Princess Connect! Re:Dive - Season 2

Princess Connect! Re:Dive has not stopped being entertaining and pleasantly surprising for a second season. It is a mystery how the anime’s creators managed to make a fun promo for their role-playing video game while investing so much into it that the quality is evident in almost every frame. Therefore, the anime series stands up as an above-average show. I do not get how they managed to come up with a story that would work for both players of the original Cygames video games and someone completely unfamiliar with the Princess Connect! franchise (because the Re:Dive anime series is not the actual beginning of the story). So even I have no problem getting my head around the plot, and I get most of the more complex plot twists, which explain for example why Re:Dive is in the title. Plus, all the lore in the story is so cleverly delivered (through dialogue, small details, and hints) that it gives the viewer room to just figure most of it out on their own, connect the dots, and build a strong and interesting atmosphere at the same time. The emotional aspect and the characters (and there are many) work together with the excellent soundtrack and animation. They make for a powerful experience so I thoroughly enjoyed every episode. Of course, there were also some slightly weaker parts, as the first half of the anime series could basically just be described as a fun video game promo. There is a new interesting story in almost every episode. Plus, three or four new characters were introduced as well, as they needed to be shown as part of the gacha game presentation (it introduces new characters that either were did not appear in the first season or were added to the game between the first and second season). But even so, it was well thought out and connected to the main plotline, which came into full swing in the second half of the anime series. In the end, each of the characters (even from the first season) got at least a little bit of screen time during the conclusion without it looking silly. The aforementioned second half was an amazing ride - in terms of its pace and character emotional responses but mostly the incredibly good fight scenes especially in the one between Mana and Labyrista which was terribly original, with greatly implemented CGI. That was one of the best purely magical fight scenes (i.e., practically non-contact) I have seen in anime so far. It was just that even when fighting, you could see how much effort the anime’s creators put into it, and so they had atmosphere, intensity, and were sometimes insanely colorful. To summarize, Princess Connect! Re:Dive got me again. At first it made my Mondays better, and then made me hungry for new episodes, and again deserves at least 8/10, and I wonder if there is going to be a third season sometime in the future because I would be very happy about that. (28.03.2022)