©Tower of God 2 Animation Partners
You know the saying “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all?” Well, if I followed that, this week’s episode review would be a blank page.
This is hands down the worst episode of Tower of God to date. Visually, it feels both lazy and unfinished. The action isn’t interesting or creatively portrayed. At medium and longer distances, character outlines become rough and details are almost completely lost—not to mention the proportions can be a little wobbly. The only times things look decent are close-ups where the characters don’t move beyond their mouths. That said, the visuals are only part of what makes this episode so terrible.
This is our first episode after a time jump. The idea of time jumps in anime is to skip either A) the important parts to add mystery and completely shake up the status quo or B) the boring parts—the endless daily training and normal life between adventures. For Tower of God, this time skip was designed to be the latter. We've jumped ahead over a year of climbing the tower as the group plunges into the Workshop Battle.
However, this episode fails spectacularly at making things interesting. Despite the near-nonstop action, it’s the most boring action imaginable. We know very little about the stakes of the fight or the problems our heroes face. We don’t know their limits or those of their opponents. We have no real frame of reference for whether they’re actually in danger. This makes the action feel like nothing more than a visual gimmick—filled with “flashy” attacks that are supposed to be cool without the context necessary to make them interesting.
Throughout this episode, we briefly check in on Bam's original team (well, one member) before alternating focus between Rachael's team and Wangnan's team. We don't learn anything new about the characters on either team—other than the fact that they're now working like well-oiled machines.
The only important thing the episode does is introduce Emily, a ChatGPT-style AI that everyone in the tower seems to trust too much. I'm sure we're setting up a message about people putting too much trust in AI and the information it collects/feeds, but for now that's all it is: setup. This episode adds almost nothing to the overall story and feels bad for doing so.
Rating:
Tower of God Season 2 is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
