Blair Loveday
Demon Slayer has to be the best new anime I have watched in a long time.
Part 1 showed us a beautiful and cute design with a dark tone and story which created an absolute treat of an experience. Part 2 has well, changed a few things up.
The most notable change in Part 2 is the tone. When we finished up Part 1 the team were fighting the demon slayer with the hog mask Inosuke who is fighting in a fit of rage.
Pretty quickly Inosuke joins the team and he regularly goes into a rage state. On top of this Zenitsu throughout the series shows his power more and more, but is still a complete wuss. He has to go into a trance to be a badass, so the vast majority of the time he is whining and cowering.
There are interesting character ideas here, but because they are massively overused it completely changes the tone for this part of the series. It winds up being classic anime over the top humor where less of these moments could have allowed for the consistent tone the first part achieved.
Despite this, the show is still amazing. Tanjiro and the relationship with his sister Nezuko in her life as a demon continues to grow and we learn a lot more about the demon world and hierarchy. Far more interestingly we learn a lot more about the Demon Slayer Corps and its hierarchy as well as some colourful characters on the good side.
I won’t touch much more on the story because well, you should enjoy the show a little bit spoiler free but despite its tonal change it still manages to tell some dark stories.
We discover a lot of villains, some of which you can empathise with, and the bulk of the plot goes from strength to strength.
As with Part 1 the show is still an absolute treat to look at with gorgeous animation and world design, and the artistic style used for attacks is mind blowingly gorgeous.
The voice acting also continues to be strong, and I mean, go watch it, it’s such a great series.
The Blu-ray is packed with features consisting of some trailers for other series and textless opening and closing credit songs which is super cool as the songs in Demon Slayer are outstanding.
In some ways Part 2 is better than Part 1 as the story keeps developing quickly and we learn a lot about this intriguing world, in other ways like the tone Part 1 had a better balance. Either way this is an excellent second half to an extraordinary series.
