Sound! Euphonium 2 Review

Gearing Up For Season 3

Sound! Euphonium 2 (Hibike! Euphonium 2 / 響け！ユーフォニアム2) is, you guessed it, the second season of the Sound! Euphonium anime. It’s been a long 4+ years since I watched and reviewed the first season. But, the third season is airing in about a month.

I doubt I’ll be reviewing the third season on a weekly basis — there are other anime I’m going to prioritize. However, I still want to watch it while it airs and be able to review it not too long after it ends. That means it’s time for me to catch up.

Unfortunately for me, the second season isn’t the only part of Sound! Euphonium I need to watch. There are two canon movies between this season and the upcoming season. So, if you like this series, you have those reviews to look forward to over the next few weeks or months.

There’s also the Liz and the Blue Bird spin-off movie. I’m not sure if I’m going to watch that before the third season begins airing. And, I was originally planning to skip it entirely. But, now that I know it’s about Mizore and Nozomi, I want to watch it.

Mizore and Nozomi are two of the major supporting characters in this season. These two were at the center of one of the big pieces of drama from season 2. So, watching that movie might be pretty important for their backstories.

So, anyway, watching this season was the start of my new Sound! Euphonium journey. I’m going to be ingesting a lot of content from this series. And, hopefully, that doesn’t burn me out on it. But, as you’ll see in the next section of this review, it might already be too late for me.

I’m Too Old For This

I want to preface this section by pointing out some good things about this season. The art and animation are amazing, of course. The soundtrack is good (as expected of a music anime). And, it has good (cute) characters.

To me, it’s pretty easy to see the good parts of Sound! Euphonium. That’s why I want to focus on the part that I didn’t like, which was the drama. Well, to be fair, not all of the drama was “bad.” Some of it, like the stuff with Asuka toward the end, was pretty good.

Asuka’s mother was forcing her to quit the band so she could focus on her studies. To an extent, I agree with her mother since Asuka has to take entrance exams. This caused a whole meltdown within the band, though. Luckily, it all turned out alright and Asuka was able to get the best of both worlds.

That’s the kind of drama that I think is good. How does one balance their studies and club activities? It’s something I’m sure many people have had to deal with at one point — even if not to this extent.

The whole Mizore and Nozomi situation, however, is what I would call bad drama. This was petty, childish, interpersonal drama that was annoying to watch. It was all about the internal politics of the band that began with a bunch of students walking out the year prior.

Sure, I guess if you’re in the band, you’d be invested in this stuff. But, as an outsider looking in, I couldn’t care less. Okay, so Nozomi left the band and now she wants to rejoin. What’s the problem? Let her join. Why are they gatekeeping a school club? It literally doesn’t matter that she left.

The First Year Is Over

Maybe, as implied by the preceding section’s headline, I’m too old. It’s been a very long time since I was in high school. So, maybe I’m too far removed from the drama that’s going on in this series to be interested in it.

But, I have hope that things will get better. The second season ends with the graduation of the third-year students and the end of the school year. And, this should be good because it means a lot of the issues I had with this season should be going away.

Let’s go over the core issue that rocked the band in the year before the series began. The third-year students wanted to perform in the main band during their last year. So, they did, at the expense of the younger students. Seeing this as being unfair, many first-year students left the club.

Those third-year students then graduated and everyone else moved up a grade. However, that didn’t solve everything. Once the problem third-years were gone, some lower-classmen rejoined the band. But, those who never left felt betrayed. They felt like the quitters shouldn’t be allowed back in.

Now, at the end of this series, another class has graduated. This means the only people left from that original incident are the current third-years. And, it appears that they’ve all resolved their issues by this point. That’s what the whole Nozomi and Mizore arc was about. So, there shouldn’t be any more of this particular drama.

Of course, Sound! Euphonium is a drama anime. There’s going to be drama. But, my hope is that it can now move on to better drama. Sure, the incoming freshmen will likely shake things up. However, I want to see the drama have more to do with the competitions.

Final Thoughts

I’m going to give Sound! Euphonium 2 a 6/10, which probably seems low to a lot of you. It’s a good anime in many ways. But, I couldn’t get very invested in it due to the pointless drama in the middle. However, as I said, I have high hopes for the future of the series.

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`My review of Movie 3 (the next part of the series) is available now.