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Overall I really liked the season. I started watching monogatari initially at Nisemonogatari, and that has what formed my basis for judging the others, a little different from most people. I had problems with both Bake and Nise, and also a few with this season, but enjoy them all.
Some people have mentioned the page count. I remember seeing a post on reddit by someone who compared number of pages to episodes. In the second season, the books are a lot shorter than Bake and Nise, and the page to episode ratio was about the same by their calculations. Although those calculations were done before the review episodes were known about.
If the review episodes help newbies understand the show, I'm all for them. I know it's common to do in anime. But it's not good if it takes away from episode count for the rest of the show.
With the second season, the animation quality appears to have gone down slightly, but still good. The artistic backgrounds are still intact and beautiful, as is the musical score especially. Intros are a little weaker. The scenes with real life stills continue to be absent that were in Bakemonogatari (suck as real humans, hands, stills of real food)
-Neko White: Since this book is translated, it's one of the few I can compare to the book. I thought it was very well done and covered most of it. The part with the parents eating breakfast together didn't seem to carry over well; that was the only thing big I thought was missing.
-Mayoi Jiangshi: I was really looking forward to this one since many say this is one of there favorite books, but I didn't feel this watching it. Sounds like the last episode was rushed. In spite of this, I still found the arc amazing to watch. I will say though from the perspective of not reading the book, I found the first episode with Shinobu's story to be quite beautiful with the backdrop and have absolutely no complaints. I hope someone translates this someday.
-Nadeko Snake: I enjoyed this one and especially loved the twist at the end. The animation in this one was stepped up from the other arcs and well done. Although some say Nadeko's character development might be rushed, I think it can be explained by puberty. These are all still preteens here.
-Shinobu time: This one wasn't my favorite. Araragi kissing little girls is weird and Nisioisin should replace that joke with something else. His moves on his sisters was weird in Nise, but at least they were more of age and that was somewhat funny then. Yotsugi confused me with her red herrings regarding Shinobu lying and telling wrong info about the darkness. She was leading me to believe a different sort of twist would result involving Shinobu.
-Koimonogatari: Great arc. I liked the dialogue at the end, and I liked how it was stretched out and took it's time. Some may say they don't like the show to drag on, but I'd argue it's best that way and builds up suspense. Like when dragon ball Z was around, everyone complained how much it dragged on, but they watched the shit out of that. To me it's suspense and teasing; there's none of it that's filler. Monogatari has never had filler.
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