Note: This review only covers the second season of Chihayafuru. Original writing date: 11/09/2017.

Chihayafuru got me by surprise. A sports show about an unheard card game with unexciting premise and absurd skill requirements managed to deliver an exciting, high-quality, and deep tale of a girl trying to pave her path to be the best of the best.

The first season focused on the first year of Ayase Chihaya in high school, building her karuta club, climbing the ranks as a karuta player, and learning about the background of this game world, such as the current queen and master, the best schools, mentors, and so forth. Now the setting is laid out and it’s time to move on with what really matters.

Not quite…

Chihayafuru starts introducing new members to the karuta club and spitting us exactly what its priorities are. The high school club environment becomes the heart of this second season quite early and, although it gets exciting later on, it’s hard not to say too much time was wasted on this. School clubs are just plain boring when you have a game with players of any age or experience fighting for a place in the sky.

And it abuses of defeat

A great sports show deals with defeat a lot. Most of them miss the mark as you know quite early when the protagonist can lose and when he will definitely win. Chihayafuru, however, loses sight of its skill level this season in a different form, making unlikely defeats a norm and frustrating the audience at many points. Instead of reveling in the new skills obtained by Ayase and her friends, what you see is a showering of losses which end up looking more like a forced stop to the tale instead of something from which the cast can learn and grow from.

It’s growing and it’s still exciting

The thrill is still there though. The matches are amazing and the background of the sport is finely explored this time around as Arata returns to the fray to spice things up. The new club members provide an additional comic relief and the outcome of the tournaments are now not only focused on Ayase and her friends, but in some other schools as well. The cast does not get an absurd injection of new players, but those who were only to the sidelines in the first season get more time in the sun, turning them into more interesting players, or at some occasions even more interesting persons.

That means a lot of matches though

Yep. Although the spread of attention towards multiple characters help in turning them into something more than just one-liners, this also means we get time taken away from Ayase and her friends. The result is a season that only covers half a year. If you wanted to see the second semester where the queen and master matches would be the focus, that’s too bad, because it never gets there.

Well, Chihayafuru goes on with a superb outing. It’s more exciting, the stakes are higher, and the laid setting now can be used to make things even more interesting between players and the dispute to be queen and master. Sadly though, the season breaks halfway through and leaves us wanting for more. The pace is not the issue though, what brings things to a slower progression is content. There’s a lot more to talk about now, and that would require fifty episodes at least. Perhaps some of the unlikely defeats of the show could be skipped or rushed in order to tell the bigger tale, but that’s not exactly a certainty.

Well, I can only hope a third season comes out someday.