Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun Review - An Odd Change in Tone

So the first thing I will do is link my review of the first season which should give you an idea of you would want to get into this show: https://peakd.com/anime/@dlstudios/made-in-abyss-was-not-the-show-i-was-expecting-to-get

If the show sounds good from that, you'll probably like the whole thing. What I will use this review to talk about is a bit of a shift in how the story seems to work. It started a bit with the movie, and I talked about it in that review, but the show has largely had a consistent internal logic that felt very scientific in how it worked. Yes, passion and emotion drove the characters, but learning about the way the Abyss worked and adapting to those changes is what let them progress. Once the movie, Dawn of the Deep Soul, came out, which acts as the bridge between Season One and Two, there was a shift in how things operated.

Things now only seem to have happened because of the strong feelings a person has. The Golden City is this strange place in which the value of something is determined by a person's view of it, and some supernatural entity will balance things out if you destroy or take someone's value by taking something or something of equivalent value from you. And this society was created from some weird wish-granting artifact that grants a person's wish in some kind of strange perverted way. The sense that things follow a more scientific kind of internal logic is pretty much gone at this point.

I don't think that is necessarily to the detriment of the show though. Past the sixth layer is beyond where people can come back from and still return to the surface as people, this is past the point of no return where little to nothing is known. It's almost as though the second season has intentionally gone beyond the realms of understanding, and maybe that is why people can't come back from it, and even when info does come up from the White Whistles it seems very little can be garnered from that information.

It took me a minute to get used to the change, but I came down on the side of being in favor of it. It's helped by the show has been very good at getting you to care about these characters, and that doesn't change at all here. The core of what makes the show work is fully intact. Pair that with the continuation of the fantastic visuals, Made in Abyss has shown it's worth keeping up with.