English Dub Season Review: Overlord Season Two

Overlord marches on holding its own, but its not the savior of anime we’d like it to be.

Well, another season of Overlord has come and gone, leaving me to look over the season and pass judgment on this curious anime. To those of you that read my reviews on a regular basis, you’ll know that I generally have pretty high marks for this series, and have had a good time watching it so far. But, as a season, does this new edition of Overlord hold up without the sheen of novelty to keep it interesting?

Similar to its first season, Overlord 2, as it’s been dubbed, functions as a political drama set in a fantasy world, focusing on interactions between the members of Ainz Ooal Gown and Momonga’s machinations to take over the strange world he finds himself trapped in. Because of the show’s solid writing and dialogue, this creates episodes that feel curious and rich, leaving me waiting with baited breath to see what comes next. Furthermore, characters feel real and alive, with solid vocal performances working very much in the story’s favor.

It’s par for the course for Overlord, but this actually serves as something as a problem. Overlord is consistent, yes, but it is basically the same as the first season, with some minor additions. This means that things can get a bit stale, especially in some of the middle episodes of the season. This also has the side effect of making the season itself feel somewhat inconsequential. While the episodes themselves are good, the season never really comes together in a big way story wise. I felt like I was waiting for a big reveal, for some major shift in the plot to turn things on its head, but everything goes basically as you might expect, which makes things feel, dare I say, boring. And you never want your anime to be boring.

On a technical/artistic level. Overlord is passable but suffers from some glaring animation problems in some of its episodes. Namely, the use of some pretty atrocious-looking CGI. Nothing takes me out of a fight scene more than the sight of a bunch of wacky-ass looking skeletons, all copy paste CGI clones of each other marching in unison. In a word, its ugly, and this comes in a series that already doesn’t exactly scream “artistic integrity.”

But look, I can’t say that the show is bad, because it isn’t. Especially when compared with some of the garbage-water that gets peddled from season to season these days, Overlord 2 is a solid experience from start to finish, one that has earned another upcoming season. I enjoyed it, I liked its characters, and I can recall some genuinely good moments that kept me going along. Yet, there is something lacking here. What it is, I’m not really sure; maybe Overlord functions better as a novel than an anime, maybe there are too many characters to spend enough quality time with, there are quite a few ways one could improve this show. With everything said and done, it just falls into the category of “Not bad.” Perhaps its third season will bring something a little more fresh to the table.