With this second season, I am beginning to think that Yuri Kitayama's original light novel series is simply a poor fit for an animated adaptation. That's not necessarily because the story is a bit hackneyed; it is, but that's hardly the problem here. The greater issue seems to be that the story is so dense that the anime – which isn't even doing a page-by-page adaptation – has a difficult time getting through it in a timely manner. Like the first season, this one ends at a cliffhanger without ever fully resolving any of its plot points, and while that works in a 20+ volume book series, in twelve episodes, it just comes across as frustrating.

Still, it's worth noting that it's very easy to get right back into the story despite the years-long gap between series. When we left off during the pandemic, protagonist Rio had more or less made his peace with his new life, recognizing that it wasn't possible to live like a modern Japanese citizen in a Medieval(ish) fantasy world. He'd done the important things that too few isekai protagonists do (i.e. freed slaves and stated that slavery is unequivocally bad), gained ludicrous amounts of power, and was moving towards getting his revenge on the man who murdered his mother before his eyes. All of that came to a screeching halt when he and his spirit companion Aishia heard screams in Japanese, and upon checking it out, discovered his lost love Miharu, and two younger children being attacked by slavers. Most shocking to Rio was the fact that Miharu was in her high school uniform, thus solving the question of why he was never able to reunite with her: she was summoned to another world years before he died in the bus accident.

While this should make us wonder why so many Japanese people are pulled to this fantasy world, the major issue for Rio is that his past as Haruto has come screaming back. He can't help getting involved with Miharu and the other two, who turn out to be his long-lost younger sister (the siblings were separated during their parents' divorce) and her younger stepbrother. Together with Aishia and Rio's teacher/mentor Celia, they take the newly summoned in, and thus the story begins. It's not a terrible place to start, either; yes, it undoes a lot of what Rio worked hard to come to terms with in the first season, but there's an argument to be made that he never truly accepted that his past life was over and done; the fact that “Haruto” is his default alias says a lot. He's also been faithful to Miharu, despite the plethora of gorgeous young ladies throwing themselves at him. Yes, everyone loves Rio, but the strong implication is that his heart still is Haruto's and belongs to Miharu…and it quickly becomes clear that hers belongs to him. This is where we begin to lose the nuance from the novels as Anime Rio doesn't emote much, while Novel Rio is very much off-balance with this new development.

That sums up the biggest storytelling issue with Seirei Gensouki – Spirit Chronicles' second season. While I wouldn't call the source material high literature, it has the space to get more into Rio's head and heart, while the anime glosses over that a bit in favor of the action. And the action is important: the summoned heroes (at least two of whom Miharu and the gang are friends with) have arrived in six different countries to combat Reiss and his monster minions, and there were already serious political tensions, even just within different factions in Beltrum. Reiss has seriously upped his game by perfecting a spell to turn humans into zombie-like monsters, and Lucius is as thirsty for Rio's blood as Rio is for his. That's not even counting the situation with the Spirit People and their hidden village or the wedding Celia narrowly avoided. It's a dense, packed plot, and in the drive to reach the start of the next major arc (the introduction of the heroes to the world at large), the series opts to cover the surface layer more than anything else.

The result is that most of the Rio/Miharu plotline feels very thin. I can't help but feel like that wasn't a terrific choice, given how central Haruto/Miharu was to the first season as Rio adjusted to his new life, and it's also frankly a bit more interesting than Rio easily dispatching monsters and human villains with an overpowered swing of his magic-infused sword. Spirit Chronicles has the potential to play with the isekai genre by including two separate subgenres under its roof (reborn and summoned), and in opting to focus on the more cookie-cutter elements, it squanders that. We get a bit as Miharu starts to feel an increasingly nagging suspicion about Rio's identity and Aki's unwarranted anger at Haruto, who she sees as having abandoned her rather than understanding that they were both children and he didn't have a choice. But it's not quite enough, and while the next arc of the story will cover it a bit more, there's no guarantee that we'll see that happen.

Certainly, there's some question as to whether or not we want to. The visuals for this season err on the side of “not great,” with noticeable shortcuts taken in almost every background. Character mobs all repeat the same movements on an obvious loop, and CG is clunky and unattractive. The main characters generally look and move fine, but there's such a discrepancy between foreground and background that it's very distracting. Even the fight scenes are lackluster, with a few large actions supported by dialogue rather than dynamic fights overall.

Is this the worst show to air during its season? No, not really. Its story is still at least moderately interesting, and it does make you curious to see more. But it's also crumbling under the weight of its bloated cast and not spending enough time on the emotional storylines of its key players, and once again I find myself offering the counsel that if you want to experience this story, you're almost certainly better off just reading the books.