Note: This review only covers the second season of Haikyuu!!. Please read the review of the first season for a full understanding.

Haikyuu!! was a solid, although not exactly original, shounen sports show. It focused on fleshing out the charismatic cast in the first season instead of slamming tournaments and content, and for that it succeed in being an enjoyable experience paving the path for a much better sequel.

Now, as the Karasuno team is fully presented and given life, it is time to hone their skills and rise from their harsh loss at the end of the last season. Instead of simply filling the screen with new enemies and overflowing the episodes trying to make them sound cool, Haikyuu!! smartly pick the right amount of spice to make you care even more about Karasuno an yet leave enough tease for players from other schools.

A Sequel Done Right

Once again Haikyuu!! keeps its focus. If the first season was about the cast, now it is about their skills. There is no derail from there, no fillers, no escapes. The show immediately goes to show how the teammates work to overcome their loss and hone their skill to a higher degree, and for that half this season is about their trainning camp with powerful schools from Tokyo and about them discovering new ways to play volleyball.

And Shouyou steps aside

Shouyou is unfit for Haikyuu!!. That’s the simple truth. While all other players work with human minds and try to play volleyball, Shouyou simply jumps, overhypes, and clumsily succeeds at everything he does. At least that was the formula for the first season. Fortunately, this second half puts him on the sidelines for much of its part. Instead of showing him as the super-player that needs his skill honed, he now becomes an average player that just has a strong will to succeed. In fact, as the season matures and the trainning turns into matches, Shouyou becomes a secondary character to Tsukki and Tobio. Not only this move throws out of the way the worst character of the show, but it also gives the entire team more time to shine.

And they grab it

Although the second half is about their rebirth as a powerful team and their victories are much likely expected given the amount of time and effort put to show their advacement, the team grows in more ways then simply playing skill. Every player becomes important, even bench substitutes such as Yamaguchi gets his time to shine, and for a shounen sports this is pretty much everything it needs to succeed when the protagonist is a boring blot. The thrill of the last matches is tremendous and the outstanding animation quality keeps up.

Alright. After a promising first season, Haikyuu!! starts to deliver one of the most exciting sports shounen show around. It is not as deep and meaningful to volleyball as Baby Steps is to tennis, but regardless of how shallow its presentation is, the matches and their narratives are simply thrilling.

This season, however, succeeds much to part of how it had the courage to keep the boring protagonist to the sidelines and show, by the end, that he is perhaps the weakest player of the team. This boldness lifts Haikyuu!! to a height I was not expecting by the end of the first season, and for that it earned my respect and admiration.