If you asked me where I thought RWBY as a story could potentially end, a crossover with the Justice League would not have even made my top 20, but here we are. Things are in a weird place for RWBY lately, with Volume 9 starting and finishing, followed by a Blu-Ray release, followed by the first of said two part crossover movie, then a plea from its creators to spread word of interest in more material as the company that built it continues to recede and take major steps to make as much money as they can from what little they can do. And now, the other shoe drops for the RWBY franchise, with the release of the second half of the crossover, its only remaining animated production that had still been ordered. There’s simply nothing left until someone at Warner Bros. decides to throw Rooster Teeth a bone, which puts this particular movie that was just meant to be a fun side thing in a very odd place and feeling. I’ve been following RWBY as a whole since its very first trailer, so to think this may be the last time I discuss it in this capacity makes me feel…quite strange, and even more so that it’s in such an unusual way. But we might as well get started talking about it.A lot of how one may feel about Part TWO of this crossover is going to depend on how they feel about Part ONE, naturally. You can go back and read my review of the first part for my thoughts, but what my feelings really boil down to is that I thought it was a pretty fun time that did interesting things with the RWBY cast and some odd but okay stuff with their respective versions of Justice League characters while impressively being able to keep the story within the timeline of the show. Right off the bat, pun very much intended, I can say this second part does a lot of those things, though to a lesser and much messier degree. Part One managed to work itself into an uneventful time in RWBY’s seventh season. The second part takes place after the ambiguous ending of Volume 9 (seemingly taking into account an unfinished ending that put the lead characters back with their friends in Vacuo), making it the latest part in the series chronologically, but also adding a ton of weird questions, namely why Team RWBY doesn’t ask the Justice League for some backup in the oncoming Salem threat. Oh yeah, and did you remember that this is also loosely based off a comic? Well, thankfully it doesn’t end up pulling too much from that, it wasn’t great.While Part One kinda had the two groups meet in the middle in a digital simulation that made them all younger, this half physically brings Team RWBY (no JNPR this time) to the DC Universe to meet the proper Justice League and even some supervillains who inexplicably decide to help out, which leads me to the first major step down from last time: the models for the DC characters look pretty bad for the most part. Even the ones like Superman and Batman that look basically like the typical designs look kinda blocky and oversaturated, but then you get ones like Wonder Woman or Vixen or Jessica Cruz’ Green Lantern that look basically unfinished. Flash and Cyborg look alright, as do the Team RWBY redesigns (for some reason their clothes change just by coming over, presumably to sell toys despite there being none for these designs), but that’s still the majority of characters that it’s just not fun to look at. Oddly enough, the modified Grimm designs are probably the biggest standouts, with a personal highlight for me being a dinosaur Grimm that may or may not be a major deep cut, and if so is quite fitting for what may be the final RWBY animation.And then there’s the matter of the story. As mentioned, Part One was more or less meant to be the Justice League coming over to Remnant with a DC bad guy, Killg%re (yes, his name is with a percentage sign), even though they only ended up meeting in a simulation. So, Part Two is the reverse with Team RWBY making the multiversal jump to the DC Universe and facing both Killg%re AND Watts, a main villain from RWBY who was given a rather unceremonious end in Volume 8 and somehow was the only one of the main villain team to never interact with any of the main cast, which I suppose this is rectifying. The way the characters cross universes is probably the weakest justification given, having them find a convenient factory that just so happens to have the tech needed to help them CROSS UNIVERSES, while Watts’ reveal as an antagonist is treated as a huge reveal but has to bend over backwards to even get there. They also try to incorporate developments Volumes 8 and 9 like Atlas being destroyed and its impact on Weiss or Ruby being more reckless in fights after her trauma in the Ever After and trying to use those as ways for them to connect with Batman and Superman respectively, as well as making a whole thing out of Flash’s guilt from being possessed last movie so Yang can use her entirely different trauma to tell him to get over it, but they’re all pretty flimsy, which was also an issue with the last movie.All in all, I’m gonna say this is probably the lesser of the two halves, but I’ve already seen some disagree on that, so this will most likely depend on your own priorities in a crossover or whether you’re looking for more RWBY or DC stuff from these. Personally, I’m of the belief that a crossover should always be about showing the strengths of the two groups meeting while giving them both ways to shine in a way that doesn’t undermine the other. While I think the first part did a sufficient job of having the Justice League highlight the RWBY characters with their setting and enemies, this seems like, at least on paper, that it was meant to go the other way around, which I don’t think it does. I’m already a DC fan, more so than I am a RWBY one, and it honestly feels like this was more a RWBY story than a Justice League story. That’s probably to be expected since this is pretty much just spinning off from the main RWBY plot to interact with a version of the Justice League specific to these films, but I don’t feel compelled to spend more time with these versions on their own…although I’d probably watch more if they made more just because I’m a completionist.And that’s that for RWBY in animation for the foreseeable future, I guess. Volume 9, for all its faults, at least felt like a clean enough break going into the next stage of the story they planned, but now we have this, which gives us a little taste of where things are/were headed, and I don’t know how to feel about that. Who knows if the character threads set up in this movie, like the remaining Schnees facing backlash for Jacques’ actions or Ruby’s seeming death wish, will go anywhere in future volumes? Well, WE don’t because, at the time of writing, there may not BE future volumes. We’ve heard rumors about the remaining plot being crammed into a single season, split into movies like this (which would be my pick), or even delegated to a comic or two, and that’s assuming it comes back in any form at all. But, as we enter what seem to be The Wilderness Years for RWBY, I imagine the fanbase will stay strong as they always have. They have weathered worse storms and will likely do fine while waiting patiently for whatever news comes next from this little independent franchise that could. We close on the day after the in-universe birthday of protagonist Ruby Rose, looking out into an unknown future. While this is not where any of us thought we’d end up when this journey started, I feel compelled to evoke the words of its late creator, Monty Oum: Keep moving forward. Carry on with that and I’m sure we’ll meet again, somewhere, somehow.
