Rbastid

Instead of swimming forward, this season of Free was lucky to even be treading water when it came to the story.

Story - 6/10

With the success of the team at the last district event, even if they ended up being disqualified, the team was certain they’d be rolling in new membership applications. Despite their hard work they still stay as a foursome, which is a bit of luck for  viewers considering any new members, on top of those now on Samezuka’s team, would have just overwhelmed the show.

Seeing the teams ended amicably at the end of the last season they needed to create a new rivalry this year, and it comes in the form of an old classmate of Rin’s, Sousake. This old friend is very protective of Rin, as he really believes he has all the skills to become an Olympic swimmer, so as his new teammate he’s going to do all he can to make sure the Iwatobi team doesn’t cause him to lose his focus and act irrationally, as he did in the previous year’s district finals.

The show really doesn’t play out much different than the season before it. They have their races, Haruka acts up and feels sorry for himself while making his teammates worry, and everyone has a happy ending. They even doubled, or actually tripled, down on the stories of underclassman pushing themselves to get better so they can fit in with their team, but oddly some of those scenes were the best in the show, as they helped make the students involved all the more likable. 

The story about Rin taking Haruka to Australia, so that he can light a fire underneath him, was good in theory, but they just rushed through it and made it all seem so simple, while they had basically the same storyline running for Makoto, but in a way that was more endearing and selfless.

They ended the show, not the result but the actual race itself, in the same way they did the first season, which felt like a complete cop-out. The seeing ocean creatures thing was kind of dumb the first time around, as it completely broke up the fact the show was based in reality not some sci-fi world, but to do it again was just lazy, though really this last episode was pretty much an awful recap of the two seasons.

Animation - 8/10

While the animation was almost exactly the same as season one there was a moment that raised it’s level, but that was offset by a small few that lowered it.

On the plus side there was a scenario where Haruka has a nightmare before their big regional race. They did an excellent job making that scene feel like it was out of a horror anime, with a look and feel that made me think of Boogie Pop Phantom.

Negating that gain was the minor use of CGI animation for some of the early swimming scenes, which took away from that beauty we were use to from season one/ Thankfully it appears they quickly abandoned that route and went back to their traditional style. They also seemed to start rushing animation towards the end, where characters began to look very sloppy in pretty mundane scenes that didn’t require a ton of complex animation.

Sound - 6/10

Once again the voice over work, between the returning characters and the few newer ones, was all very well done.

Similarly the themes are still not good, with the opening losing that sporty/olympic feel, but keeping the awful Linking Park-esc sound. The ending is again a poppy song tied to a video that makes our major characters appear as if they are members of a boy band.

There was a little more variety in the background music, and it once again worked pretty well while adding something to the show.

Characters - 5/10

They somehow were able to make Haruka even more unlikable this year than in the past. Throughout the series his friends all appear to be worried about his life after high school, because while he seems to only think about swimming, he hasn’t actually thought about how he’ll parlay that into a future. When schools come scouting him he instead blows them off, apparently thinking he can just swim for himself to make a living. They try to explain this away with another one of his “I only swim for myself and my friends,” blowups, but as we’ve seen he never swam for his friends either, he’s just been an angry and selfish boy since the time he was a child.

They give the other members of the team some screen time with their own little stories and problems, but some just didn’t mesh seamlessly with the show. First was trying to add a little new bit of drama with Nagisa, as he runs away from home because his parents want him to quit the swim team due to his falling grades, which seems perfectly reasonable considering he isn’t really that good at swimming to begin with. The thing is this doesn’t really go past that single episode, and a comment later about needing to study, it all just felt unneeded and made Nagisa look like a little whiner instead of a sympathetic character.

Makoto, unlike Haruka, does start to think about his future, but he’s unsure of what he’ll do as he isn’t nearly on the level of the top swimmers in the district. After starting a part time job as a children’s swim instructor over at the new Iwatobi Swim Club pool he changes his mind, and even if he’s not one of the best he will continue to try and swim in college. His little brush with drama comes from a spat with Haruka, where he tries to get his friend to think about the future, but gets met with resistance. When they finally patch things up it’s Makoto doing the apologizing, even though it was Haruka who again acted as if he’s the infallible one.

Compared to the others, Rei’s story is pretty funny and shows him to be a good teammate. When he suddenly starts blowing off his friends after school they become suspicious, so they start thinking up reasons he’s not hanging out with them. At one point they think he’s going back to the track team and at another they mistake an old teammate as his new boyfriend, but in reality he was just going to meet Rin so he can become a better swimmer and pull his weight when it comes to the relay.

The Samezuka team actually was much more entertaining and had better, albeit pretty cliche, drama to add to the show. 

Rin did a hundred and eighty degree turn from where he was a season ago, becoming a great team captain and friend to his old teammates. Unlike Haruka, he actually knows what he wants to do with his life, pushes himself to reach those goals and now does so without being a detriment to his fellow swimmers. The thing is, the way he acts makes the first season look even sillier by comparison, as he was a nice kid when he was young, acts like a really good person now, but was a complete jerk in season one all because he lost a single race years earlier and wasn’t on the level of those training for the Olympics? It just seems like an odd turn for someone they have being kind and selfless for all other years of his life.

The real drama in this season, outside of Haruka being a baby, comes from a new swimmer to the Samezuka team, Sosuke Yamasaki. He was a friend of Rin, before Rin left to join the other boys at Iwatobi Swim Club, who joined Samezuka because he said he wanted to be close to home during his last year, but that may not be the full story. He feels Rin has the potential to be a world class swimmer, so he tries to keep his old friends from becoming distracted, as they did the year before. While this drama pretty much only manifests itself in weak threats and mean stares, it at least makes more sense than the attempt to make Rin the bad guy last season. Although his story also has the overplayed “hiding an injury” angle that so many sports anime shows use, it worked well here because it wasn’t overdone.

Two other Samezuka swimmers that have a decent amount of screen time are underclassman Nitori and Momotaro. You may remember Nitori as Rin’s hanger on from season one, and while he still occupies that spot, this year he’s working hard to win a spot on the school’s relay team. Momotaro is the younger brother of the team’s old captain Seijuro. After being forced into swimming an exhibition with Rin, he decides to actually join the team in hopes of impressing Gou. Both are pretty entertaining and do their job in the show rather well, being built up enough that if the next season, or a spin off, focused on these and Iwatobi’s underclassman, they would continue the show’s tradition of having (mostly) likable characters.

I enjoyed, for the most part, how they tried to continue to build up these characters while adding just the right amount of new swimmers into the mix. This show excelled at having you connect to likable people, well besides the awful Haruka, as the overall plot wasn’t the strongest, and this season they again did a great job at it, which should help soften the blow if next season loses some fan favorites and again has another almost repeated story line.

Overall - 6/10

While I still enjoyed the show very much, I think it took a step back from season one, despite having a story that should have made it a much better show. The new rivalry, the addition of other Samezaku students and more focus on Rin and Makoto were all great, but having an even worse version of Haruka and less focus/originality when it came to the actual swimming, made me feel they dropped the ball when they had the chance for an easy score.

One thing that both seasons had, which was both good and bad, is the pace of the show. The story never felt as if it was dragging on, which is good while you watch it, but afterwards you almost feel gypped, even if it is the same length as most shows, because it just flew by and made you want more episodes.