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Listening to: &Z – SawanoHiroyuki[nZk] (Aldnoah.Zero OP 2)

This review is free of major spoilers, in the interests of being helpful to those who are considering watching the show in question.

“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”

You may remember that I reviewed the first season of Aldnoah.Zero some time ago. Despite the many gripes that I had about it, I ended up giving it a fairly favorable rating of 3.4–mostly due to my admiration of the twists and turns at the end of the season. Much to my dismay… well, we’ll get to that later. Spoilers for Season 1 follow!

Season 1 ended in spectacular fashion, ending the otherwise lackluster character development in the most direct way possible: in a hail of bullets. Princess Asseylum was the first to go, getting shot through the chest and then the head. Next was main villain Saazbaum, and my goodness was his death fantastic. After taking a full clip of bullets from Slaine in the torso, he had the gumption to smugly tap the center of his forehead, retaining his aura of calm authority even to the end. Finally, to my everlasting joy, it was Boring Protagonist’s (Inaho’s) turn to be shot, at point blank range, directly through the head. “Perhaps, with him dead, the show will concentrate on the other UFE characters,” I thought to myself. “Since he’s gone, we’ll get a chance to hear more about Marito, Inko, Yuki, and the bridge crew. Right? Right?”

Wrong.

For some logic-defying reason, every single one of the characters shot in the Season 1 finale managed to survive. The only difference is that in Season 2, Inaho has a robot eye that gives him the power of the Mary Sue: instant ability to know everything about his opponents’ weaknesses and exploit them accordingly. By giving him this power, they do a grave disservice to every other UFE character: when they could be doing things for themselves, they’re relegated to either talking about how great Inaho is, or uselessly struggling against the Vers forces until Inaho comes along and solves their problems. I was half tempted to come up with a drinking game to see how many times any of them managed to do something on their own. Unfortunately, that would have left me distressingly sober.

On the other side of things, Slaine continues to make questionable decisions. Despite the questionable decisions, however, I still found him a thousand times more likable than Inaho, mainly because he was capable of expressing emotion. Unfortunately, the characters on his side seem to be suffering from the same syndrome as the ones on the UFE front: they’re incapable of having a conversation with each other unless it’s somehow about Slaine. The show is trying much too hard to make its protagonists likable, in exactly the wrong way: if you want to make a character likable, you make them likable. You don’t have a host of characters shill how likable they are for a minimum of five minutes every episode.

As it was before, the one redeeming quality of the show is the minor characters. Most of the minor characters from the first half of the show are unfortunately out of focus, but the three most prominent minor characters in Season 2–Mazuurek, Lemrina, and Harklight–are all likable characters. Though none of them are terribly complex, they at least have understandable motives that are much more interesting than those of the characters leading the show. What’s more, each one of them is given moments to shine, though these moments become precious few as the show drags on.

Overall, I thought that Aldnoah.Zero was a show that had a lot of potential. I had high hopes for this show: with the initial concept by Gen Urobochi (Fate/Zero, Puella Magi Madoka Magic, Psycho-Pass), music by Hiroyuki Sawano (Attack on Titan, Kill la Kill), and a respectable animation budget, it could have been something great. The end of the first season would have had a lot of promise–if anything at all that had happened during it had stuck. Instead, the show devolved into watching an infallible and completely uninteresting protagonist becoming more and more of a robotic Mary Sue.

CONCLUSION

In order to reach this rating, I miraculously survived being shot point-blank in the face. Despite this, I failed to react at all.

Rating: 1.3 of 5
Ruling: Season 2 of Aldnoah.Zero undoes all of the progress the previous season managed to make, and somehow manages to make the protagonist even less likable. Despite a few redeeming moments, most of its potential is wasted on characters who don’t deserve it.