English Dub Season Review: Zombie Land Saga Revenge Season Two

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Franchouchou returns for their second season with a vengeance! After a humiliating failure of a show, the group retreats back to the house to lick their wounds. Kotaro can’t take the stress and starts drinking himself into a stupor. Without their fearless leader and hype man, the girls decide to take matters into their own hands and start finding ways to pay off their debts. As they go about their new jobs and recover their mojo, they slowly begin to be ready to give this whole idol thing another shot.

After a stint on a Japanese TV show where they showed viewers around a shrine, the girls are back in the public spotlight. Throughout the season, they work on growing their brand and their fans, and have run-ins with everyone from rivals Iron Frill to spoiled child actors. But when the time comes for their next big concert, they’ll have to overcome more than just the usual challenges, because Saga is in real danger.

Our Take:

Zombie Land Saga started off as a real gem of a show. A series about idols who happen to be undead is a perfect mashup that anime was made for; it’s wacky but it worked. The second season, Zombie Land Saga Revenge, is still a lot of fun at times, but overall it feels like a step down over the thrilling highs of the first season.

It’s not necessarily that the second season is a complete downgrade in quality. It’s just that when the novelty of Franchouchou’s initial dynamic wears off, the bones of the show aren’t quite enough on their own to make up for the diminishing returns of the premise. There are still some cool moments and interesting episodes, but looking back I don’t see any clear home runs when it comes to the individual episodes—I do see a lot of missed opportunities, though.

The initial premiere of the season was basically a re-do of sorts, like ‘we were idols, then we stopped, and now we’re going to be idols again’. It’s not that exciting because it’s literally just retreading territory we’ve already been in last season. After that, the format of the season switches to focusing on individuals for the most part, with each of the girls of the group getting an episode that follows them specifically.

This has a lot of potential as a story format to allow us to get in-depth looks at the girls as the season progresses, but unfortunately most of the spotlight episodes this season feel very surface level. An episode focused on Zero could’ve been really interesting, but it turns out that watching the gag character doing her usual gag for an entire episode isn’t that groundbreaking. And while traveling back in time with Yugiri to the place where Saga was in trouble in the past sounds really neat, she’s basically sidelined for the entire storyline while an accidental revolutionary takes up most of the screen time.

There is somewhat of an overarching story to the season, focusing on both overcoming Franchouchou’s failed performance and undoing a curse that’s been placed on Saga. That latter part is never really explained or explored in much detail, and just feels like an unnecessary add-on that served to muddy the plot. And while the final episode does see Franchouchou return to the spot of their failure and put on a stellar show, I think the performance in the penultimate episode, where they are exposed as zombies while performing for a group of kids at a shelter, would’ve been a much stronger note to go out on.

Overall, I was disappointed in Zombie Land Saga’s second season. The first season was such a surprise hit, and the first episode’s rap battle will never be forgotten in the history books of anime, but I struggle to even recall a similar moment of epic-ness from this season. And one of the worst things a show can be is forgettable.