English Dub Season Review: Kengan Ashura Season Two Part One

Based on the Japanese manga series written by Yabako Sandrovich and illustrated by Daromeon. The story picks up immediately after the brutal victory of Ohma Tokita in the first round of the tournament. Despite insisting that he’s fine, Ohma ends up collapsing and hospitalized in a coma but recalls a childhood memory. At the same time this is happening, the show must go on, as the Kengan Life-or-Death Tournament continues with its 2nd round…

On the technical side, the series was produced by Pony Canyon (Afro Samurai and Attack on Titan), animated by Larx Entertainment (Tekken Bloodline), and continues to be  Seiji Kishi and written by Makoto Uezu, with animation by Larx Entertainment. Kazuaki Morita provided character designs for the anime, while Yasuharu Takanashi composed the series’ music for the anime, while Yasuharu Takanashi composed the series’ music. SiM performed the opening theme “Red”, while Band-Maid performed the ending theme “Shambles”.

Kengan Ashura is back with the first part of its second season, and it starts directly from where we left off in Season 1 Part 2. Round 1 of the Kengan Annihilation tournament has just concluded, and round 2 is about to start. With 6 new fights in the first half of Season 2. All these fights were very good, but it isn’t until the 6th episode that we get to know a bit about Tokita’s greatest foe Setsuna Kiryu and his fucked up upbringing and history which explains his connection to Tokita and makes proceedings feel even more personal.

On the subject, during Tokita’s coma, we do get a bit of backstory into the brutal details of his training in his youth which further fleshes out the brutal nature of his style, along with the events that lead up to being the person he is now. Later on, an unraveling subplot involving the corporate business aspect of the tournament begins to rear its ugly head with a series of unexpected backstabbing plot twists and coup d’é·tats that show a morally grey side as Tokita comes to grips with his predicament.

The animation seems fine for the most part except for the flashback scenes which have barely any animation, yet they resemble photo-realistic still images made by A.I. and can feel a bit out of place when half the anime at most utilizes a 2.5D cel-shaded artstyle akin to Batman: Ninja or the aforementioned Tekken series. It’s hard to believe Season One came out in 2019 but like everything else in 2020, it was most likely delayed due to Covid19 rearing its ugly head. And it also didn’t help that Season 2 is acknowledged to Netflix as “Season 3” despite the first season being cut in half which would’ve been simpler if it was appropriately labeled in “parts” like the other shows they did in the past…

Overall, this was a slow burn of a show at first as it took me almost 2 weeks to binge-watch both Season One and the first half of Season 2. At the very least some of the characters are compelling, the behind the scenes dirty dealings between greasy business jerks can sometimes be compelling and it sometimes falls into familiar Shonen Manga tropes such as enemies becoming allies, or Record of Ragnarok’s track record of devoting entire episodes to character backstories that almost take up half the running time. At the very least, I’m satisfied with what I got, it wasn’t the best, but not the worst either. With the recent announcement of Part 2 being released later in 2024, we can only hope there’s a proper ending to this story that ties up all loose ends and culminates in one hell of a battle!