Huo Feng Liao Yuan 2nd Season

Well looks like every show that I was wondering when they’d have a sequel got it in just one or two years, gone are the days where you’d have to wait half a decade for the news of a continuation of that one series you liked, it seems.

The second season of The Ravages of Time comes off with a slight improvement on the visuals. Although the overall looks are still rather plastic, there are more motions everywhere on the action scenes and facial expressions. The backgrounds look a bit better but on the downside they are still almost completely static, minus some falling leafs ... here and there. The directing allows itself to experiment a little more with the special effects and it keeps having a cool battle choreography and now it’s not as frantic, so it’s better and more clear to follow. The character models are slightly better by differentiating their faces a bit more. With that said, the main ones have been a bit prettified, while the other older generals have a rougher and more semi-realistic look to them. The good side is the distinction amongst them like I already said, the bad part is the combination looking a bit odd.

The audio department was also slightly improved thanks to a more standardized level of the sound effects, which no longer range between good and mediocre, and now are solidly decent. The voice acting and the music remain about the same though, so no important changes in there, the opening has slightly different visuals, and the previous ballad ending was replaced with a more epic sounding one, but other than that, this aspect remains the same.

As for the writing, there are still rule of cool and dick measuring moments, but are now more present in the form of close cool fights than only some characters doing impossible things, although Huo is still kinda more overpowered than the rest. There are also moments where the cast comes off as imposing, controlling or scaring away others through some speeches and feats, by bluffing, basically.

As for what the story covers in this season, it focuses on Liu Bei saving Gongsun Zan from Yuan Shao, and the main characters conspiring with Lu Bu to take down Dong Zhuo. Characters still scheme and try to outplay each other, but now with more actual buildup and pre-planning so it doesn’t seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, the resolutions still feel a bit like HAHA GOTCHA moments, but nowhere near as bad as before. I wish more details about Lu Bu’s schemes were shown beforehand, but even as it is, it’s fine. Basically, the dick measuring is slowly giving space to the actual good writing.

There are moments and battles that are explained through narration and/or text, which made me think that maybe some content was skipped, but maybe that’s just me mising the source material. The story is there and although it would be fine to have those battles and their strategies given more screen time, it doesn’t really feel like the season is missing stuff. With that said the last few episodes are noticeably more rushed, so the season does not end as well as it begins.

Characterization gets a little bit sidelined this entry, as it focuses more on plot progression than anything else. Still, one could say that Huo, Sima Yi and Lu Bu get more fleshed out through their schemes and the action, and other characters are built up from this season, like the Eight Geniuses, particularly Jia Xu, who is willing to even sacrifice his masters in order to win, making him a fierce opponent to Lu Bu because of that. Oh, and Cao Cao appears, but very briefly as he still does nothing.

Despite the drop in quality of the last few episodes, this season is overall an improvement over the first. It reached a better and more interesting point in the story, it started to improve the writing, it began to setup the cast by introducing other interesting characters, and even its presentation is not as weak as it was before, leaving me hopeful to see a better level of quality on the next entries.