Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story Season 2

How do you turn the world's most boring sport played mainly by middle aged men into an interesting anime? Season one seemed to have figured it out, struggled with some pacing and budget issues, and then completely threw out the winning pieces in season two. As an initial fan of Birdie Wing season one when it aired and before it gained mass appeal, I absolutely despise season two. The show initially gained attention by bombastic, adrenaline fueled situation writing that seemed to involve taking psychedelics, shonen anime, and campy lesbianism and throwing it all in a blender and painting with the resulting slurry. And it worked!Season one may have been silly, but the high stakes and insane gambling golf games managed to be enjoyable and compelling, and the characters had enough appeal and eccentricities to be enjoyed. There was often a method to the madness and it was a blast, and any shortcomings could be forgiven because we operated on rule of cool. The latter half of season one struggles as it changes setting and arcs, but any stumbles were easily forgiven as it was still exciting to see what comes next. Season two starts off very painfully aware that we ended in the middle of an unfinished arc, but rather than sidestep issues with the usual energy, it disregards everything. The insane golf powers reminiscent of gambling anime like Yugioh or Kakegurui or sports anime with crazy finishers like Prince of Tennis are gone. While each new character is hyped as a bigger threat, gone are campy perfume tricks or robot arms or godlike precognition. Even our main character loses her ability for a worse, new one. Her individual bullet shots were a little silly, but had specific functions. One had crazy backspin to make interesting moves, one was a strong enough shot to break trees, one got impossibly high vertical angles to go over any obstacle. The powers were campy, but followed understandable rules and ideas. The new Rainbow Bullet, Rainbow Bullet Burst, and Shining Rainbow Bullet are just different ways that she hits the ball really good and wins while we put different effect filters over the camera or show stock footage. And now the in universe audience states that the shots leave real visible rainbows. I never assumed her colored shots LITERALLY had visible light, that was just an effect. I can only watch Eve shoot the OP rainbow shot that everyone tells me is so good and she wins so many times before I'm bored in a way I never was in season one. We also completely remove any fun setting. Gone is the underground golf mafia and their billionaire funded insanity. Instead are boring and bland tournaments where if I wasn't being told that something cool was supposedly happening, I wouldn't know. We fight a mafia battle exactly once and during it Eve looks directly into the camera and screams THIS IS NOT REAL GOLF. It's been a long time since a show told me to go shove it quite that hard. Birdie Wing season two can tell me all it wants that the tournaments are important, the new random competitors are strong, and the shots are cool but it feels like all talk and no show. And most damning, we take away the fun lesbian bits from the show. Eve no longer hits on girls and has her swooning fandom. Her main lover Aoi is even nerfed once we bring in the absolutely terrible "your daddy is secretly my daddy and we might be sisters" bull. I watched Birdie Wing for the lady killer with attitude doing trick shots against golf assassins to impress her innocent lesbian girlfriend, not...whatever this is. So what does Birdie Wing add in place of all it removes, besides more identical uninteresting tournaments? Mainly a really bad attempt at backstory, first shoved at us for an entire episode and then progressing at a breakneck speed to try to replace the former energy with character writing. But the show's strength was never in compelling and well written story, it was the camp we left behind. I resent every moment wasted in the lame drama and subsequent injury and sickness arcs. They were bad ideas and poorly implemented with jarring pacing. Any deep or dark moment fell short because I was too busy either lamenting what I lost or staring into space bored. The only decent aspect that stayed was the music...quite literally. The great jazzy OST stayed and tried its best to carry weak writing. The opening song from season one also stayed. And don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic song that I never tire of hearing. But with the same song and a half reused OP sequence I began this season worried about budget and pacing and was really never proven wrong. Season two lacks any ability to wow or impress, and since we had those skills previously I couldn't help resent watching it. It seems I both got on the Birdie Wing hype train before average, and then left it early too since I don't hear many complaints matching mine. But I was absolutely miserable, and no matter how much I wanted to get back on the train, Eve never was able to do a trick shot between the cars like in season one and repeat the same lightning in a bottle.

Viewers of the first season should watch this one immediately, it's even better. And the show works best with all 24 episodes. Look, Birdie Wing is one of the best sports shows out there, BUT! You need to have some tolerance for storytelling that goes fully to the “Awesome” side of the scale. It's not a show that is illogical or has big mistakes surrounding that awesomeness; it sets up a universe and world much like our own where these awesome things could happen, it doesn't come out of left field at any point, but it is NOT accurate to real life. If you want a golfshow that bothers explaining the technicalities of golf, you might not be in love with this show. If you want a golf show that has the characters screaming the name of a special ability they might have inherited from their estranged father, then shoot the ball a metric of “over 270 yards”, while they have a flashback about their mother's infidelity to some other man… Yeah, this show would be for you. It's very ridiculous, but it's also very good! They try to mix the emotional core of the characters with their golf abilities, often putting focus on both at the same time in a rather peculiar manner that feels natural. The characters all develop around these events in their life that could be comparable to something from a korean drama, yet their stories and the tone isn't completely in disregard of the show's golf focus. It's still trying to remain grounded in having the characters golf using cool moves. It has more than a few moments where you and the characters will, as they say, “pop off”. If you were distraught by the first season's drop of plot points like the mafia ones, do not worry! This season will continue those plots, which makes the ultimate complete product, including both seasons, feel several times more natural. It also evolves in a rather interesting direction, splitting the characters to make the challenges they will face more logical to their skill level. The show establishes both protagonists as incredible forces to be reckoned with, but then has them face off against believable opponents, explaining why these opponents came to be as good, or better, though not as completely as other shows who make properly memorable rivals. They are good, but I wouldn't say memorable… The animation isn't top-notch, but it does generally look good. There are a few cuts that get repeated every few episodes, and then occasionally you get some of the craziest perspective shots you'll ever see. Many shows renown for their great animation should learn from this one about making good animation by picking unusual framing and perspectives. Too bad those shots aren't a large portion of the show. The rest looks alright, I suppose, unless it's golf related, almost all the golfing stuff is very well animated, both the balls and the character's anatomy and movement when swinging. The rhythm of this season is more satisfying than the first, as the show takes on a more standard direction for development, establishing goals for the characters to achieve and then showing what occurs from that. If you didn't like that the first season didn't have tournaments or opponents after a certain point, be glad they are back! Everything else is very similar in quality to the first season. The characters do repeat a few things a few times more than they should, and sometimes the writers don't take the more complex path of figuring out new solutions for the way the characters overcome a challenge. Heck, sometimes the challenge is done as a means to be poetic, which ends up on the shallow use of tropes. It's far from a perfect show in terms of writing, it commits many mistakes and uses more than a few tropes. Still, the issues are minor when you consider the show puts Awesomeness over realism, which I still believe to be an incredible approach to the show's storytelling, and I recommend you look into it, even if remotely interested.

It is a genuine miracle that Birdie Wing is as good as it is. The animation is rough, the financial backing from a metaverse company is sketchy, and the sport it adapts is terribly dull. But it’s clearly a work of love, with one of the most fun scripts in recent anime history. Anything could happen in Birdie Wing, and the whole show feels scrappy in a way that you can’t help but root for. Knowing this, how did the second (and presumably final) season of Birdie Wing turn out? Well, alright. We’re dropped in right where the first season left off: the middle of atournament arc. Luckily, that’s wrapped up pretty quickly, as the real meat of this cour is The Strange Fates Of Two Generations Of Young People Who Were Caught Up In The Ego of Adults (actual episode title). It turns out that all of the adults just kind of floating around in the first season have messy, intertwined backstories, and their sins have been passed down to our two main characters in dueling attempts to create the golf übermensch. This is all good fun, the exact soap opera drama I’ve come to expect from Birdie Wing, and the fact that they’re all meant to reference Universal Century characters makes it all the better. While the first season of Birdie Wing pays a lot of homage to old-school sports shounen, this season is arguably just as much of a Gundam show as G-Witch. The generational drama also means that star-crossed golfers Eve and Aoi have to face their biggest obstacle yet: the incest allegations. Unfortunately, this season has a bit less going for it overall. The underground golf mafia, easily the best part of the first season, plays only a small role here. Eve and Aoi spend most of their time in generic professional golf tournaments, gradually unlocking new abilities and suffering the consequences. I hate to say this, but Birdie Wing gets stuck in a rut! Don’t worry, there are still incredible moments every episode. But the overarching plot noticeably suffers due to the constraints of the game they’ve confined themselves to. Golf is truly a terrible sport, and Birdie Wing shines when it’s being disrespectful. There is far less golf disrespect this season. The pacing and production values also take a hit, with the final episodes in particular rushed beyond all belief. I wish this had gotten a twenty-sixth episode, or a movie, or anything to help smooth things over. And also so they’d have more time to queerbait me. The constant tournament arcs mean that Eve gets far fewer chances to be a lesbian chad this time around. Birdie Wing was never going to be a show with incredible gay representation, but they could have at least followed through on more of the yuri-tinged narrative threads. If this review has come off as somewhat harsh, it is largely out of love. Season 2 of Birdie Wing is still an absolute delight to watch, and only pales in comparison to the first cour. It is never boring, has a great balance of melodrama and sleaze, and is absolutely unparalleled in the world of sports anime. In my ideal world, we’d have a show this funny and stupid and dubiously lesbian every season. I hope Birdie Wing gets an official western release, because I would gladly vote with my wallet to make that known.

I firmly believe that anime can make any boring sport fun to watch purely based on good storyboarding, pacing, story, and character development. Golf is no different, and while I saw a little bit of potential in Birdie Wing's season 1 despite giving it a 6, that all came crashing down in season 2. See, a good writer would be able to make golf interesting on its own. No unrealistic techniques or no drama, just rivalries and competition between spirited high school girls in matches that seem high stakes due to the tension of a golf swing, the trepidation that the opponent will catch up with,or the nerves of making a mistake. Unfortunately, despite Birdie using every damn trope to artificially raise the stakes of golf games, the show is still unable to keep my attention. There's a lot of drama. People get sick and hurt so that tensions rise in a match artificially. There's a bunch of drama in the personal history of Eve and Aoi, but that eventually gets cleared up. I was so fed up with this trash drama I almost dropped it completely, but I soldiered through. It was not worth the trouble. Just because you create some wack backstory or drama doesn't make a boring anime fun to watch. What do I mean by this? As I said, sports anime can make even the most dull sport shine. Even if you like a game like Go, you have to admit that creating a story out of a board game is quite difficult. Yet, Hikaru no Go is such a show where a dull sport shines. It all has to do with character development. I'll be honest. Eve is probably the only character that has any iota of character development. Aoi's sort of a shoehorned in Mary Sue's rival character that has a personal past with Eve. Forget the caddies entirely, their drama, backstory, or character don't exist. There was just no screen time dedicated enough to them. Rival characters? They only show up during the tournament! And it's essentially a different rival character each tournament. Unlike Hikaru no Go, where all of the players Hikaru plays are developed, Birdie just invents new rival characters for the "big final tournament." Sorry to say that introducing new characters for Eve or Aoi to beat doesn't magically make the game more interesting. Let's just compare the professional qualifications of Eve and Aoi. The 4-day tour was barely covered for both tournaments. And I get that it's pretty unrealistic to cover so many holes of golf, but there's barely any coverage at all. It's just that "somehow, Eve and Aoi pull ahead with their plot armor." In Hikaru no Go, Hikaru takes a lot of effort to go pro. There's a lot of emphasis on him stepping on top of other people's dreams to win. Even though the characters he beats never show up again, they were still characterized. If Birdie focused on the actual sport and its competition with other players and their caddies, the anime would have been much better. If there were detailed highlights and monologues of each caddy and player covering multiple episodes for a single tournament against players that weren't just introduced an episode before, it would have been enjoyable. Instead, too much focus on crappy drama and artificial stakes just make me slog through the entire show with no returns.

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