The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs Season 2

Following the defeat of the Principality, Leon has never been more in demand than he is now. Not only has he been inundated with marriage proposals, but he's also been summoned to be a guard for the Saint—who, it turns out, is Marie.

Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs Season 2 is based on the light novel series by author Yomu Mishima and illustrator Monda. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

I'm just going to kick this off with the most obvious thing that I'm sure we're all thinking: Oh my Haruhi, the visuals have taken such a massive step forward, it's ridonkulous. I had to double-check that this season wasn't being made by a different studio; it looked so much better—but nope, still ENGI. But don't misunderstand; this isn't to say that the visuals are great now. They're not; I'd broadly put them on the lower end of the serviceable range. But they were so aggressively awful in season 1, which I maintain is one of the ugliest-looking anime to come out in the past five or so years, that “the lower end of serviceable” is still a considerable upgrade. The eyes, especially, in the first season were the worst. They were often inconsistent sizes, almost seemed to move around, and had really wiry eyelashes that made them look like they didn't belong on the faces they'd been haphazardly shoved into.

The price of normal-looking anime faces is that everyone's clothes seem weirdly shinier now, but the season 1 eyes were so distracting, and it's much easier to ignore clothes that all look really greasy. Well, that, and the animation quality itself, don't seem to have improved nearly as much as the faces have. So basically, visually, it's immediately obvious that this is a huge step up from season 1, but there's still a long way to go.

The visuals are the most obvious difference you're likely to notice in this episode, but once you get past that, this series still feels much the same, ironically enough. Leon is still as chaotic as ever, Marie—who's very obviously his sister—is scheming as much as ever, and the politics-slash-world around them feels as (perhaps, to a certain extent, intentionally?) overly dense as ever. Really, if anything of substance can be said to feel different, it's that Angelica and Olivia somehow feel even more like a lesbian couple than they already did.

Well, I guess there's one other thing. Leon and Marie have taken advantage of their knowledge of this world by taking initiatives in different aspects of their lives—Leon mostly for financial gain, Marie mostly for social gain. But now, we're seeing Marie take matters into her own hands in a way that's a lot bigger than what we saw last season: She's taking Olivia's place as the Saint. Already, she's playing a much larger role than she did in the first season, where she was often seen but not heard. So, I guess this season has that going for it at least.

Better utilizing Marie, like the visuals, is another step in a positive direction. But I'm not sure it's going to be enough to supersede the bland taste the first season left in my mouth. This anime feels like it's trying to accomplish too many things in too little time, and there's nothing in this episode to suggest it'll be any less ambitious (with little to no payoff). In fact, if anything, it only looks like it's trying to do even more, on top of everything else. Time will tell if this season handles it with any more grace than the first, but I don't exactly have my hopes up.

There are three types of people in the world of Trapped in a Dating Sim: the corrupt, the noble, and idiots. Unfortunately, the vast majority falls into the first category or the last—or is often a mix of those two. In fact, our hero Leon would fall naturally into the corrupt category himself if it weren't for the fact that he had this pesky thing called a heart that keeps getting in his way.

To put it another way, Leon is a complete and total asshole—but only to people who deserve it. When it comes to those being hurt or exploited, he time and again finds himself unable to abandon them, even when it'd be in his best interest to do so. And so, with the comedic premise well-defined, we come to the situation he finds himself in at the start of the second season.

Leon's a celebrated war hero—so celebrated that the corrupt sections of the government are eager to kill him off. Thus, he is saddled with venturing abroad to a dangerous dungeon alongside the newly revealed saint, Marie, and her idiot male harem. There's only one problem (besides being on glorified babysitting duty): Marie isn't the saint, Olivia is—and Leon can't figure out what his fellow reincarnator is trying to do given that, in the end, Olivia herself is needed to save the world.

But what makes this series so enjoyable, beyond the comedy filled with idiots and a plot gone completely off the rails, is the romance aspect. It's gotten to the point where Leon can no longer pretend to himself that he hasn't fallen in love with both Ange and Olivia—the villainess and the heroine of the original game. It's clear he thinks he has to choose and so is trying to maintain the status quo between the three of them—even though this is an obvious impossibility.

The trick, however, is that since their coming to Jesus moment last season, Ange and Olivia have come to accept each other fully. But more than that, we're getting all the signs of a romance forming between the two young women. They walk around hand-in-hand, spend their vacations together, and even do a bit of risqué flirting in the bath.

But the biggest sign of their new relationship is that when Leon tells Olivia that he has no interest in spending time with other women when he could spend time with her and Ange instead, Olivia shows no signs of jealousy. In her mind, she already seems to be moving in the direction of a true and equal poly relationship with Ange and Leon. Leon, however, completely misses this hint. And as for how Ange sees things, that's still a mystery.

As a fan of the first season, I'm happy to be back and can't wait for more of the mix of asshole comedy and romance drama this anime provides.

The question is never what will happen in the next episode of Trapped in a Dating Sim, it is what type of episode it will be. Will we stick to otome isekai? A comedy of manners? A war drama? Escaflowne if it were a two-episode tournament arc? The first season of Dating Sim was something that chose to be too many things at once, but it certainly wasn't bad at doing so. There was something to admire in how it tried to juggle so many genres at one time. Hell, I kinda loved it for that. Dating Sim's second season's opener doesn't exactly try to be amorphous right off the bat. It's a pretty straightforward premiere that aesthetically sticks with its otome isekai roots while reintroducing its characters and settings, capping everything off with the promise of a treasure hunt looming around the corner.

In between, Marie becomes the Saint, Leon is promoted to being one of the Saint's guards, and Angelica and Livia get to have a gay ol' time with each other in more ways than one (highly complimentary). None if it is necessarily wowing, although it is charming and breezy enough. I do wonder if Marie's Saint-ness will come into play a little bit more here. As much as I was charmed by Sarah Wiedenheft's performance as Marie in the dub, Marie herself felt like an underutilized brat of a character whose reincarnated-from-another-worldness took too much of a backseat. Marie is essentially the villainess who isn't technically the villainess (if we're being real here, that would be Angelica), so let her really do it up this time around!

Leon's robot buddy Luxion always hinted that Leon possessed some villainous qualities (dabbling in gambling and randomly hitting on the queen will do that to ya), and I guess they come into play here when Leon's rise is seen by some of the elite as a potential threat to the kingdom. This sudden jump to conclusions is a bit out of left field for me, especially since he helped save numerous academy attendees from pirates and a warring nation last season, but that's something I can overlook. Leon is a bit rough around the edges in the personality department, after all.

What is a problem is that watching this show subbed makes Leon feel a bit duller to me. I watched all of the first season dubbed, and Jordan Dash Cruz as Leon had such an unbelievable sense of snark to him that was so hilarious and served just right. With the exception of this episode's opening moments, Leon's sense of caustic hilarity feels a bit absent here. Still, even if the episode doesn't exactly make me excited for the rest of the season, there's enough to enjoy and latch on to if you enjoyed the first season enough. With a scorching hot summer season of anime upon us, Trapped in a Dating Sim's second season might prove to be a good watch whenever you feel the need to beat the heat.