The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Shangri-La Frontier Season 2

With one world boss under their belts, Sanraku and friends continue their adventures in the world's most popular game, Shangri-La Frontier.

Shangri-La Frontier Season 2 is based on the manga series by Ryōsuke Fuji and the web novel series by Katarina. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

I feel bad ranking this one a 2.5. The ranking I usually give to hum-drum, run-of-the-mill premieres. After all, Shangri-La Frontier continues to look fantastic. The action is well-animated and dynamic, with the use of colors and effects keeping things way above average visually. But that doesn't change the fact that this episode is just plain boring.

After their big world boss adventure last season, Sanraku and their furry friends are off to do the exciting task of… farming for crafting materials. This means going to a new area and killing everything they see there in the search for the specific item they need. Throw in some banter and a bit about Sanraku admitting he needs to learn a bit more about the game's lore and that's it. That's the whole episode.

I mean, as a middle-of-the-season episode, it'd already be pretty weak. As a season premiere, it's terrible. Unless you're already 100% invested in the series, I can't imagine this episode making you want to come back for more of this next week. I for one have no intention of doing that. There's just nothing here beyond the visuals to hook you. I guess this series is what they mean when they say the phrase "all flash and no substance."

I had mixed feelings about the first season of Shangri-La Frontier while it was airing. While it was undoubtedly one of the best-looking shows of the entire season—great animation and choreography—narrative-wise, the show wasn't as strong as I had hoped. Part of that comes down to my own expectations for what I thought the show was doing. But now that I know what the show is trying to do, and what corner of appeal it's trying to lean into, I'm still a little bit mixed. Shangri-La Frontier perfectly captures the appeal of jumping headfirst into a well-polished and expansive open-world action RPG. It's like if you did VR Dark Souls with all the intricate mechanics and physics behind it. However, while all these games are a lot of fun and innovative from a lore and gameplay standpoint, there's always a point where you hit the more miscellaneous parts. Sometimes you have to grind to level up or sometimes you have to go on side quests that may or may not benefit the main overarching narrative of the game. It's those parts that drag Frontier down a little bit because while other shows I feel would cut those moments, here they have just as much presence as the major boss fights or narrative flags.

Some people definitely find that appealing but I think that causes the pacing to drag a bit and this first episode of season two isn't really much different. After we get through the exposition of everything that happened before this point, we're just seeing Sunraku go look for materials. The action is engaging and it's great to see some of the other characters show off some of their skills, especially when it's implied that some side characters are stronger than Sunraku himself. But it doesn't feel like there's any weight behind what I'm watching at this point. I'm still waiting for the interesting bit to happen which is ironic considering that we ended season one with a potentially strong narrative point…only for this episode to sideline it and basically say “Yeah we'll get back to that later”. This episode felt promising at the end with the return of Oikatzo and Arthur but overall, I couldn't muster much emotion watching this episode outside of a passing acknowledgment.