by Meghan Duffy
If I was asked what one of the best web series of 2013 was, Rooster Teeth’s RWBY would be one of the first to come to mind. The first volume was a great starting point with awesome characters and an interesting style. It burst onto the scene with incredible fight scenes and interesting characters. With one year in between volumes, there was plenty of hype for its continuation and RWBY volume two certainly doesn’t disappoint. Although there were still some failing points, this second volume is a general improvement from the first.
Animation in RWBY is a double edged sword. It shifts between being stiff and choppy, or flowing beautifully. The fight scenes’ animations are nothing short of stunning. The details show the effort and love put into the show. The physics-defying weapons are part of what make it great. One character has a purse that turns into a giant, gaudy, black and gold minigun which is just as ridiculously awesome as it sounds. Monty Oum, creator of RWBY, has described the fighting as being almost like a dance and the fluidity of the fights certainly lives up to that description. This volume opened up with the best food fight ever animated, giving you a lot to, ahem, chew.
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| Just what every girl needs, a purse that turns into a minigun |
The animation for non-fighting has also been improved. Background characters are no longer just black shapes, and stiff, lifeless animations are much less frequent. However, when these moments do occur they are quite obvious and it can pull you out of the show, even if only for a moment.
Keeping up with the improvements, the plot becomes much more interesting with this season. Most of the character’s introductions have already been taken care of so there is much more time for actual plot. Following along from the events of the final episode of volume one, it takes place at the beginning of the second semester at Beacon Academy. The girls in team RWBY are finally beginning to act as a team and they start investigating the activities of the White Fang and their relation with one of the main villains, Roman Torchwick. The pace flows well, however there are some plot twists that were extremely obvious. The final episode also gets resolved a bit too quickly and cleanly, but it did lend to an awesome action sequence. Thanks to the episodes being much longer than they were in the first season, with a minimum length of twelve minutes, a lot more ground is covered in this volume.
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| The White Fang |
The characters also gained a lot more characterization in this season. You get to see more of the faunus struggle and the White Fang, a faunus terrorist organization. It would have been nice though to get a bit more characterization of members of the Team JNPR who aren’t Jaune Arc. Pyrrha had gotten some development but Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren have been barely hit with any characterization even though they’re secondary main characters. Hopefully volume three will give some focus on them. Several characters that were teased also never appeared in the season such as the other half of team SSSN which is composed of Sun Wukong, Scarlet, Sage, and Neptune Vasilias. Only Sun and Neptune showed up in the volume despite Scarlet and Sage premiering in the opening sequence. It’s a tiny complaint, but never seeing them in the volume was a bit of a letdown.
The second volume of RWBY held up to the hype it had been gaining in the year hiatus. The animations were vastly improved between the first and second volumes, although it can still get stiff and choppy at times. Overall it was fantastically animated it’s obvious that there was a lot of care put into it. RWBY is a fairly quick watch, each episode in the second volume is about twelve minutes in length and in the first volume they’re each around six minutes. If you have a couple of hours of free time give it a watch. RWBY is a work of love and despite it falling flat at some points, the overall quality is worth the roadbumps.
