Okay, so this review will have spoilers. You have been warned.
Let me go back to Season 1 just for a little. My impression was extremely high due to the amazing music, amazing animation, art style was decent, high tensions all over, emotional appeal to the audience, and even character development in the main cast. In addition, the biggest thing that appealed to me with S1 was the aspect of survival. How will the kids get away? What strategies would they use? How many would they take with them? Where would they go? These questions come in mind and are expertly answered through the progression of the plot. Along with how faithful the anime adaptation was in respect to the manga, this led to S1 being one of my favorite anime.
Now, Season 2 didn't start off horrible. There are some good points to it as well, like the OP/ED, the trials they underwent to survive the demons that chase them, the search for Minerva's hideout... I could go on. The CGI in the very first episode was rather disappointing, but for the most part it's forgivable. What wasn't forgivable was the insane amount of cuts from the manga. While S1 was a really faithful adaptation, where the few cuts didn't affect the cohesion nor pacing of the story, S2 is an extremely unfaithful adaptation due to the extremely fast pace. The amounts of cuts aren't so bad in the beginning, but upon the 5th episode, I lost all respect for the series. Seriously, this show treated the manga like a fucking flipbook with the pacing and cuts. I realized the pace would render S2 to be a lower score than S1, but I didn't think it would get as bad as it did later in the series.
Before I get there though, I have to reiterate my extreme disappointment in the cuts. As I mentioned before, the theme of S1 that appealed to me the most was the survival aspect. Now, I have not read the manga, but I have watched a video on the cuts up until halfway into the season. This is the video I refer to:
It seems, from what I learned in the video, that the entire survival aspect was cut out. In the first few episodes, the anime cuts all the scenes where the children use their knowledge from the books they've read to survive. This is, to some extent, forgiveable. The worldbuilding is also cut in the anime, which is a rather alarming. Even more alarming are the characters that were entirely cut from the anime, like the guy who was supposed to be waiting for them at the bunker. At this point, the anime starts playing flipbook with the manga, placing scenes from many chapters ahead into the episode. The anime then declines steeply once we get a timeskip, where the arc that is supposedly the "best manga arc" and "the peak of the manga", the Goldy Pond arc, was skipped. Yet, this is the arc with the most action as Emma and Ray learn how to hunt, how to survive, and even grow as a character. After that, we get a series of anime-only scenes, and the anime skips dozens of chapters to rush the discovery of Norman's survival by the 5th episode.
I feel, due to the aforementioned sequence of events, that the first 5 episodes alone was enough to throw the beauty of S1 away. All the worldbuilding is gone, the survival aspect is now at its bare minimum, and I truly wish I dropped the series at this point, because it only gets worse from here on out. I will say that the anime did a good job of giving the spotlight to characters other than Emma, because many shonen manga tend to only give the spotlight to the "Big 3" characters, but this just isn't enough to fix what went wrong in the anime. Hell, even the discovery of Norman's survival just felt cheap due to the rushed progression and lack of buildup. Like, seriously, how can I feel anything about Norman when a 6 month timeskip happened at the beginning of the very same episode?
There are many posts on what went wrong after this point, so I will be brief on this matter, but I absolutely hated the rushed pacing and cut content towards the end of the anime, as this just led to me believing the mangaka's writing quality went down exponentially. Can you blame me though? By introducing a fuckton of plot convenience, I couldn't help but think this, when in reality, the manga explains it so much better. Not to mention how much the latter half of the show focused on Emma trying to save all the demons... it honestly felt like the show went from a story of survival in a cruel and oppressive world (similar to Attack on Titan) to a disgustingly idealistic shonen story where all that matters is saving the world and making it a better place. I'm sure its done better in the manga, but if that's all this story becomes in the manga, I'll be bound to hate it there, but at least it won't be as bad of an experience as this season. The anime budgeting must have been really fucking cheap, because that is exactly what this anime is: cheap. I will be reading the manga (S1 ends at Chapter 37) after this, but I'll be damned if I watch this butchered series again. I said this in the summary, I've said this in other posts, and I'll fucking say it again: The Promised Neverland Season 2 is a series where The Promises Never Land.