The Rising of the Shield Hero Producer Talks Season 2's Surprise Challenges
The Rising of the Shield Hero wrapped up its highly anticipated second season earlier this Spring, and the producer behind the anime opened up about all of the surprising challenges the team needed to keep an eye out for when developing the new episodes! The second season of the series was one of the most anticipated returns of the year overall following the successful first season back in 2019, but the premiere ended up being divisive among many fans. The second season approached its story in a way fans didn't expect to see, and it appears that the team behind the series was hit with a number of interesting challenges behind the scenes too.
Speaking with ComicBook.com's Megan Peters during Crunchyroll Expo this Summer, The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 2 producer Kousuke Arai opened up about the challenges the team faced when adapting the series. Along with balancing elements such as the Spirit Tortoise arc and adding in all of the development Naofumi Iwatani's party goes through, the challenges came with balancing each episode of the series to make them compelling enough to continue watching forward. That balance was tough to find while making changes for the new season.
"There was the Spirit Tortoise to consider as well as Kizuna and their friendships," Arai began. "We approached these two episodes with excitement as one was more about spirituality and the other about friendship and how the team fights together. We wanted to make sure that each episode had a different kind of excitement for fans. Each episode was created to impact audiences differently in this second season. Also, there was advertising. We've done a lot of advertising. Like for the key visual. If you take it and compare it to the one for the first season, you can tell that slowly but surely vivid changes were made to the anime's colors and characters."
So the team not only had to make sure that the second season was decisively shown to be evolving compared to the first season of the series (which is already tough considering the majorly positive response to the first season), but they also needed to balance how much ground it needed to cover. With the series now getting ready to come back in Season 3, it seems the challenges are far from over for this team.
What did you think of The Rising of the Shield Hero's second season run? What are you hoping to see in the third season? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!