tl;dr: A sequel season that preserves good action and tactics while broadening it’s scope but fails in regards to being overtly rushed and ending at a terrible point. This is a direct sequel to the first season but it is tremendously different. It does manage to keep the exciting action and strategies from the first season, but beyond that it felt like it was going in a completely different direction. Firstly, while the first season was the story of Arslan’s growth in finding his convictions, that isn’t even a theme in this season. Rather, this season things get a lot more complicated and it feels likethe focus has shifted to being about more than just Arslan to being about the entire conflict and everyone involved in it. It’s clear that the protagonist is still Arslan, but this is no longer the story about his growth, or rather anyone’s growth, but rather just the tale of a large conflict and Arslan’s place in it. At the end of the first season, it looked like there were two factions in play essentially, with some infighting. This season, there are at least four distinct factions all vying for power, with various other players possibly having an effect as well. Things get much more complicated really quickly. Still, I would say this is a very welcome change. The core of Arslan’s growth felt like it was over so putting less of a focus on it and more so on other players definitely keeps things interesting. I especially appreciated the larger focus on Hilmes, on whom we get a lot more background and who performs actions beyond him simply being vengeance obsessed.

The first big issue with that though is that all of this is tremendously rushed. The first season was 25 episodes. This season is 8 episodes. Though it’s doing a lot less, it still felt incredibly rushed where things changed too much too fast without properly developing these changes. It also felt strangely badly written at times, with moments such as Arslan randomly charging into an enemy camp alone and no one really objecting to that or the secret villain clearly showing that he’s the villain to the main cast but it being portrayed that this was only picked up on by the tactician due to his intelligence. Also, due to there being a lot more changing in perspectives, it felt like it got weird as the timelines don’t really match up how things were actually shown. The second big issue is that the ending isn’t really satisfying at all. The first season ended with what felt like the end of Arslan’s growth in a sense as well as a major victory, so it felt pretty satisfying. The ending to this season doesn’t feel like its the end of anything really, rather it ends right before a major battle. So while the first season ended at a point that while not the complete ending, it felt like it finished one of the main things it wanted to do and stopped at a point where it felt like an arc break. I should note that this is an anime based on an ongoing manga based on a novel series that began a long time ago that’s based on ancient Persian epic. This anime is most immediately based on the manga, but it differs from it quite a bit, and I think it actually passed it when this came out. So I feel like relying on the manga as the continuation and not caring as much about how the anime ends doesn’t really work as well as it does in most cases, and thus the ending of the anime being such a non-ending I feel has much more of an impact unfortunately. This season felt like it shook things up and left everything uncertain and then just abruptly stopped at a point where it isn’t clear at all what’ll happen next which isn’t satisfying at all.

The art, design, and animation are similar to the previous season, mostly good but bad use of CG during big battles. The OP and ED are both pretty great, though I feel the OP makes the heel turn of a villain overtly obvious, which makes me question whether they intended for it to be a twist at all. Soundtrack is still pretty good and especially good at sounding heroic.