I honestly don't know what to say at all. This season should've been amazing, and most people do think that this season is pretty great. But for some reason, I just don't really like it.

Trying to judge this season critically is very weird. In theory this season should be much better than Season 1. A lot of the new ideas that Season 2 brings to the table are very interesting. The witches, the Sanctuary, the new characters, and other ideas that are intriguing on paper. However, this season ended up being so much worse than Season 1, because Subaru is a significantly worse character.

Whenever any crazy event happened to him in Season 1, it had a long lasting impact on him. Usually the causes of his deaths are very mysterious. The best example of this is in the first half of the 3rd arc of Season 1. Subaru and the viewer never fully know what is going on, and that what made it so effective. With each and every death, a new piece of the puzzle is added, which makes the payoffs in many episodes feel so satisfying. The audience and Subaru are always in the same boat, which makes Subaru's emotional struggles come out in the person who is watching it. Season 2 has a very different approach in writing Subaru.

In Season 2, the reason why Subaru dies isn't very ambiguous. It is always laid out without much subtly and any element of mystery absent. It isn't rewarding to see Subaru die for a reason that the audience can put together pretty much instantly. What makes this problem even worse is that it just kind of feels like Subaru shrugs off his deaths and just tries again. The whole series just feels like it is insisting that Subaru is going through a lot, but you can't exactly see that in him. It feels like the series doesn't fully know what its own biggest strength is, and just ends up trying to replicate this in a very half-hearted way. While this may seem like a very small problem, it isn't. This is the core of Re:Zero, and it just ends up being broken by this season.

My score for this isn't lower than a 50, because in terms of world-building and the development of the other characters, this season is on par with, if not better than Season 1. Otto, Roswaal, Beatrice, and even more get so much development in this season, which wasn't really there in Season 1. Characters like Garfiel and Echidna are great new editions to this universe that add a lot to the experience. However, these characters have to be in service to Subaru's journey, which I have established before, is not very good. Side characters can't carry a series like Re:Zero, because Re:Zero is about Subaru and the story mainly focuses on him.

This season isn't trash, far from it. However, seeing this series fall extremely below my expectations when it could've very easily far surpassed them saddens me. This might be weird to say, but I am still excited for Part 2 of this season. This is because the ending to Episode 13 of Season 2 set up its next part extremely well. The situation that Subaru is now in is a perfect opportunity for something actually very interesting to happen with his character. So while this Part 1 of this season was extremely disappointing for me, I am still holding out a lot of hope that Part 2 will be so much greater than anything this series has done before.