Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru 2

A repeat of the first series, with some things changed here and there. Once again, Wataru, Himiko, and Shibaraku journey together, sometimes with Kuraman, and sometimes with the new rival character Umihiko. They need to release the curse on each of the seven star realms to restore the colors to the rainbow. Which sure sounds awfully familiar. There are some improvements over the original. The villain designs are generally better and when the writers decide to put in effort, some episodes really work. The 5 'Trials of Love' episodes have surprisingly engaging writing, though it accomplishes that by breaking most of the normal formula. The new rivalUmihiko is a nice addition. He's a lot more present than Toraou was in the original series, and he starts showing up in the first world. He works well as a rival character and helps round out the team. If you look past the dumb hairstyle, I think's he's basically perfect for his role. On the subject of rivals, Toraou does actually come back in this series but only for the last 7 episodes or so. I mention this because the opening and ending sequence prominently feature him long before he actually shows up. He's fine while he's there, but he also doesn't really need to show up here. The visuals are a bit cleaner from the original, though they were only about a year apart, so the differences are small. On to the downsides. This series' writing is far more hit-or-miss. The highs are fairly high, but the lows are lower than the original's lows, and the average is also a bit worse than the original's average. The plot writing was a lot less consistent overall, and had a tendency to jump rapidly into new ideas and never get back to them. The final section especially does poor job of wrapping things up. Most of the villains don't actually get their big moments despite the time invested, and the main party mostly wins because the script says they should. Almost all of the escalations at the end have no foreshadowing whatsoever. The original at least set up the final powerups. I felt like I missed a few episodes near the end with how quickly it goes from the normal grind to the final arc, and I suspect there might have been some last-minute changes there. Similar to the original series, the beginning is rough and they get into the groove of it over time. It's surprising that a "basically season 1 again" series had this problem, but it's because they tried to change things up in the main cast and bungled it. Himiko is somehow MORE hyper, Wataru got a sarcastic streak and starting getting whiney, and Shibaraku shifted from generally competent adult supervisor to an idiotic oaf. There was literally a villain that could control animals and Shibaraku was controlled by them. These are all bad changes for the characters individually, but taken together remove pretty much the entire endearing group dynamic they had before. The writers figured out that these changes weren't working well and made some adjustments, so you won't need to live with these version for the whole series, but it's a struggle at first. As a consolation, Shibaraku does actually get a serious arc at the end of the show, and it was the only major ending plot thread they actually managed to execute properly. One thing I wanted to add was a lack of whimsy in this one compared to the original series. In the original, Wataru gets a lot of odd tools he uses across arcs and Himiko's ninjutsu abilities seemed much more unpredictable in the original series. In this series, Wataru doesn't really get new tools to work with, and the magic onigiri he gets are the start are both lame and short-lived because you can't actually do much with them. Himiko's abilities are flattened and seem obligatory rather than something the writers thought was fun. The most memorable episodes from the original series were more charming and goofy. The memorable ones here are memorable because they are unusually introspective or weighty for the series, not because they're necessarily fun. It shakes out to being a bit worse of an overall experience compared to the first series. If you really liked the first series, you'll enjoy this one, but maybe a little less. If you struggled to get through the first one, this one will not be much easier. For the record, the next Wataru series doesn't treat this series as cannon. So if you got enough from the first series, you can safely skip this one or just watch bits and pieces. You may want to check out the Trial of Love episodes for characters you like: 32 (Himiko), 33 (Umihiko), 34 (Kuraman), 35 (Shibaraku), and 36 (Wataru). They don't really need context, so you can just jump into those ones if you feel so inclined. And the OVA (The Never Ending Tale of Time) is actually good so watch that either way.

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