The Summer 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Sengoku Youko (Season 2)

What is this: Some time has passed since former human Jinka unleashed the full power of the thousand-tail fox, losing his humanity in the process. Cursed sword-wielder Shinsuke has been separated from katawara girl Tama, and now resides in a rural village where human beings and their supernatural katawara friends live in peace. Accompanying Shinsuke is former enemy Senya, who liberated from the influence of his “dragon” father, now has a chance at a new beginning. Unfortunately, life in the warring states period is hard, with the weak preyed upon by the strong – humans and katawara alike.

Sengoku Youko is based on the manga series by Satoshi Mizukami. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Thursdays.

Sengoku Youko was one of Winter 2024's hidden gems – a sixteenth-century Japan-set supernatural fantasy from the pen of renowned mangaka Satoshi Mizukami. As the second of Mizukami's manga to have received an anime adaptation, a lot rode on it to erase the disappointment fans felt towards 2022's desperately botched Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer adaptation. Thankfully Sengoku Youko is in good hands with Studio White Fox, and the wait for this second season, following the apocalyptic cliffhanger that ended the first, has been excruciating.

We now embark on the story arc that manga fans widely claim to be its best, with a surprising change in the protagonist. Now that Jinka's out of the picture, so seemingly is Tama. With beloved rock-girl Shakugan having already met a tragic fate, only self-taught swordsman Shinsuke remains from the central cast. Terrifyingly powerful little kid Senya has been promoted from side character/antagonist to audience viewpoint character, and through his amnesia we learn about his new place in the world. Shinsuke now takes on a mentor role, though he's not very good at it, electing to tell Shinya nothing of his origins, then getting blind drunk and allowing the village's children to be kidnapped by a roving band of rogue katawara.

Mizukami is a master at creating empathetic, interesting characters. Senya is at once an innocent boy who blushes when cute girls praise him, yet he also harbors unbelievable supernatural power. While he may be permitted a brief respite of happiness with new friends, especially the delightful Tsukiko, Sengoku Youko isn't an especially happy story. While it features bucolic scenes filled with innocent joy, there's always some horribly deformed monstrosity or selfish lord only too willing to destroy the lives of the weak.

While Sengoku Youko's animation is hardly spectacular, it gets the job done well enough. This episode's climactic fight against a “local deity” with a body like lava won't win any awards for smoothness of motion or dynamic direction, but what it lacks in visual panache it makes up for in brutal tragedy. It's clear going into this second season that these poor characters won't get a break from suffering, but they won't take their misfortune lying down. I'm very excited to see where Shinsuke, Senya, and Tsukiko go next, regardless of what tragedies they may face on their journey. I trust Mizukami that they'll find hope and salvation somewhere down the road.

The first season of Sengoku Youko ended with a big fat question mark about where the story would be going. Our heroes were scattered to the winds, with Jinka lost to the madness of his own apotheosis and disappeared by mysterious new conspirators. This new season doesn't seem in any rush to answer those lingering mysteries, which is a little frustrating, but it does an overall great job of introducing us to our new status quo, and especially our new(ish) protagonist.

Senya was little more than a side character last season – a threat who accompanied the much more aggressive Jinun, but had little autonomy or effect on the larger plot. Now, he's been chosen by the Mountain Goddess to become a guardian against the threat Jinka's transformation poses to the world. It's a bold move for the story to completely flip the script from season one, but so far it's handled well. Senya, conveniently memory-wiped, is a likable and good-natured kid, and this episode wastes no time setting up his personal stakes. He may not have his memory, but he still has a whole army of Katawara sealed inside his body, and adapting to the danger that represents is messy and heartbreaking. He gets juuuuust enough taste of normalcy before things go to hell, partially by his own bladed hands, and going forward he'll have to grapple with the potency of his own abilities, and the consequences of holding that much power. It's the exact kind of efficient characterization that made season one so compelling, and I'm glad to have it back.

With so much focus on Senya, it's a little harder to read the rest of the cast. Shinsuke is the only returning cast member from season one, and while it's interesting to see him in a mentor role now, he's kept at a distance for most of the premiere so as not to reveal too much to Senya. Tsukiko is nice enough as an obvious love interest, but we don't really see her struggle until the very last scene of the episode when she asks to be Shinsuke's apprentice. There's certainly potential for her character, between an established talent for combat and the cruelly ironic way her father died, there's a lot to work with here. I've got plenty of reasons to hope she'll be handled well and become as richly written as the rest of the cast, but that's still speculation. It'll need another episode or two before I can be sure.

In the same vein, it'll probably take a few more episodes to really get a handle on the plot now that our initial cast has come together. Or maybe not that long, considering the breakneck pace Sengoku Youko has always operated at. The important thing is that I'm excited to see them answered, whenever that happens, and fully on board with our new status quo. The show's taking a pretty big leap in so drastically changing its dynamic, but it's still the same series at heart, and there's little reason to doubt that it can deliver just as well as it did before.