Bryce's Blog

As promised, although later than I was planning, here is another post. Awhile back, I got a DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack from Best Buy. I don’t really get all this excitement over the BD format, since everything is essentially going digital now. For right now, I view it only as a useful backup medium. However, today’s post is not about Blu-Ray, but the product I purchased, which is called Spice & Wolf Season 2.

Spice & Wolf Season 2 is obviously a continuation of the previous adaption in which a traveling merchant, Kraft Lawrence, and a pagan wolf god, Holo, meet each other and embark on a journey. The goal of the journey is to bring Holo back to her home. Along their journey, they encountered problems, such as a large debt and betrayal. Now, they continue on their way, but continue to face a few problems, which involves pyrite and fur.

I cannot say that there is much that is enjoyable about this as it is more dialogue-driven than action-packed. In this case, it is similar to .Hack//Sign, but .Hack had more action and an interesting story to go with it. I will say that I did like seeing that Lawrence went out of his way needlessly, in order to not lose Holo, as well as the fact that he is not dense, but does have his weaknesses. Holo also shows signs of feelings for Lawrence, as she shows signs of jealousy and even sacrifices herself, in order to help Lawrence realize his dream. In this day and age, dialogue-driven shows or stories may be dull, but this is a nice change of pace from the movies that are all eye-candy and no story.

As for what I did not like, the first episode in the set, which was episode 0 was really pointless. It did show signs that Holo liked Lawrence, but there was nothing relevant to the show. Lawrence and Holo get together with an old acquaintance and just talk on and on about pointless things. If that was not enough, almost nothing happened in it for the longest time in the beginning. That is a flaw of the type of animation it was, but they could have had the three just sit down and start talking to begin with. Fortunately, this episode was not available on Hulu, as far raw I can remember, when I first saw this show and I am quite glad that they did not. Not only was the first episode a let down, but Lawrence also did not have faith that Holo would support him until the end. I guess many men are like that, but as Lawrence and Holo traveled together for so long now, he should realize that she would have helped him. The bonus episode and Lawrence’s doubt took this season down, but the former took it down the most.

As I am sure that most of the readers here prefer more action than dialog-driven and/or thought-driven stuff, I cannot really recommend this or the previous season. However, it was not entirely bad, so feel free to give it a shot, if you want to try something new.

What are your thoughts about this show? Do you think things need to be action-packed to be interesting?