Reviews WebAnimation / RWBY

Season 2 and lots to do

After a nerdtastically polarizing first season, in which both a devoted fandom and a critical backlash quickly grew, Rooster Teeth and the creators of RWBY came back to show everyone that this series has potential.

For the most part, I feel they succeeded.

Let's start with what's good. Or rather, what's better.

• The animation itself just looks sleeker, cleaner, refurbished. They've made the world look far richer; no more black shapes as non-essential characters. The characters and their environments are almost seamless.
• This of course means that the excessive fight scenes are all the more dynamic. There are a lot of great fights, especially toward the end of this volume.
• The characters are also more vivid, but still need a ton of fleshing out. Meanwhile, I'm way more fascinated by some of the new characters sprouting up, namely Cinder Fall's lovable Those Two Bad Guys duo, Mercury and Emerald, and Roman Torchwick's new oddball henchwoman, Neopolitan. I also like the Tin-Man inspired James Ironwood who serves as a new player in the intriguing political/government side of the story.
• Speaking of the story, I can say is that it definitely seems to be going somewhere. Which is how I would describe the early seasons of Red vs. Blue, and we saw how that turned out.

Now let's get to the bad.

• The intriguing plot advances at a snail's pace. Most episodes are composed of Wangst, quips and fight scenes, leaving little room for significant character development or world building.
• When I said the fights are "excessiveI" I meantthat the fights are near extraneous. I know this is an anime style action series, but I feel the world would have more room to breathe if we weren't seeing it whooshing by as the girls go to town on a bunch of cardboard monsters and robots. This is especially so when no character seems to be in any real danger, being able to take ridiculous amounts of damage without so much as a black eye or spot of blood.
• Also, so far all I really know about the villains is that some are really sneaky and really snarky, and the rest are big, loud and weak.
• Oh, and once again, the cute/funny factor is bordering on Tastes Like Diabetes so bad that the story's drama still comes off kind of weak.

RWBY definitely has some growing to do, but it's acknowledging its flaws and showing a lot of promise.