Well, just finished the serie.
Oh my... Let's say my feeling about it were QUITE NOT the same than the majority of people here.
SnS, so far, has been a serie about a rather sinister world, with some rare but dangerous demons hidden in the shadows and a few guardians of order keeping them in check. A story of one of these guardian, cold and uncaring, learning humanity with a victim of these demons, and seeing the human life through the eye of a high-schooler.
I expected this serie to somehow follow up in this manner. What I got has been something that could be called "Saint Seyia : the Tomogora Sanctuary". I rarely felt such a disconnect between seasons of a serie, and though the story and characters were the same, I really didn't feel like I was seeing SnS, but rather a weird shônen.
We always saw Flame Haze as very independant, very powerful, self-reliant and autonomous guardians, protecting wide areas and looking for the few Tomogora that would happen to pass by, keeping a low profile.
Now we see whole LEGIONS of them fighting in battle ranks in the open, looking like regular grunt with laser, with a military-like headquarter and organization. I actually went to check on the forum ot be sure it was not some fanfiction take on the world or anime-only invention, because it was so far from everything we saw before that I had a hard time taking it seriously. Many characters were also derailed or retconned, but I think this part is more about problems in the plot, which I'll cover a bit later.
The serie starts at a dreadful pace, about four ep where NOTHING happens. Then it's about 17-18 ep of fight, fight, fight and fight, with something like 2-3 ep worth of breathing room (or at least something else than fighting). Some action is good, but for a serie that was so far thankfully short on the fighting scenes (which rarely took more than half an ep), it was really a complete change of style, and really tiring. In the end, between the terrible pacing at the start and the fight-only rest of the season, it managed to both feel very stretched and still nearly empty.
I'm not really fond about the lack of character interaction neither. The little that happens is significant (one of the good side is that we FINALLY got rid of the atrocious artificial dragging-on of the romance), but it's still far too little. No slice of life and very little "human world" left, it's 95 % of the time either in a Fuzetsu or in a battle somewhere.
The main draw I had to SnS was the characters. Among all the fighting and the "scenario" (I'll get to why I use quotation mark in a second), there was very little of them save for launching big energy beam of yelling at each other.
And now for the big, big problem. The story. The plot. The scenario.
Yuji who, about two hours after having fought against demons and Bal Masqué with all his heart, willpower and anger, suddendly decide to join them. Okay, right. Hu... well, nevermind. I can understand the reasoning in the end, but maybe they should have used a bit of these first dreadfully... EMPTY first episodes to actually set it up and make it believable.
Then... then what I saw was about 23 episodes of what I can more or less describe like this :
Yuji : "
I love you, and have a plan that will make everything all right, and I do it mainly for you, but I'm not going to explain it to you because you wouldn't accept it"
Shana : "
I love you too, and I've also an idea that will make everything all right, and I also do it mainly for you, but I also won't tell you about it, and I won't ask you what your plan is, because it would resolve the story in two ep and we have a full season to last"
...
Seriously, I rarely felt a scenario that was more RETARDED, and I put it in cap because that's really the only word I can find to describe it.
Everything could have been solved in five minutes if they just took a bit of time to speak it over, but instead of that, they spent the whole season killed each other for... well, for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, because of the reason stated in the very beginning of the sentence.
And they don't even have the excuse of hating each other, on the contrary. So all this pointless scenario is just a perfect example of "
idiot plot".
Though to be honest, the amount of plot holes, deus ex machina and absurd reactions is rather a staple of this seaons :
Yuji and his "we don't want to fight you" speech while letting his minions slaughter people who have stopped fighting. Err...
Yuji getting mad and fighting the insertion of the "don't eat humans" law, while the very reason he started it all is BECAUSE he wants humans not to be eaten. Hello ?
The very possibility to put a "law" in a world by firing at it of putting an insignia. Seriously ?
The out of the blue Oracle. Yeah, cool. Thanks for passing by.
I'm still scratching my head about the godawful amount of Flame Haze that went to the Tomogora world. What the hell are they going to do here ? Be sure to have still some fights to not forget the old days ?
And so on.
The story was just choke-full of contrived coincidences, contrived reactions, contrived reasonings. The overwhelming feeling I got was essentially that the author wished to have Shana and Yuji fighting each other, and both sides being somehow right, and shoehorned everything to fill this pattern without bothering too much about the consistency and logic of the rest. Also, it was painfully obvious that HUGE chunks of lore and fluff and characters were simply missing. Maybe lots of the plot holes actually had a good explanation in the novels, for what I know. And maybe half of the events that happened would make more sense if we were actually told about them (I still don't have any f-ing idea what Rammie was all about).
It certainly didn't feel "organic" at any moment, and felt very artificial and forced. Like someone who really want a certain scene to happens, and warp, twist and distort the whole story so it's force-fitted into a specific configuration.
So here I ended. There was a few actually good moments (Margery and her boyfriend, cuuuute, the death of Behemoth was moving and a few others), there were actual attempts to hide the huge gap in the plot (often too little too late), but there was nearly nothing left of the SnS I liked from the first season. The setting didn't feel the same, the style certainly wasn't the same, very little character interaction, nearly only fighting and a completely retarded plot full of holes.
In the end, I didn't enjoy this season, and finished it more because I wanted to see it through due to previous investment, and due to a morbid fascination about "what will the next /facepalm will be ?". It was simply not fun, and though the production values are good, I felt rather insulted by the idiotic story and didn't find anything of the good parts I liked in the first and small parts of the second season.
Final score : 4. A very poor experience.