I'm going to target this review towards people who were like me, unfamiliar with the Utawarerumono series and just happened to stumble upon this entry. While browsing Anilist I came across this show and was a little bothered by the lack of information. I wasn't sure if I could enter the series just by starting here at Utawarerumono: The False Faces, but I got it all sorted out.

It may not seem worth your time because it's relatively old, but if you want to dip your toes into the series, start with Utawarerumono (2006) before watching this one. I don't like to distill Utawarerumono into simple genres, but it's primarily a slice of life fantasy/action series. 2006 and The False Faces have a significant gap of time between them story-wise, but 2006 lays the foundation for many story details that help things in The False Faces make sense.

Much like the preceding season (2006), The False Faces revolves around an amnesiac man who slowly builds up a cast of characters around him one way or another. The action-y type of conflict is minimal in the first half of the show. Instead, the focus is on the daily life of the cast during peacetime. I personally found the characters to be very endearing, each with their distinct character design, verbal tics and accents. They're also easy to identify through tropes they've been given, which at the time I watched, I didn't mind that. For the people that have played the visual novel The False Faces was adapted from, these characterizations are frustrating, but I'll touch on that later. Either way, the cast essentially grows into a big family just like 2006 cast did and it's great, and I don't think the time spent on that went to waste.

I would personally pay close attention to Kuon and Haku, the duo that acts as the driving force of the show. Their chemistry, with a dynamic that is very opposite of each other, is cute and enjoyable, and it's no wonder their personalities attract such a diverse cast to them.

Utawarerumono has always had a big scope of the world, involving battle and diplomacy and character origins from different countries in the world, but in The False Faces I think that scope is much more realized. There's much more emphasis on the visuals and the locations used throughout it, and overall it just felt so much more inviting to be in than it did in the first season.

The music, through the soundtrack shared with the visual novels, really lends itself to covering a wide range of emotions and atmospheres that help stay engaged with watching. I love how easily it sets the mood to be comical, to be mysterious, to be mournful.

I'm about to get sidetracked but the OP and ED are very akin to 2006 as well, an energetic opening with a solemn ending full of reflection.

Anyways, all of these things really come together to produce a last act in The False Faces that makes it easier to set aside any gripes about the earlier parts of the show. It's full of character drama, war with combat that leaves very impressionable consequences, and it has the right music played at the right time. As much as I was enjoying The False Faces, I found myself wondering when the show was going to get its act together and when it did, it absolutely delivered.

(A side note, there's lots of spoiler-heavy lore about the series that came up in the last act of Utawarerumono 2006 that I'm glad was expanded on in the False Faces.)

Many of the flaws that The False Faces has though will probably go over your head if all you've seen is the first season. If you watch only The False Faces, you'll have your own batch of problems mostly related to the dominant slice of life aspect of the first 12 episodes. Visual novel players, however, will have an incredible amount of issues with this adaptation. I mentioned earlier that a lot of the characters feel like they're centered around tropes, and it's part of what makes them distinct in a show where the characters are competing for screen time. The problem is that the characters are caricatures compared to their visual novel counterparts - the anime scriptwriters really honed in on specific traits about each one and amplified it, to the point that some visual novel players consider the adapted characters butchered compared to the originals.

The story was also rewritten quite a bit in the second half, a lot of it being simplification of events, some changes of where events took place, but also some key subtle moments for characters that got cut out. For an anime-only watcher this won't be apparent at all, but I'm just putting it out there that if you think something is off, it's potentially because of how the story was changed from the source material. Allegedly, the director only read the visual novel script without playing and was oddly selective what he wanted in the anime, but I've only heard about that as rumblings in the Uta community. The things that they cut, as well as the fact that the upcoming Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth anime is adapting an even longer visual novel than this, leaves a lot of people worried that they will botch good character development in season 3.

Personally I did feel like the episodes were well paced and ended in good spots, but perhaps they could've done more with their time. I've always believed this series as a whole could be much better if there were longer episodes and higher episode count (relatively unrealistic dream I suppose, but hey, Mask of Truth is getting 28 episodes).

To put a wrap on this, I definitely recommend getting into this, but you should be wary of how you approach it. It's a fantastic continuation of its first season, Utawarerumono 2006, but a flawed adaptation of its source game, Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception. It's a middle act of a larger story that gets you invested in the characters ahead of Mask of Truth, with a story that may potentially weaken the plot of the Mask of Truth anime. But hey, ignorance is bliss, so watch the anime first before giving the visual novel a try.