Title: Baka & Test: Summon the Beasts – Series 2 Collection
Published by: Madman Entertainment (Australia) | Funimation Entertainment (North America)
Based on: Light Novel Series by Kenji Inoue
Audio: Hybrid Dub
Subtitles: English
Runtime: 325 Minutes
Cost: $59.95 on EITHER DVD or Blu-ray
Special Thanks: Madman for kindly providing me with Blu-ray sample of this release
The loveable losers of lowly Class F are back for more fun in the second season of Baka and Test – Summon the Beasts! Goofball Yoshii’s still leading his crew in Avatar battles against the brainier students in school, but the girls in Class F have grown way less concerned with improving their status on campus. Instead of moving up in the world, the girls are more interested in getting closer to the guys in the gang! Of course, some of the boys are totally oblivious to the romantic intentions of their female friends. That’s to be expected in a group of dim-wits and misfits. Nonetheless, the femmes of Class F aren’t giving up anytime soon. Because when love is on the line, even the biggest underachievers can find motivation – even if they can’t spell it!
I will begin my review of Baka and Test Series 2 the same way that I did the first all the way back in December 2011…. my High School grades were not much value to me – infact that despite working my ass off for several years to obtain my final grade they were useful for perhaps…. a morning at best – heck I don’t even recall what my individual grades were. I say that because I do genuinely like the concept behind the series – where students grades are pivotal and they must use their brains and intellect in order to secure a better educational experience, resources and other luxuries.
How do they do this? Through summonable avatars whose strength and health are directly linked to test scores – and by challenging higher level classes and taking down the opposing class representative will see the class take over their room and resources. While season one did consist of considerably heavy filler content outside of the handful of main episodes… the main plot where the students of Class F aimed at taking down the top tier Class A was pretty interesting. Moving on the Series 2 – while there is some decent backstory content it is even less of an actual storyline and more of filler (and occasionally fanservice) content.
I didn’t feel there was any direction with this second series – with the focus on the Avatar battles being dropped to a few scenes across the whole season and instead filling the mix with romance and an assortment of cliché episode themes including the “Beach Episode”, “Study Camp Episode – Split over three episodes” and the “Festival Episode”. Granted the season retains and builds upon the comedic elements of the first, many of the episodes just don’t reach the same standard as the original set. While I haven’t read any of the light novel volumes, surely there would be something more structured available to serve as an overarching plotline and in turn providing better direction of the episodes.
That being said, there were a few better written episodes in the mix which I felt contributed to the development of the characters. Episode 8 for example highlights how Minami first met Akihisa while Episode 11 highlights how the relationship between Yuuji and Shouko started in High School. Given the length of the first season, it was welcoming to have development provided for some of the more prominent relationships in the series. Overall however, the episodes of series 2 are pretty hit and miss….. and while some shine amongst the pack, others end up drawn out, tedious and don’t make as good a use of the series more unique concepts as they could have.
Out of all the elements of Baka & Test, the visuals are most probably the biggest highlight and I think benefited from a release on Blu-ray (Taking into account my original review was of the DVD release). Featuring a cast of interestingly designed characters, bright and colourful environments as well as many unique visual quirks to the series it comes out as good if not better than the first season.
The avatars, which are the core element behind the Avatar Battle system return with very little alteration and they do play around with their designs a bit across the episodes – including having them more expressive (and even talking) in one half-episode segment to “spooking” them up for the final two-part arc. Unfortunately there were very few Avatar Battles shown across the episodes – a shame as they were some of the visual highlights from the first season. Other than this issue, the studio Silver Link did a stand-out job with this title.
While this does occasionally change between episodes – Baka & Test Series 2 makes use of the opening sequence “Kimi + Nazo + Watashi de JUMP! by Larval Stage Planning” and the ending sequence Eureka Baby by Natsuko Aso”. When complemented with the animation, these sequences retained the same impact as the first series and were all fun to watch. The remainder of the music backing was also up to the same standards set by the original – featuring both new tracks and tracks carried over.
Funimation Entertainment once again delivers both the original Japanese dub and a brand new English dub for this title – retaining most if not all of the original voice actors. While this will come down to personal preferences as both dubs are solid, the English voice cast once again provided fitting voices for their roles in the show – with highlights including Scott Freeman as Yuuji Sakamoto and Brina Palencia as Hideyoshi Kinoshita. While subtitles provided are decent, none of the text used in the question cards at the middle and endings of each episode were not translated – an unfortunate omission as irrespective of the dub you are listening to most of the text on them are not covered in the dialogue.
Funimation Entertainment provides a solid set of extras which should have also carried over into the Australian DVD release as well. These extra goodies include:
- A Couple of Episode Commentaries from the English voice-cast and crew: An interesting listen to as most are.
- Baka and Test: Summon the Beat Spinout!: A series of non-dubbed mini-episodes
- Promo Videos
- Original Commercials
- US Trailer
- Textless Opening Song – Kimi + Nazo + Watashi de JUMP!
- Textless Ending Songs – Eureka Baby, Baka to Koshitsu to Kodoku Meshi and Hi-Ho!!
- Trailers – These should vary between media – for Blu-ray these are trailers for Funimation titles while the DVD format SHOULD have trailers for Madman titles
As I said above, I do like the concept behind Baka & Test, however for its second series I unfortunately didn’t think what they delivered did the series justice. Granted there were many laughs to be had – and if you go into this series expecting comedy you will most likely come out satisfied – but on the other hand there is no overarching storyline and Baka & Test 2 was essentially 13 loosely joined episodes.
There is no word on if there will be a third season of Baka & Test yet – however Funimation Entertainment and in turn Madman Entertainment have / are planning to release the two OVA episodes in the coming months which are referenced throughout these episodes.
Final Score
Storyline / Character Development: C-
Design: B+
Music/Voice Acting: B
Extra Content: A
Personal Preference: C
Overall Score: C
