So, after months of waiting and speculating on how the animation for One-Punch Man season 2 Episode 1 – Return of the Hero was going to be, I finally saw the episode and despite the clear change in animation, it wasn’t all bad.
Let’s face, everyone’s going to be commenting on this week’s episode, animations and whatnot. Which is fair, we got spoiled with the speculator animation that was season 1. So naturally, we expect the same trend to continue with One-Punch Man Season 2 Episode 1. Nevertheless, I’ll be focusing mostly on the narrative of the story as that also took a hit in terms of quality. The story starts off with the introduction of King, a fake hero who’s reputation alone landed him in the S class role. It was funny to see him monologue his experience and how he’s just a coward that seems to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The story in this episode kinda jumped all over the place in my opinion.
First we see King stand up to a machine god, which was interesting to see how he’d handle such a situation. He comes up with some excuse about having to go to the bathroom as holding it in cuts his powers by 50%. He runs home, only to realize that Saitama also followed him. After he was confronted by Saitama, he came clean and told the truth.
After that, the scenes kept changing from Saitama talking and playing games with King, to Genos fighting the machine god. This kept going back and forth for a while. Then, we’re suddenly told that there’s a prophecy, which in six months a disaster will come to earth and destroy it. Sonic was there too but only to find Saitama. Then the scene changes to Genos and his engineer and their dialogue consisted about Geno and his quest to find the guy that wiped out his village, something that we already knew. Oh and lady blizzard shows up proclaiming that she’s searching for Saitama as well.
I mean overall, the episode was funny, I’ll grant it that, but the story’s pacing was kinda all over the place in my opinion. Not one thing was giving time to breath and flesh out. For the first episode of a new season, it didn’t make a strong impact but hopefully, it will get better as we go on. Also, there’s something off about Saitama’s character. He didn’t feel as goofy as he was in the first season. It’s like he got slapped with the serious stick. I dunno, it was just something that I noticed.
