MF Ghost Season 2 · review
MF Ghost Season 2 is still a good watch and has very exciting races. Please read all the sections to understand why I think it's worth watching. Story structure: Now usually this wouldn't even be important because this is a racing anime and you wanna watch cars race, that's it. But MF Ghost has established a very formulaic story structure which I wanna inform everyone of. This is supposed to be a race between 15 drivers. Yet there will only ever be focus on 5 drivers max, the main character being one of them. This severely limits the type of races you see. The author hasquite a bias towards Japanese cars (wow who would have thought), so many competitors in non Japanese cars are just straight up trash. It's a pretty harsh way of saying it but that's the truth. There's an Audi, a BMW, a Mercedes, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, a Lotus, and 3 whole Porsches. Yet 90% of these guys end up in low rankings. Like there's legit one good Porsche driver whom the Ferrari guy will never be able to catch up to and that's it. Every other car on that list is merely a stepping stone for our main character to show how good he is. "Look at the superior driving technique" "Look at that high speed cornering" "Look at how daredevil he is". We have seen this for 6 seasons in Initial D already and they are sticking to this same thing with the new character as well.
The only redeeming thing is that they are introducing some characters who actually have skills to keep up and challenge the main character. And those characters actually have good enough driving skills that they can compete with each other (without involvement of the main character) and it actually is what makes for a super fun race. This is why I say that this race is basically just between 5 drivers. 15 is just to pad the numbers. Many are just there to be overtaken.
Music:
Eurobeat is Eurobeat. They got good music as usual and my Playlist just gets bigger.
Animation:
Seen a lot of people here complaining about unrealistic animation. For the most part the animations were perfectly fine. In fact I think they did an amazing job illustrating the cars during races, especially with so many close up shots. The cars still looks like amazing depictions of modern hyper cars and honestly it almost feels like watching the real things. Some movements for a couple of seconds can be janky that's it. The sounds are also spot on. You can tell if a Ferrari is on the scene or if it's a BMW based on the engine sound alone which shows their consistent dedication.
Character designs: I'm not a fan tbh. Idk who these designs appeal to but not to me for sure.
Fanservice:
The racing cheerleaders still exist and they're still sexualised underaged or barely of age girls. They kinda toned it down a bit but I would rather they never mentioned it ever again.
Overall experience:
I think season 2 is still worth watching. If you watched season 1 you are invested already and the races are still pretty high quality. They showcase the differences in cars that are in focus and comment a lot on driving techniques. Even though many times it's just how good the main character is, there are definitely real driving techniques being showcased which are pretty fun to watch. (7.8/10) Would recommend watching.