The first season of Sakamoto Diaries was a fun season, with some interesting characters and some fun writing and fight scenes. the concept of “What if John Wick’s wife didn’t die, and he retired to run a combini?” worked for me. However, the second season had a really strong fall off for me, and I dropped it before the season finished, so I should probably talk about why.

A big part of why this fell off for me is that part of the appeal of the first season was Sakamoto juggling his assassin background with his ordinary life, and with it his desire to keep to that ordinary life, in spite of other assassins interfering to try to kill him. Season 2 starts with a continuation of this part of the story, including a brief exploration of some of the more mundane fronts to different aspects of assassin culture, serving as something of a fun counterpoint to the classy suits-meets-punk-rock aesthetic of the John Wick series.

I did find myself a little annoyed with the prison-escapee arc serving as something of a mini-tournament arc. It essentially existed to introduce another group of semi-allied assassins who appeared to exist primarily to provide a mechanism for killing off antagonists who no longer served a narrative purpose without breaking Team Sakamoto’s “Do Not Kill” rule. However, we got to keep Team Sakamoto’s interactions with the mundane world, and we had the introduction of the major antagonist, who looked interesting, so I was with it.

Then they went, “You know what we need? Another tournament arc immediately after the last one.” And then they went, “What else we should do? Remove all of the mundane framework that made the last arc so fun?” so we get a big Battle-Royale themed Exam arc which sticks Sakamoto and Shin on a tropical island as part of the entrance exam for an Assassin school that Sakamoto’s already graduated from, so they can access the files from the school and presumably leave, instead of just visiting (certainly you’d think they’d want someone of Sakamoto’s prestige to be a guest lecturer).

It ended up becoming just tiresome, and like the series had lost track of its core concept, and unfortunately will never know if this was the creator’s idea, or if their editor came in and said “Hey, we need a proper tournament arc, do something on a remote island like this bit from Naruto or HunterXHunter everyone likes.”

So, I’m done with Sakamoto Days.

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