting build up, climax, and resolution, we get a boring start where nothing really happens, and then ending with a build up (which should have happened at the beginning). I actually found episode 12 kind of interesting, but not as a conclusion. There is a lot of dry exposition to try to build the world, but it isn't very effective.

At least the character art is still good.