The first Tower of Druaga season started off slowly, but gradually built up speed and had me super-excited for season 2. Although ToD: SoU was able to maintain some of what I enjoyed in season 1, it was never able to generate the same thrills or laughs. Other than maybe episode 7, most of the episodes were decent at best. Even worse, the last few episodes attempted to wrap the story up in a flurry and failed.

Story

The story was definitely the weakest part of SoU. When I watched Neeba in AoU, I found his brooding mysterious and interesting. I briefly felt hope flare up as the Ancient Sumar Empire was brought up, but this was never really addressed adequately. In the end most of the storylines were essentially chucked out the window into Meskia as Neeba’s bro-jealousy overwhelmed everything. The final revelation that the Tower was originally a bunch of artillery cannons for firing on unseen enemies had me facepalming hard, and I didn’t like how the story wrapped up at all. I really thought the writers could have done a good job with Kaaya and Neeba’s stories, but while Kaaya’s was alright, Neeba’s was terrible.

Characters

As bad as the story was in SoU, the characters were not much better. Jil’s party plateaued and we didn’t get any of the lovable moments in SoU (e.g. the mage traps in AoU). There was a little Fatina development and I was thankful she didn’t immediately hop in the sack with Utu, but everyone else pretty much stayed at the same level in season 2. All of the main characters ended up staying flat or regressing into flat characters. We never even learned what Succubus’ deal was. The only plus was that Ethana succeeded in bagging her man at the end.

The characters introduced in SoU were even worse. Most of them were poorly developed and unnecessary. Henaro could have been pretty neat, but we never really found out that much of her past. The Pazuz revelation was thrown out there and then promptly ignored. The constant betrayals were silly as well. Gremica served little purpose, especially since the Sumar angle was not pursued. Kai and the butt-spoon joke were ok, but she was ended up getting bounced around like Jim Jackson. The time spent on the new characters could have been used to develop the original cast and story, and so I felt like the new characters were a detriment to the series.

Tilt

The one really bright spot in SoU was the OP. The song was decent, but the OP animation was incredible. Once again, it felt like the best planning went into storyboarding the OP, and the OP only got better as we met more characters. The ED animation was understandably lazy, and I didn’t think that much of the song. BGM seemed mostly recycled from AoU, but it wasn’t a big deal to me. The voice acting was decent, but unremarkable.

Unfortunately, I think the animation funds must have run out midway through SoU. The second half felt like a fix-for-DVD special, as the action scenes were laughably bad and many of the proportions were off even during slow-paced scenes. Considering that the fights were never really that important to Tower of Druaga anyway, I really think they could have streamlined many of the fights and redistributed the budget to keep the overall series looking good.

Verdict

AoU ended up being surprisingly good, but in the end SoU never really got past surprisingly average. There were some good moments, but season 2 felt like a generic RPG conversion in a way that season 1 was able to avoid. It just felt like the writers mailed it in for SoU and the budget wasn’t there. I was disappointed, but I didn’t hate SoU.

Kabitzin’s Rating: 3/5

Related posts:

1. Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk Review
2. Tower of Druaga: Sword of Uruk 06
3. Shakugan no Shana Second Review

Tagged as: Three Stars