Anime: Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori

I just finished watching the second season and now I have the urge to write my first ever review..
I tend to be very harsh with evaluating animes so be warned.
Oh and, this review may contain >MAJOR SPOILER<.

Let me start with the main point of the anime. There's Jigoku Shoujo, namely Enma Ai, and this webpage Jugoku Tsuushin. On the site, people type the name of people they want to send to hell, then Ai appears, giving them a kind of voodoo puppet with a red string, that when pulled will send the typed persons name to hell. After the one who got his revenge dies, he will also go to hell.

When I started watching the first season and got to know this concept, I was pretty sure that there were a lot of sad stories waiting ahead, and oh was I right. Actually, even at the end of the second season, there was not one thing which I thought had a happy end.

2 obvious examples:
- Good guy sends bad guy he hates to hell. Happy end? Of course not, after all the good guy will go to hell after he dies too.
- Bad guys sending good guys to hell.

Story
As you might guess from the above, a lot of different stories get told and a lot of people get sent to hell. In fact, almost every episode is a standalone, the only thing the episodes have in common being the characters Enma Ai and her few companions.
In my language this means: There is NO story, just a collection of tales of the same universe. So for this: Story gets a -0-, not for being bad, but for not being there.

But, I said almost. The first season had some kind of "main guy" investigating Enma Ai and Jigoku Tsuushin which was actually quite good and kept the anime kind of interesting.

For the second season, that main guy is gone (I don't remember why, too long ago, but he probably got, oh surprise, sent to hell).
There are some episodes that tell the story behind the companions of Enma Ai, which were neither better nor worse than the rest of the standalone episodes. As this has a connection to the overall anime, I consider it "story". The development however was close to 0, therefore this story part gets a solid -1-.

Lastly, like season one, there are some characters investigating Enma Ai and Tsuushin like in the first season, though they only first appear at episode 22 or 23. While this was actually interesting again, it made up only a few percentage of the anime.
With this being everything there is to story, I can give it no more than a -4-.

Looking at the standalone episodes:
One: After watching just a few episodes of the first season, you will start to see a very simple pattern, and be able to almost always predict what will happen. Two: You will also begin to KNOW that the episode will NOT have an happy end.
Three: What kept me watching (.. aside from my policy to finish every anime I start, no matter how much I hate it ..) was actually wanting to see the bad guys get punished, which certainly does happen, though not always.
Looking at all the points, I think it's not hard to guess, that watching this anime is a real >torture<.

After watching an episode I always feel like the hate of the characters somehow turned into my own. This the anime does well.
As an example for all of this, let me bring up a big spoler of the close end of this season:
The person who investigated Ai and the incidents happening in his town just somehow escaped from those crazy people trying to kill him, his sister, and another boy. He took a car and is escaping from the crazy people, wanting to tell the world about Enma Ai, with the 2 kids on the back seats.
After watching 50 episodes of Jigoku Shoujo, I could not help but think: "The good guy will vanish any moment, being sent to hell by those crazy bunch of people, leaving the car without driver. The car will then drive against a tree, killing the kids. I KNOW this will happen, but please don't."
Well, in the end the kids survived, but this was what happened. By the way, the only guy that gave me a hope about actually making it possible to have a third season with actual story just died..

After these two seasons, and all the hate that was transfered to me every single episode, I cannot say that I enjoyed much of it.
For this, I cannot understand how anyone sane can truly enjoy this anime.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate sad ends, though I prefer good ones. But this anime does it every episode while making you hate so many characters, it's just wrong.

Animation:
In comparison to other animes, theres nothing really bad or good. There's much better animation and there's much worse animation. Solid -7-.

Sound:
The sound fits the theme of the anime pretty well, and the voices mostly fit well into the anime. There was nothing really outstanding though. -8-

Character Development:
See Story section. There's single episodes about some characters, which are plain uninteresting. The characters stay the same all the time anyway. -2-

Value:
If I will ever watch this anime again, then it will definitely be one of the very last rewatches of my list of about 200 watched animes.
-2-

Enjoyment:
See story section. Transfering hate into your watcher all the time does not equal making him enjoy it. -2-

Oh For The Emperor's Sake...

For no particular reason, the original jigoku shoujo run has a special place in my estimation, and for arguably the first time that this is the case, the sequel didn't actually disappoint. Not to say its perfect mind, but it could have gone a great deal worse.

The animation is marginally worse than the original sadly. A particular sticking point is the marked lack of noses. Character design is a bit blurred at times, special effects could use some more love and so forth. There are exceptions, and these are fairly well handled for whatever reason that they were singled out.

Sound is alright, little to stand out or drag down. Background music has a good few touches of brilliance now and then. But i'm inclined to say the OP and ED were a waste of time, at least compared to the first one.

Voice actor work is as close to the same as makes no difference. This is good; the four repeating characters have .. well, character, even if it is a bit of typecasting at times. The generic victims dont get off so well though; suffer not identity being something like the rule of thumb.

the story(s) however is a marginal improvement over the first, in that it leaves even more of a WHAT THE HELL? at the end, which was built up to very nicely throughout. Another nice touch was actually building on the five recurring characters which was sorely missing last time around.

The premise has been polished up a bit, with substantially more variety than last time. But the fact that comparisons to "last time" keep cropping up counts against the season, and the series itself.

this series is alright, it is quiet possibly the most original take on the magical girl formula but is ground down into the dust by doing the same basic thing time after time after time after time. So the fact is, once you see it through, you wont really get much out of it a second time.

But it is worth that one commitment. Its patently ridiculous to watch this one before the first, but this one doesn't drag quite so much, and gives a very slightly higher reward on your time investment.

So by all means give this a try, but if you didnt like the first you will certainly like the second even less.