Natsume’s Book of Friends continues to be a quiet slice-of-life drama based on the adventures of a young man who carries a special ability few people share. The transition is as seamless as any of the aforementioned shows, each episode as self-contained as the others (with one of the stories-of-the-moment stretching over two episodes this time around.)
Natsume started this season with tear-jerking episodes that made the other episodes seem weaker, but they all still deliver a healthy dose of feels that made me cried a lot. This season being the same as the first focuses mainly on youkai and ayakashi. Natsume, being the owner of The Book of Friends, is caught into trouble involving youkai. The Youkai is again present as a group of morally and emotionally diversified creatures. A few of them even carry over from the first, like Hinoe and Hiiragi (though the latter might be explained with her being the familiar of Natori the exorcist, who is one of the returning human characters. And the former, I guess, through her association with Natsume.
The human side still hasn’t improve much in term of character development, through we are introduce to some characters that can be consider villains of the shows. It is difficult to tell as they only appear for one episode. We may get more in the third season.
Natsume’s Book of Friends is also still a mixture of nice animation and budget-saving still images, hard as it is to tell sometimes, the show being as gentle and reflective as it is. The art is a pretty accurate faximile of the manga, which is certainly good. And while the intro theme is still largely forgettable, they did manage to find a suitably nice ending theme to replace the excellent “Natsu Yuuzora” from the first season.
In conclusion, the shows strike a perfect balance in terms of fun, reflectiveness and sentimentality that it has become one of my favourite show that I would recommend to anyone who likes fantasy and slice of life.
BlazTavern 