Tower of God Season 2

Episode 8

You know the phrase, “If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all?” Yeah, if I followed that, the review of this week's episode would be a blank page.

This is, unequivocally, the worst episode of Tower of God so far. On the visual side, it looks both lazy and unfinished. The action is not exciting or creatively portrayed. At mid-distance or further, the character line work becomes rough and details almost completely disappear—not to mention that the proportions can also get a bit wonky. The only time things look even halfway decent are close-ups where the characters don't move beyond their mouths. That said, visuals are only one part of what makes this episode terrible.

This is our first episode after a time jump. The idea of time jumps in anime is to skip over either A) important bits to add mystery and completely upset the status quo or B) the boring parts—the endless day-to-day training and normal life in between adventures. For Tower of God, this time skip is designed to be the latter option. We've jumped over more than a year of climbing the tower as the group rushes to the Workshop Battle.

Yet, this episode fails spectacularly at making things interesting. While this episode is almost non-stop action, it is the most boring action imaginable. We know little of the stakes of the fight or the issues facing our heroes. We don't know their limits nor those of their opponents. We have no real frame of reference if they are in any actual danger or not. This makes the action nothing more than a visual drivel—filled with “flashy” attacks that are supposed to be cool without the needed context to make them so.

Throughout this episode, we briefly check in on Bam's original team (well, one member) before alternating focus between Rachael's and Wangnan's team. We learn nothing new about the characters on either team—other than they are currently working as well-oiled machines.

The only important thing the episode does is introduce Emily, a ChatGPT-style AI that people in the tower seem to be over-relying on. I'm sure we're setting up a message about people putting too much trust in AI and the information it has gathered/regurgitated but for the moment that's all it is: setup. This episode adds almost nothing to the overall story and looks bad doing it.

Rating:

Tower of God Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.