Season Overview

The 2nd season of No Guns Life (ノー・ガンズ・ライフ) built and improved upon everything from the 1st season. And, while there hasn’t been a 3rd season announced, I do hope it gets one at some point. I was fairly indifferent towards the series after the 1st season, but now I want to know what happens next.

As with many sequels, it’s not actually the plot that makes it better than what came before — it’s the characters. No Guns Life 2nd Season doesn’t try to add in a bunch of new characters. Instead, it develops and refines the characters that are already established in the series.

Of course, some new characters have to be introduced, but no new main characters enter the story. Instead, we get some new supporting characters who serve as obstacles for our main cast to overcome. I’ll get to Juzo’s character development later on in this review, but for now, let’s briefly discuss Mary and Tetsurou.

I didn’t really expect Mary and Tetsurou to receive the amount of development they did this season. Mary’s development was the most shocking. We already knew that she had some unfinished business in her past regarding her brother, but that’s about it.

Getting to learn about why she’s looking for him and what she hopes to achieve by finding him was really a bonus for me. Mary’s my favorite character, so learning anything about her or seeing her develop is good as far as I’m concerned.

Tetsurou is a bit more understandable because he’s kind of the centerpiece of the series. Yes, Juzo is the protagonist, but Tetsurou is the one all the various factions are fighting over. And I have to say, Tetsurou’s development into a more self-confident person was extremely satisfying.

Pepper and Seven

The best thing about this season, surprisingly, wasn’t the development of the main characters. Pepper and Seven, two of the main antagonists from the 1st season, were featured prominently in this season as well. And just as with our heroes, we got to learn about their backstory as well.

Pepper and Seven weren’t the best villains in the 1st season simply because we didn’t know much about them. We knew who they worked for, but other than that, we didn’t know anything about their motivations. Well, that’s not entirely true. We did know that Pepper was Seven’s primary motivation.

But my point is that we didn’t know why Pepper was the way she was or how she came to be associated with Seven. I’m not even sure what I thought their backstory was before it was revealed.

On one hand, I thought they had always been together, but that didn’t quite make sense. And on the other, I thought they were some new bounty hunter team, but that didn’t add up either. Pepper is too young for the first to be true, and Seven is one of the original Gun Slave Units, so the second couldn’t be true either.

What their backstory turned out to be actually made the most sense given their characterizations. They’re both broken people who found a twisted sense of companionship in each other. Their relationship is really the opposite of Juzo and his handler’s relationship which ended when they had differing opinions on how they should move forward.

At least this Seven didn’t end up like Pepper’s original Seven. I think that the entire situation with Seven the spider was a perfect way to illustrate Pepper’s state of mind. She’s not a stable individual.

Juzo’s Past

Juzo’s past wasn’t exactly revealed in this season. We got to see how parts of it played out, but the events of his past were always implied to us previously. What I mean by this is that we knew that Juzo was the Gun Slave Unit who was tasked with eliminating the other Gun Slave Units.

What we didn’t know is exactly how successful he had been in this venture. Obviously, Seven wasn’t eliminated by him after the Gun Slave Unit rebellion. But we now know that all of, or just about all of, the others were.

I’m not going to go into how he eliminated the other Gun Slave Units, but it’s fair to say that this was a turning point for Juzo. His partner had left the military because he no longer believed in their mission. But since Juzo didn’t know anything but the military, he stayed with the mission because he felt like he had no other options.

Once he killed his fellow Gun Slave Units, though, that’s when he seems to have had a change of heart. He saw that the other Gun Slave Units were working towards leading normal lives, and that gave him some shred of hope that maybe he could do the same.

But, one of the things I really enjoyed about that scene was how Twelve didn’t seem to blame Juzo for his choice. That might seem odd at first, but I think what we need to focus on here is Twelve’s use of the word choice when referring to what Juzo did.

Twelve clearly didn’t want to die, but at the same time, I think he recognized that Juzo was starting to change. The fact that Juzo made a choice of his own at all is a major step forward. It’s just too bad that Juzo didn’t realize this until after he had killed all of them.

Conclusion

Although I do think that No Guns Life 2nd Season is better than the 1st season, I still think it’s a 6/10 just as the 1st season was. It’s a slightly higher 6/10, but still a 6/10 nonetheless. It looked a bit better and the characters got some much-needed development, but I still think the story is somewhat lacking.

As for the OP and ED of this season, I think that they were far superior to those of the 1st season. I love “Chaos Drifters” as the OP song and the visuals weren’t that bad either. The opposite is true (sort of) for the ED. I thought the song was pretty good, but I really liked the visuals — especially twerking Mary.

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