The Promised Neverland 2nd Season

Season Overview

The Promised Neverland 2nd Season (Yakusoku no Neverland 2nd Season / 約束のネバーランド) is the second and final season of The Promised Neverland anime series. The fact that this is the final season should be a red flag for anyone who knows the source material.

This is the second CloverWorks anime I’ve reviewed in the past two days. Yesterday was Wonder Egg Priority. Something you’ll notice from both of these reviews is that the winter 2021 season wasn’t a good one for CloverWorks.

One of the first things you’ll notice about this season upon watching it is that it’s much different than the first season. While the first season was a psychological thriller, this season is more like a bad arc from a traditional battle shounen series.

I wouldn’t really call it psychological anymore, or a thriller. It’s much more battle-focused, but don’t take that to mean that there are any good action sequences — there aren’t. Also, the plot is bad. It’s full of boring twists and twists that weren’t set up well. And some things it does set up never get satisfying conclusions.

Why does all of this happen? Well, that’s simple. This season of the anime is only 11 episodes long, and it “covered” from the end of the first season to the end of the series, which is 144 manga chapters. The first season covered 37 chapters in 12 episodes.

This may come as a shock to you, but 144 chapters in 11 episodes is a lot. And, that’s why the anime actually doesn’t cover all of that. Instead, it only covers the very beginning and end. Everything in between was cut and replaced with an anime-original arc.

Humans are Friends, Not Food

Part of what made the first season of The Promised Neverland good was that the demons were mysterious, evil creatures. I think we only got to see them once or twice, and they were depicted as vicious monsters. For the rest of the season, they didn’t need to be present in order to have an impact on the story.

Simply knowing that the demons existed and that the ultimate fate of the children, unless they escaped, would be to be eaten by them was enough. I would have honestly been fine if the demons were used in this same way throughout the rest of the story.

But, of course, that was never going to happen. Instead, this season was all about how demons are people too. Sure, they eat humans, but that’s only because they need to. They’re not actually evil. I don’t know about you, but that’s an extremely boring premise to me.

Mujina, and to a lesser extent Sonju, are the characters who exemplified this shift in how the demons are viewed in the series. Unlike most other demons, they don’t need to eat humans to survive. So their existence sets up a way for humans and demons to co-exist.

Co-existence is nice in the real world, but that’s not what I’m watching a psychological thriller for. I don’t want to see everyone in this series become friends and live happily ever after. I want to see the children escape from the farms, and then from the demon world.

And, yes, I guess I should mention that there are multiple worlds in this series now. There’s a demon world and a human world. The series obviously takes place within the demon world, and the human world is just like ours. So you could say The Promised Neverland is an isekai.

“What if We Ruined it?”

If you’ve watched this season of The Promised Neverland, it probably wouldn’t be hard to imagine the production board members asking themselves, “What if we ruined it?” It feels like every choice that was made regarding this season was the wrong one.

With that said, it’s not as if I’m saying that the source material is great. I haven’t read it and have no interest in doing so. But, based on what I’ve heard from people who have read it, while it’s better than this season, the material covered in the first season is the best part of the series.

In fact, a lot of my complaints about this season would still be included in this review even if the anime had followed the manga properly. It’s just that the negative aspects of the series would be more diluted by the decent or even good aspects.

The part that doesn’t make sense to me is why they would choose to skip most of the story and go with an anime-original ending. If we consider that one of the big goals for anime is to serve as an advertisement for manga, it’s an odd choice.

The next arc after the end of the first season (in the manga) was supposedly a good one. But it was skipped in the anime. Why not just adapt that arc that people like and then leave the anime without an ending? That seems like a better way to get people to then go read the manga.

As it is now, anime viewers have had the end of the manga spoiled. And sure, there are still other arcs they haven’t been spoiled on that they could read, but this season wasn’t a good advertisement for that. After watching this season, I was even less interested in the manga than I was before I watched it.

Conclusion

The Promised Neverland 2nd Season is a bad anime. I gave it a 4/10, which is half the score I gave to the previous season. While I do think people who are interested in the series should watch the first season, I’d recommend not watching the second.

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