12.29
When I did my first writeup for Valvrave (episode 1 for the 2013 Spring Clusterfuck) I simply dismissed it as a standard Sunrise robot show. The plot was pretty basic: an angsty kid’s girlfriend dies a horrible death so for revenge he jumps into a nearby super robot, unwittingly turning himself into a monster as a result. If it had continued in that direction, the show would have probably been ok, utterly unmemorable, but ok. Alas… it didn’t. Said girlfriend turned out not to be dead, and would have been the most idiotic character in this year’s anime slate if it weren’t for a certain Gatchaman with vocal tics. The villains became more and more irrelevant and campy (seriously… trying to destroy the Valvraves with GIANT FUCKING WAFFLE IRONS!!!) before the series introduced goofy wizards with silly hats to take over and be even more absurdly camp. The main cast turned out literally to be a bunch of vapid teens who did things for not very good to downright stupid reasons. And then… those damn flash forwards that made it seem that a grand story was at play, only to not deliver on it.
And all of this was in season one alone!
Season two was… kind of an improvement. It did make some positive strides towards trying to make a less asinine product. Characters who acted like idiots frequently in season 1, stopped acting like idiots in season 2. The plot seemed more like an actual plot with much of the goofy hijinx stripped out, and some honest to goodness DRAMA introduced. And the villains, if still fairly camp, became somewhat creepier as the concept of infiltrated governments and secret powers behind the scenes were introduced. I found myself actually kinda liking Valvrave 2 for a very brief period (namely eps. 15-17) and it seemed that the worst was actually behind us.
Unfortunately, the perceived improvement was ultimately undone by a rushed episode count, a plot made out of swiss cheese, and the introduction of The Runes, a plot device that arrives so randomly and abruptly, you could almost see where the writers scribbled it in at the last minute. Yes we knew Haruto fell victim to VVV-induced urges both carnal and sensual (Ye Olde “Valvrave The Penetrator”) in Season 1. That said sex and blood was necessary to generate power for the Valvraves came off as borderline comic (it doesn’t help that the show immediately forgot about that the very next episode). The memory loss issue was also rather haphazardly introduced as Marie Inobi was just a background joke character in season one and her amnesia felt completely random. I’ll let that one slide though because the Marie arc was easily the strongest of the season for me.
What I won’t let slide though is what happened to Saki, or more precisely, what DIDN’T happen to Saki this season. It seems the writers lost all interest in the character so she basically got shoved in the fridge for five episodes, with only the occasional 90-second cutback to remind the audience that Saki existed, as well to get impaled by the Chancellor in episode 20. Then again, considering how she tries to hit on Haruto, her actual honest-to-god rapist, in the first episode of season two, maybe that was for the best.
Likewise Shoko was also absent for most of the season, and there are a few ways of looking at it. On one hand, there’s the view that Shoko was horribad in season 1 and the less of her the better. On the other, you could see the position that she was finally becoming a far mature character towards the end of said season with the death of her father, and that absence put a screeching halt to her development. A lot of commentators on the finale over at the MAL thread were actually legitimately angry that Shoko was allowed to survive into the far future. I… actually don’t have a problem with this. Makes perfect sense really. Becoming VVVI’s pilot is basically Shoko’s way of dealing with the guilt of what she did to Haruto, not only by inadvertently causing him to become a Kamitsuki in the first place but also by selling him out to Dorssia in the end. It actually makes quite a bit of sense and is one of the few, perhaps only, good ideas to come out of that otherwise rather embarrassing finale.
I’ve already elaborated on that finale in the last part and how it managed to feel unsatisfactory by leaving so much unresolved. I generally believe that time skips need to have a point for them to matter in the long run. The time skips in this series do not serve point whatsoever other than HEY LOOK ITS THE FUUUUUUTURE OOOOOOOOOH! Now in comparison, my second favorite anime of the 2014 calendar year is From The New World, and that had three major time skips to divide the arcs as well as a final one show how the main protagonist was narrating the story in the future. The difference between that show and Valvrave was those time skips mattered and they had a pay off. Valvrave, by comparison, left us high and dry with a coda that ultimately seemed hollow.
So that’s Valvrave Season 2. While not a particularly good show in the end, it wasn’t nearly as horrid as its predecessor. I suppose in the end that was all that was necessary, simply don’t be Valvrave Season 1. That being said, please stop writing anime Ichiro Ookuchi. I already suffered through Guilty Crown enough…
FINAL AVERAGE SCORE OVER ALL TWELVE EPISODES: 5.3/10