This review is focused on Metal Fight Beyblade: Baku, the second season of Metal Fight Beyblade

This review has spoilers.

Today I'm writing a review on one of my all time favorites as there's currently zero review out there for it. I'll split this review up into sections and then give my overall thoughts on this at the end.

Story: 6

If you're watching this series for the plot, what are you doing? This season in particular is the world tournament arc. I absolutely enjoy most training arcs I watch, so that helped, but it was nothing special. There was a underlying plot under this with the whole Toby and Ziggurat deal, and I thought it was cool but what's really to be enjoyed about this part is the world tournament.

Art: 6
The character designs are okay, some of them being standout (Ryuga in particular), but I think it's just decent. The beys and how they visualize the spirits in battle are actually alright. But with how anime is today it's not something particularly special.

Sound: 8
The soundtrack is actually something standout in my opinion. They did a pretty good job here selecting tracks that contribute to that feeling of intensity. I'd be on the egde of my seat sometimes to the tracks.

The opening and ending themes for English are some of my favorite ever, but the JP ones are just as good if not better.

On top of this, the original JP version and the english dubbing of it are pretty good. At times in the english dub, it gets too kind of cringy and you can tell it's pandering to the audience, but for the most part they did a good job. The JP cast is very good. It features the voice actors of fan favorites like:

Rengoku, Daichi, Sai (Satoshi Hino) for Kyouya
Shimizu, Hagakure (Kaori Nazuka) for Yu
Shouya, Minato, Sugawara, (Miyu Irino) for Tsubasa
Nanami, Chisaki, Joker (Kenjirou Tsuda) for Ryuga
All Might, Scar (Kenta Miyake) for Benkei
Sasuke, Uryu, Shirou (Noriaki Sugiyama) for the Blader DJ

For a rewatch in JP the voice cast can actually contribute to liking it more (which it did in my case).

Characters: 7
The characters are pretty basic. I obviously like the main character, but the cast of characters is alright. Ryuga, Kyoya, Kenta, Masamune, and other mains carry the cast. However, this season in particular does better than the rest on characters as it introduces characters of many different nationalities, each having different motivations for why they're apart of this tournament. You come to like most if not all of them by the time the series ends.

Enjoyment: 10
I don't think there is anything I've enjoyed as much as this franchise, so it scores a 10 in that category.

Overall: 10/10
I would recommend to watch this season and the rest of the franchise to anyone who had enjoyed some of it as a child. The reason why this achieves a 10 to me isn't because of story, art, characters, or the soundtrack. I've seen about 100 anime, and have read a decent amount of manga, and this pales out a LOT in comparison to the others. It's not a series with nuance, or a series with visually stunning fights. So why do I give this a 10?

It's a pretty simple reason: I had fun

If you go into this expecting a story like One Piece, or philosophical conflicts like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, or anything else of the sort, you're quite mistaken. This series is extremely simple. But I think that with that, it manages to be the most fun thing I've set my eyes on. The tops spin and the characters get riled up and in the end watching the battles are fun.

If you just sit back, don't put your head too much into it, and just enjoy what you're presented, you'll have a very good experience watching this. Just because you've gotten older and mature, doesn't mean you can't appreciate a fun time.