Sieran 2 spares no expense at running forward with what's been given. The previous film (or four episodes) were all dedicated to the Empire's point of view. When I started this volume with the Alliance it began to put things into perspective, especially when it came to focusing on the conflict itself.

I think by just putting all their effort into a 4 episode story arc worked. I realize it's a movie, but everything here worked better when it focused on one conflict at a time. I didn't get a bunch of swapping back and forth trying to understand everything on both sides. I began to get a feeling from the previous movie, despite some of my disdain for certain perspectives.

As we swap places to the Alliance, I'm invested from the get-go. Once the coup d'etat starts I can begin to see Die Neu This shine. The previous episodes had me wondering, and now it has me waiting for the moment it all comes to fruition. The tension and setup is just leaps and bounds better. I finally get the show, and it's inner workings. The world begins to make a little more sense, and the conflict is so exciting to see on screen.

That space battle has much more weight than the ones that happened previously. I feel like the direction and tone is overall better here. I got pretty excited as soon as the soldiers made their landing on the ship, and proceeded to have sword fights with each other. This kind of brutality and weightiness was missing from the previous season, and I enjoyed every minute of it here. Really the ship battles had me caring more about them now that there was some build-up from the previous film/episodes.

If there was one misstep in this volume, it was a mismatched emotional scene involving Yang Wenli. In the scene prior to this, we had just witnessed a horrible massacre and the death of a familiar character. We jump back to Yang as he's seen coping, and as the camera pans up it shows him wearing sunglasses. I realize that it was representative of him not wanting to show the emotions, in fact, the narrator stated it specifically and gave reasons why. But I couldn't help but laugh at a scene that wasn't supposed to be funny. It's just something that didn't turn out well, at least for me, and I'm sure many others would feel the same way about it too. It is a novel-faithful scene apparently, though I think it could've been handled more tastefully. I just found the scene tonally inconsistent with what I should've felt.

Seiran 2 is solid. It's not a masterpiece, but I think everything in terms of plot and characters are coming together much better. I'm really enjoying the series much more than before, and am starting to see some of the setups paid off. I'm looking forward to finishing the last movie in the trilogy.