Review of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 2 - Episode 0 "Guardian Fitz"

I hope they learn from this and avoid rush outsourcing any more episodes of Mushoku Tensei ever again, it's not worth it. I watched this without knowing it was from a different production company and I was quite upset about the prospect of the entire season being like this. If this was what MT became then I wonder how long I'd keep watching. It didn't take 10 seconds for me to realize something was up with the animation quality and the entire episode I was noticing more and more rough edges. Rough lines, muted color pallete, shoddy movement, tons of closeups or still shots, lackof character detail - and that's just talking about the stuff that was animated. Beyond that they resorted to numerous CG background characters that stuck out like a sore thumb. They had several shots where you could easily spot that they reused the same generic character model multiple times in close proximity to each other. It was like an old video game where you see the same character model in the crowd every 3 seats. That kind of shoddy laziness or crunched corner cutting doesn't belong in Mushoku Tensei.

They didn't even try to make the magic look cool at all. One of the most remarkable things about the first season was how spectacular and memorable it made the magic and even sword skills look which gave a sense of amazement, depth, and realness to the world. Here we got a generic CG blue ball for a water spell and some wispy white lines for wind spells.

All that isn't even getting to the direction and pacing which almost seemed as questionable at times. I knew the story from the light novels but this episode seems like too many things shoved together and not well. The development within a scene felt weird and it seemed to jerkily go from one thing to another without properly setting things up or transitioning.

Mushoku Tensei is supposed to be special among the isekai, but when they cut corners and lower themselves to the level of their cheap imitators, it's a disappointing, embarrassing waste of source material. I thought they made Studio Bind because they wanted to do Mushoku Tensei justice, outsourcing the animation to a random studio to complete on a crunched schedule isn't doing that. I sincerely hope the rest of season 2 is a return to form and will be anxiously awaiting future episodes to see.