This was fantastic. I wasn't one of the people who had to wait the full two years for the second season to drop but I can only imagine how satisfying it was to do that.

First of all, the stunts are absolutely top notch (as expected). The jumps, the fight scenes — it really makes your heart pound while watching it and I felt every bit of high stakes that the games established.

The games are just as fun and provide really intriguing questions about human nature (which is always my favorite part of these survival shows. Compared to season 1, this season is definitely more heavy but slower paced. They spend multiple episodes on individual games, but it actually never feels slow or draggy. I even enjoyed the games where the characters were split up and we saw how different leads handled different sorts of games.

Until the very end, I felt really invested in everything: the characters, the world-building, the story.

The ending was a mixed bag for me; I think it managed to do something rare for me, which is simultaneusly wrap things up with a nice bow, while also leaving room for a season 3 if they decide to write a plot beyond the manga. I felt both satisfaction and completion, while also acknowledging that it used some tropes I don't really enjoy on principle, leaving me wanting the story to continue.

Other than that, I do think that this season suffers a little from the same thing season 1 did, which is that the backstories for each of the characters are interesting and add a lot but many of them stop just shy of "enough," and maybe part of this is just that there are a lot of characters and they kept adding more and giving even one-off antagonists backstories. I think that's valid because it certainly avoided the over-simplistic "good vs. evil" dynamic but I'd still rather have seen more scenes and various moments from our main characters' past lives (think of the American TV show Lost).

Overall, I would highly highly recommend this entire series and I know it will go down as one of my all time favorites.