Once upon a time, there was a girl named Yor Briar. Orphaned at a young age, she found herself faced with the arduous task of providing not only for herself, but for her hapless younger brother as well. Filled with love and devotion for her only remaining family, Yor took on her first job... As an assassin. Which she proved to have quite an aptitude for. As she kept her line of work secret from her brother, eventually taking a position as an office worker to cover for the actual source of their prosperity, Yor would eliminate her targets to put food on the table, letting her brother think it was HER blood she was covered in every night, as if she was working herself bloody for his sake. Later in life, however, after little bro had grown up and moved on, Yor needed to find a husband quickly to avoid suspicion from an increasingly curious government, so she snagged the opportunity to enter into a sham marriage with the gallant Lloyd Forger and adopting his imaginative daughter Anya. This means she’ll have to hide her true identity from them on a daily basis, but juggling two separate lives can’t make things THAT much harder, can it? Can it?!

Ladies and Gentleman, we are BACK for season 2! Yes, this is the first time I’ve ever reviewed three entries in a franchise back to back, and unlike the last entry, we actually have something new to talk about regarding the visuals! As you may know, both halves of the first season of Spy x Family were written and directed by the same man, Kazuhiro Furuhashi, and as such, they both looked basically identical to each other. By which I also mean they looked fairly incredible. This time around, we’re in the third segment of the series, officially titled season 2(I still don’t like that BTW), this new installment has brought in some new names. It’s still being produced by the exact same companies as the previous installments, Cloverworks and Wit Studio, but Takahiro Harada has joined Kazuhiro in the director’s chair, and Ichiro Okochi has straight up replaced him as the writer. In all fairness, Kazuhiro Furuhashi has directed several projects in the past, but most of them didn't look great... Spy x Family is easily the best looking project he’s helmed since Le Chevalier D’eon... So bringing in a younger talent who has only previously directed single episodes and one Idolmaster side-project before was an interesting move.

This shift in vision does seem to have led to some changes, and the first one I’d like to highlight is that all of the issues I’ve had in the previous season with episode structure are gone! As you may recall, in my previous two reviews I pointed out how the episodes would often end at weak points, when there was a far stronger ending sitting there in the middle of the episode, and that is no longer the case, this season is much better managed from that perspective. The half-episode vignettes that make up almost half of the season are arranged so much better in terms of impact and story. This may have something to do with the other half of the season being one continuous story arc, but I’ll still count it as a win. Another interesting change is with the animation quality, which does seem to have taken a slight downgrade, as the animation doesn’t seem as lavish and expensive as it did previously, but I in no way mean that as a bad thing, because it is still good, it’s just kind of different in its approach.

I can’t really say the animation quality is better or worse than it was before, because a well managed low budget show has every chance to be just as impressive to me as animation with more money than it knows what to do with, but it is noticeably cheaper. There are more keyframes this time around, featuring slight animation cycles as a corner cutting measure, and there are one or two lip-flap conversations that go on a few seconds too long. In any other show, I’d assume this was a cost-cutting measure, pure and simple, but for Spy x Family? There was more than likely an ulterior motive, because the moments where /i noticed this were in the middle of the cruise ship story arc, which was generously stuffed with intense, fast paced and outright epic scenes of professional assassins battling to the death, and it makes sense that they might have needed to cut a few of those corners in order to bring in the funds required to showcase Yor in her absolute combat glory, and we’re talking a LOT of highly sensational fight scenes.

I don’t have a lot to say about the dub... It’s still exceptional, no real changes have been made... But I do feel as though I haven’t given Tyler Walker the spotlight he deserves as the Forger family canine Bond. There aren’t a lot of voice actors who can convincingly play pets, but I cracked up at the way he had Bond keep saying "Bark.” Another couple of highlights are the two leaders among the assassins Yor has to face, with Nazeesh Tarsha playing the shifty and mysterious Snoops, and Reagan Murdock as the slightly unhinged and weirdly unnamed Assassin’s Leader. Both actors are standouts amongst a very large supporting villain cast, and they’re even better bouncing off of each other. Still a great dub, still highly recommended.

So there’s something interesting that occurred to me as I was watching the first couple of episodes of this season; Out of the three segments of this franchise I’ve seen thus far... Season one on rewatch, and season 2 for the first time... Each segment may prominently feature all three members of the main cast, and nobody really gets neglected, but each segment is primarily dedicated to one character. Season one cour 1 was the Anya half, as it focused mainly on her attempts to succeed at school and use her powers to keep her family together. Season 1 cour 2 was the Lloyd segment, as it went into greater detail about the social and political situation he was trying to prevent from blowing up, and we were granted more exposure into his coworkers, for better or worse. Well, as it turns out, season two would continue this trend by primarily featuring Yor, as well as a couple of highly memorable vignettes from the perspective of Bond.

Now what did this season, specifically, do for Yor? Well, it never really occurred to me previously, but when you really think about it, Yor was kind of portrayed as a walking contradiction in the previous segments. Her role as a mother was centered around nurturing and protection, yet her role as an assassin was centered around death and violence, and it was never really made clear what kind of people she was targeting... Was she only going after bad guys and trying to make the world a better place like Lloyd, or was she just indiscriminately killing anyone she was paid to? These are good questions that, in retrospect, kind of needed to be answered. Well, in this season, in addition to most of the vignettes being about her in some way, Yor Forger gets her own six episode story arc, and it is amazing, easily my favorite part of the franchise thus far. Right off the bat, this arc starts on the right foot by having her take on a job not as an assassin, but as a bodyguard, proving definitively to the audience that Yor is more than just a murderer. She is capable of being a competent and dedicated protector, which is what her character needed.

Of course, that’s not to say she doesn’t unalive anybody in this story arc, let’s not get crazy here. She’s hired on as protection for a woman and her child who have bounties on their heads, and thanks to a slip-up from HER fake husband, the cruise ship they’re using to escape the country is literally crawling with professional assassins for Yor to fight, leading to some epic, pulse-pounding moments I won’t spoil, ranging from some shocking quick kills(or just knockouts if there are witnesses) to an extended set piece that may remind you of Guts killing 100 men in Berserk, or The Bride tearing through the Crazy 88, with a sense of suspense and heightened stakes that had me on the edge of my seat. It’s important to note that she does make enough mistakes in this arc AND comes close enough to the brink of death to shut down any BS accusations of Mary-Sue status, though, and Anya and Lloyd are also on the train to provide both comic relief and a crucial subplot where they have to deal with the assassins official Plan B.

There was this one moment I didn’t care for, however... Yor and her charges are walking down a hallway, and a dangerous assassin is walking towards them from the opposite direction. Anya sees this, and she knows that shit’s about to go down, so she tries to distract Lloyd from witnessing the fight. Only, it takes her so long to do so that the encounter should have happened seven times over, and Lloyd comes off as out-of-character in this scene, for a few reasons. Still, it’s just one poorly times scene in a story arc that otherwise fucking rocks. As for the Bond vignettes I mentioned earlier, they’re meant to show different situations through Bond’s perspective as a dog with slightly higher intelligence than most of his kind, and what you see through his eyes is fascinating. My favorite moment from this was when he gets the idea to go help Lloyd at his job, and he envisions his master’s job as going out and spear-hunting wild boars like a traditional hunter-gatherer, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get that image out of my head.

I’d also like to take this story arc as an opportunity to point out how impressed I am that so far, with 37 episodes behind me, Spy X Family has shown an unwavering dedication to avoiding any kind of fanservice. It never goes beyond an occasional glimpse of cleavage in Yor’s assassin outfit, but that kind of feels important since we’re supposed to look at her differently when she’s wearing it. Hell, during her big battle, she gets slashed across the chest, which you would expect most anime to use an excuse to showcase even more cleavage, but no, Spy x Family holds up its usual standard of taking violence seriously, and all that comes of it is a blood splatter, and an injury that figures into the plot later. And speaking of injuries, I also adored the episode where she gets shot in the butt during a botched hit job, and Lloyd misinterprets her pained facial expressions and refusal to sit down as a sign that she’s mad at him, Anya is also super precious here. Hell, this season also does a lot of good for Lloyd, as it finally gives a clear glimpse at some of his weaknesses, such as how his identity as a spy is so integral to his personality that he doesn’t know how to turn it off and just relax and have fun. And while we’re at it, Anya can be a straight up brat sometimes, because she’s fucking five years old, of course she can, we all could be at that age.

The overarching plot, by which I mean Operation Stryx and the mission surrounding the Desmond family, has not made any progress this season. Not only has Lloyd not gotten any closer to his target, Anya has also not gotten any closer to Damian, and on the one hand, that is a little frustrating, especially given the previous cour ended with some major steps being taken in that direction. On the other hand, that plot itself doesn’t really have any emotional weight or investment built into it, and I struggle to imagine anybody really giving a shit about it, since it primarily exists as the excuse to explore a much more enjoyable and engaging Found Family story... And let’s be honest, Found Family is a universally beloved story trope. Not only is it satisfying as hell to see a bunch of random misfits coming together and bonding over a common goal, but it also lets you live out a fantasy we’ve all had at some point, being able to choose who your family even is. Unfortunately, the plot does have to go somewhere at some point, and the only reason I’m not getting too upset about it is because there’s a movie I’m going to be watching soon, and a third season confirmed for October, so maybe THEN we get to see what happens to the Forgers when Lloyd’s mission is over?

Much like the previous installments, Spy x Family season 2 is available from Crunchyroll, as well as for streaming on Amazon Prime. The original manga by Tatsuya Endo is available from Viz Media.

There have been countless extremely lovable Found Families in fiction before... From Firefly to Cowboy Bebop to Guardians of the Galaxy, everyone loves seeing these tight knit little unrelated family units form, I’m no exception to this rule, and The Forgers are among my favorite examples of this trope. In addition to this, I love how Spy x Family is just constantly firing on all cylinders, as it knows exactly what its strengths are, and it never allows itself to settle into a groove or a routine. It can be suspenseful, it can be touching, and it can be hilarious, often all in the same episode, and yet the tone never feels off or out of balance. It’s not just a good show, it’s a show we don’t deserve, and while it hasn’t quite reached perfection in my book, it does feel like every installment that I watch just keeps getting better and better.

I give Spy x Family season 2 a 9/10