Reincarnated as a Sword Season 2

Episode 5

Speaking to the escalating scale of this next chapter, this flying undead island storyline has taken up five episodes of the cour—nearly half of Reincarnated as a Sword's graciously granted second season. And that's fair; it's a sense that communicates the growth, the evolution, the heart of watching Teacher and Fran level up. It's gotten its point across well, especially in showing how out of depth they are now that they're effectively out of the tutorial zone, and nominally won't be able to count on OP skills and power-leveling to get them out of every jam they wander into. It's gotten the vibe right, so far, so a big finish to this big fight before they continue on their way is all that's needed.

Unfortunately it seems my previous praise of Reincarnated as a Sword for eschewing the worst habits of it and its genre has turned out to be something of a jinx. This alleged big finish is all exposition all the time, and damn well torpedoes so much of the goodwill the season had built up. Hell, it undoes a lot of the praise I had for the show's storytelling going back to the previous season. To be sure, the anime itself isn't necessarily bad now, it's just that this episode specifically is a massive misstep that's going to have me side-eyeing all the rest of the show's options for the rest of the season.

Granted, the incitement of how this plays out is, technically, momentarily exciting. In his most desperate moment, with an exploding, pissed-off Lich threatening to eradicate his allies and loved ones, Teacher begs for help, and the System Lady answers back. That's a big moment that sells the expanded scale at stake here and teases at some previously unconfirmed truths about this world itself. That's primed for some cool revelations in theory. In practice, what's actually revealed is that there is, in fact, something worse than watching an isekai protag min-max his stat numbers: watching his computer do it for him.

This is effectively like seeing Teacher ring up fantasy Tech Support so they can get remote access to his computer and solve the issue he was having while delivering an exhausting technical explanation of the process. It's all numerical workarounds and reveals of systems that weren't previously touched on before—like how Teacher can apparently scrap unused skills to scrounge up extra points, if needed—until System Lady has stacked up enough skill dominoes to knock them down for…well, not even that big a finish. The ultimate saving teleportation effect is honestly pretty limp. Even all the descriptions of Heavensight abilities that let Teacher at last see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch can't paper over the banality of basic narration over the Lich's angry slow explosion. How much of a drag was this to read back in the original novel form?

The big doppelganger multi-cast attack is cool. That I'll give it. But the main result is that the big finish to this fight, the grand finale that the anime skips the OP for, amounts to watching a character tallying up and spending their experience points at the end of a D&D session. Worse, it's more like watching the DM explain to them how to tally up and spend those points every step of the way. Thrilling!

As I said, there is storytelling and worldbuilding wrapped up in this development, technically. There's a plot point to System Lady feeling the need to step in, having the Gods/Admins/whoever behind this world erase her identity for her trouble, and the bittersweet feeling of her leaving Teacher behind after all that. That part absolutely could have been explored more interestingly and wrapped around more exciting action than eight-and-a-half minutes of Teacher sitting around while Excel spreadsheet formulas resolved. The writing can't even be bothered to make any part of this numerical big finish feel…big, as Jean and Stephan are anticlimactically teleported out unconnected to Teacher/System Lady's efforts. There is something in Teacher having to use parts of his new, auto-acquired powers to stop the big island itself from crashing, but by then the writing seems as exhausted of this stretch as the audience must be.

That's the vibe of this whole episode, really. The skipped OP and ED come off less like mid-season-finale-level big finish signifiers, and more like an exercise in cramming as much of the last stretch of this plot into the time-slot as possible because they just want to be done with it. The rest of the episode is taken up by detailing the full story of the Lich's origins as glimpsed in flashback. There's the crumb of an entertaining idea here, specifically that the Lich was, effectively, a kid in a role-playing scenario who simply wanted to have an adventure. It's cute seeing how he thought Jean was cool (and he's right) and modeled his own necromantic efforts on him originally. It's retroactive sympathy that does work in the bittersweet way it needs to with the characters discovering it as such. It's a parable for the path they could go down—a warning.

Unfortunately, the delivery of that point drags as well because the writing simply can't trust the audience to get that connection. It's plain from his origins that the Lich represents a dark divergence of Fran's story: an enslaved lower-class being who sought evolution and found an outsized power to do so. Clean, but through multiple read-throughs and commentaries, Reincarnated as a Sword keeps using its run-time to make that point more and more spelled out. I know I've snarked before to the effect that modern isekai audiences might not be the most reading-comprehension-inclined, but I honestly think this show is giving them even less credit than that.

The finish here, the desummoned disappearance of Stephan, the uncovering of the Lich's sympathetic backstory, and the eventual parting with Jean, it's all supposed to be bittersweet. And it is, just not in the way I think Reincarnated as a Sword hoped for. It feels like an exhausted author not being able to write themselves out of a corner when it would have felt less cheap to just explode the characters out of the island without all the extra math. Supposedly this hail-mary help-out from System Lady is a one-and-done, but the exercise still raises my hackles at the prospect of how the series will continue after this. Can I look forward to more exciting battles with Teacher and Fran just barely getting by using their own skills, or will DM privilege again step in to play the game for our heroes?

Rating:

Reincarnated as a Sword Season 2 is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

While you were partying, Chris studied the blade, which is why he's here to talk about swords for another season. See him saying s-words sometimes on his socials.