In the midnineties character designer Keiichi Sato had an idea for a multimedia franchise. His concept was a giant robot show but with a unique edge... Taking inspiration from both Japanese and American television of the sixties and seventies with the world design of classic kaiju movies the aesthetic of Gotham city and a swinging film noir atmosphere to give it an irresistible retro kick he would eventually join up with director Kazuyoshi Katayama and writer Chiaki Konaka the latter of whom added several more intriguing and provocative ideas to the mix. Unfortunately as promising as this team may have looked production was troubled right from the start... After some initial delays the toy line never getting off the ground and the side story manga failing to drum up interestit ultimately only reached six volumes before being largely forgotten by history and the anime itself... Didnt fare much better. The series received some decent critical responses but it failed to set the world on fire not really bringing in the money or ratings that were expected of it. A promised 26 episodes were cut down to 13 and the writers decided to take a calculated risk by ending on a salivating cliffhanger hoping that it would get the series picked up for a continuation... And it did but not for another few years. Weirdly enough Big O was not the first initially unsuccessful anime that Cartoon Network made bank on and following the colossal western success of Cowboy Bebop they were looking for another scifi action show with a retro appeal and damn did they get one. Big O wasnt quite as popular as Bebop but it still did about a thousand times better with western audiences than it did on its own turf. It did so well in fact that Cartoon Network ponied up the money to commission a second season from Studio Sunrise with certain demands... And who were Sunrise to deny the source of Big Os financial salvation? To be perfectly frank I wasnt there to see how all this played out at the time. Big Os entire existence on American TV spanned the earlytomid 2000s and I didnt actually hear about or see it until around 2013 or so. I didnt have to experience the wait for a second season in limbo I didnt have to bite my nails over the cliff hanger or figure out how to cope with the possibility that a conclusion would never come... I wasnt there and while its possible somebody who did experience all of this would have a different experience to talk about than I do I can only really speak from my own experience. I should also point out that while The Big O is considered one uninterrupted series over on Myanimelist thats not the case on Anilist. I posted a review of season one less than a week ago and I cant guarantee you wont be lost if you dont read that before continuing on with this companion piece. Just to be nice heres a linkhttps://anilist.co/review/15082 for you or you can just get there through my profile. That being said lets just move on. Being that the first season ran from 1999 to 2000 and the second season started a couple years later it should go without saying that they look drastically different. This is due to the industry between the two releases switching from hand drawn cells to digital painting a change thats brought a considerable amount of progress and regression to the anime medium. I dont personally have a strong opinion between the two... I like that digital painting makes anime far more efficient to create and consistent in qualitywell most of the time in both cases but I also wouldnt argue with you if you sighed wistfully and said They dont make them like they used to... Because yeah hand drawn cells often had more of a capacity for artistry and it always felt like more effort went into it with a personal touch that a lot of people miss. Sadly even for a guy whose first exposure to the series was a straight up twoseason binge the difference in quality between episode 13 and 14 isnt just noticeable its jarring. Now I should say it gets better as the series goes on. By the end theyve figured out how to grow into their new method and get the best possible exposure of the Big O universe out of it but those first few episodes man... Woof. They try to use a lot of the same budget saving tricks from the first season theyre nowhere near as subtle as they used to be. The lighting feels artificial characters moving against a still frame background do not blend into their surroundings like theyre supposed to theyre frequently off model and while they tried to replicate the offbeat cinematography that worked so well before it just feels cheap and hollow at this point. Like I said the series does grow into digital painting as it goes on but it is a climb. The music however suffers a drop of quality that it never recovers from. In the first season they employed a small number of soothing saxophone riffs as a motif throughout and it is gone in season 2 save for maybe three or four random appearances. The music its been replaced by is definitely not terrible I could easily see it being used well but it never fucking shuts up it occasionally comes close to drowning out dialogue in a few scenes and its just a tad too generic to be as overplayed as the saxophone riffs were without wearing out its welcome. The English dub sadly has also taken a hit but thankfully not as bad. Steve Blum is still just as amazing as he was previously ably navigating Roger Smith through some tough waters in terms of his development. Lia Sargent who has returned to write and direct the dub does seem to have lost a step with her portrayal of Dorothy but for reasons well get into later I cant say I blame her. I didnt mention Wendee Lee in the previous review but yeah basically the same story as Lia Sargent but to a smaller degree. The most surprising aspect of this dub however isnt one of the returning cast members but one of the new ones... They brought in Crispin Freeman to voice an insane foppish new villain named Alan Gabriel and I hate myself for saying this but he sucks... This is so far out of his range its not even funny. This is only the second role of his I havent liked and hes not quite as bad as he was in Now and Then Here and There but thats a low bar to clear. Also Carolyn Hennessey plays another new villain and her German accent is hilariously bad. So I said earlier that Cartoon Network had some demands. They had two actually and on paper they seemed like perfectly reasonable demands giving the money they were putting up to rescue this show. What they asked of Sunrise was for more action and some solid answers to the mystery of the series. Again perfectly reasonable and Sunrise was more than happy to accept... And at first things didnt seem too bad. Ignoring the abrupt dropoff in visual and audio quality the story starts out progressing in a more or less natural fashion. Towards the end of season 1 we were getting hints at Paradigm Citys past becoming unraveled along with some notsosubtle hints at Roger Smiths identity unravelling with it. Thus it shouldnt be too surprising that season two went all in on this shifting from a story about Roger Smith solving mysteries and conflicts while occasionally getting into giant robot fights to a show about Roger Smith getting into big robot fights while occasionally questioning who and what he is. I personally would have preferred a more gradual shift but you cant say the new season doesnt kick off in bold and exciting fashion even if it does run through some alternate universe bullshit in order to do so. Its pretty clear that Roger Smith isnt quite the same character he was previously which is fine it falls with the acceptable bounds of character development. Whats far less excusable however is what they did to Angel and Dorothy. Angel has had all traces of sexy mystique stripped from her and loses a lot of her agency and personality in order to become more of a plotdelivery type character one whos growth and identity is largely tied to the story. And Dorothy? They did my girl dirty. Shes a lot more talkative and expressive now her dialogue sounds like its been homogenized towards everyone else and all the sassy sardonic wit that she had before has been scrubbed clean. There isnt any more subtlety to her speech. She often says things that immediately make you think no thats something she wouldnt have felt the need to vocalize before. She has never felt like a character who would ever talk to herself but now she cant stop and to make matters worse she dumps exposition just as bad as everyone else. I said before that Cartoon Networks demands were perfectly reasonable on paper and yeah they sounded doable especially when the alternative was just leaving the series dead in the water like it had been previously. Even with the power of hindsight I cant see any logical reason why Sunrise would have refused those demands but that doesnt change how badly these decisions played out in practice. I dont know maybe this is just my opinion but the mecha fights and the overall mystery were never the stronger aspects of Big O. The series was a hit because of its atmosphere witty dialogue and inspired execution. Its fair to say you cant really take me seriously on the subject of giant robot battles because its not my thing and it never has been but theyve never done anything for me even in this show... I just accepted them as part of the package and I was totally fine with them that way but a tighter focus on them without the aid of a cool film noir aesthetic to back it up just falls flat for me. And then you have the increased focus on the Paradigm City mystery which Im feeling a lot more confidant in calling a bad idea. I dont have a source on this but you kind of got the impression throughout season one that the writers didnt exactly have a firm grasp of what the truth even was and it was just supposed to lurk in the background giving the viewer something to play around with and theorize over while each episode just did its own selfcontained monster of the week thing... Which is by no means a bad approach as Chiaki Konaka did pretty much the same thing to great effect in Digimon Tamers... But it only works if youre playing the long game and trying to force a conclusion out of that kind of setup in only thirteen episodes is insane. It results in a ton of exposition several dumb and/or incoherent reveals that are confusing at best and insulting at worst and the abject sacrifice of everything that made the series cool in the first place. And you may be thinking But hey its a mystery there has to be a conclusion right? No not necessarily. Sometimes explaining a mystery can ruin a story. Shows like Adventure Time and RWBY lost a lot of their chaotic creative energy when they started taking their lore seriously and while I personally liked them better afterwards I cant argue with the people who dropped off when the early energy faded. Key the Metal Idol is one of my favorite anime of all time and it features a fantastic mystery but the episode where they spend over an hour explaining everything to you is just barely watchable. I loved the original standalone Black Rock Shooter OVA but then the followup series that explained everything was trash. And hell since Ive already gone this far I spent one of my most divisive reviews ever saying I didnt care about the mystery and potential depth of Serial Experiments Lain or what it was trying to say because I didnt connect with the plot or main character in even the most basic way. Yeah theoretically a mystery in a piece of media should have a solution but there are times where its far stronger if left unsolved. This entire concept doesnt make a lot of sense and to make matters worse Im pretty sure it didnt make sense from the start but it was such an easy show to get lost in that it was fairly easy to just not think too hard about it. Losing touch with the cooler elements of the series forces you to shine a light on these ideas and what you see there isnt exactly pretty. For example in the first season I never asked what memories are in this universe... I saw people fight over them I saw people venture into dangerous situations to find and recover them and I knew they were valuable but what are they? Are they a physical thing? How are they stored? How are they transferred between people? How can an entire person just BE a memory? On another note I mentioned in my last review how they didnt explore the topics of memory and identity too hard and they went out of their way to rectify that this season but for their efforts it just comes off as pretentious and poorly thought out. It doesnt crawl quite as far up its own ass as Ergo Proxy did but not for lack of trying. Also Roger and Dorothy are hinted at being love interests this time around and I hate it. My strongest memory of this series from when I watched it in 2013 and one of the only memories I retained going into my rewatch of the series over the last week was a series of events in episode 18 that you have to see to believe. As the plot goes Roger Smith falls for an obvious trap by a former adversaryfeaturing an afro because he got electrocuted... No really.... Said adversary constructs an identical robot replica bust of Roger one that moves and speaks like him. He steals Rogers watch gives it to the replica straps that replica to a remotecontrol cart and drives the bust through the city repeating the phrase Big O over and over again so the Big O mech will follow it somehow not matching its pace. The cart somehow gets from the street to the top of a building in between shots and drives into the water hoping the Big O will fall in after it and be lost in the ocean. I feel like by pointing out that Big O has entered large bodies of water with no issue before would require to me to assume you got through the rest of this paragraph without already screaming into your pillow about how fucking stupid this entire concept is so lets move on. I try to not let disappointing sequels and reboots bother me but this one hurts. The second season of The Big O is a shadow of its former self. Im honestly not sure if bringing it back was a good idea or not... On the one hand if they had left things as they were fans would have never been satisfied and theyd be demanding a continuation as ravenously as Highschool of the Dead No Game No Life and Firefly fans have been to this day. On the other hand it might have been worth it just to know that the series ended on a high note still bathing in the adoration of a diehard fanbase. A second season is what we got however and it is in the history books where it will stay for all time and if Im being completely honest I cant condemn the entire experience. Yeah the second half is bad but I still think the entire series deserves to be viewed in its entirety for better or worse. I give The Big O2003 a 4/10 and while were here I also give the entire experience a combined 6/10.