Tower of God was popular and well-received in manwa form, but it wasn’t nearly as successful as an anime. Still, the first season from 2020 was entertaining enough. Four years later, a different studio released a second season. (Season 1 was made by Telecom Animation Film and season 2 was made by The Answer Studio.) Unfortunately, this season failed even harder than the original work. What went wrong? And are there any redeeming qualities? Well, we’re about to find out in this brief review.
Note: This review only covers the twelve episodes of TOG: Return of the Prince. It does not include TOG: Workshop Battle Arc, even though Crunchyroll considers that the second half of season 2. My review for Workshop Battle Arc will come later.
Warning: Spoilers may be present
Story
Score: 5/10
Adventurers continue trying to climb the Tower of God, which promises divine power to whoever can conquer it. Instead of focusing immediately on protagonist Bam, we start by getting to know a new character, Wangnan Ja. He soon runs into a mysterious man named Viole who is far stronger than the others. Naturally, Viole is actually Bam, having undergone a transformation and joined a gang of dangerous royalty-killers called FUG. Why did Bam join FUG and is he actually the same sweet person as before? Can he form a bond with Wangnan and their new team so they can climb the Tower?
This doesn’t sound bad on paper, but in execution, the story had major pacing issues, awkward time skips, and subpar world-building. Furthermore, any meaningful story themes felt forced rather than smoothly incorporated into the work. For those interested in the central stories of Bam and/or Khun, the second season was frustrating because it was so slow. It took forever for any progress to be made because the story focus was on other characters most of the time. For me personally, the worst flaw in the story category was the world-building, which was abysmal.
Visuals
Score: 7/10
The visuals in this season were adequate but seemed to be a step down, on average, from what we saw in the first season. The fight scenes especially are much more boring in Return of the Prince. They don’t have creative choreography or much movement at all. The character designs were fine, but nothing special. I did much prefer the look of young adult Viole compared to the boyish design for Bam. Magic and such (like Shinsu) was quite pretty. I like the expressions and the overall polished look of the characters, particularly in the more detailed still-shots and close-ups.
Audio
Score: 8/10
You shouldn’t be surprised that the audio gets such a high score from me when the music was composed by Kevin Penkin. He is one of my favorite composers on the anime scene to date. If you have some spare time or like anime background music, definitely listen to some tracks from the TOG season 2 OST. As for the songs, despite not being my usual style, they were awesome, too. The opening song was “Rise Up” and the ending song was “Believe.” Both upbeat, hip-hoppish songs were performed by Niziu. As usual, I have a slight preference for the ending song, as it’s a bit slower and easier to learn.
The voice-acting was excellent as usual in Japanese anime. There are numerous VAs worth mentioning if you’re a fan of Japanese seiyuus, but I’ll just quickly mention three of them. Taichi Ichikawa was the voice of Bam/Viole. He’s had mostly supporting roles in anime since he started about 8 years ago, but he did fine as a main character. I look forward to learning his voice and seeing him in new anime from here onward.
Nobuhiko Okamoto is a more seasoned seiyuu who played Aguero Agnes Khun. He’s usually type-cast as the crazy kid (Karma in Assassination Classroom, Zack from Angels of Death), but in this case, Okamoto played a calm and princely character very well. Saori Hayami, a seiyuu with an angelic voice, played Rachel. Hayami is a talented actress who can pull off cute, innocent roles as well as more complex characters. By now, it should be clear that the audio category was pretty damn good.
Characters
Score: 5/10
As I mentioned in an earlier section, one of the biggest problems with Return of the Prince is that it focuses on a bunch of new characters instead of the ones we already care about from the first season. The story we were most interested in – Rachel and Bam – was all but forgotten to make time for new characters. There was progress for Rachel, Bam, and Khun, but it was slow and largely underwhelming. This means a lot of fans of season 1 gave up on season 2 from lack of patience – and understandably so.
Beyond that, there were two other issues: 1) there are far too many characters; and 2) very little personality or character development was given to those characters. The worst part is that many of them – like Goseng, Arkraptor, Xia Xia, and Dan – had the potential to be highly interesting and loveable. The character concepts are not the problem. Even with the disastrous or nonexistent development in the second season, I was still fond of many of the characters. That’s why I won’t say this category was outright bad. However, it was disappointingly average.
Personal Enjoyment
Score: 5/10
My score for personal enjoyment is low because even though there were several elements in this series that I loved, the negatives outweighed the positives for me. I think the songs and music are fire. On top of that, a handful of characters are genuinely interesting to me. My number one among these is Rachel. Her growing evil and insanity are fascinating from a psychological perspective. (Hopefully I’ll write another essay post about Rachel at some point. That scene where she stabbed Dan was chilling!)
So, to restate: yes, there were enjoyable aspects in this anime. But my disappointment was stronger than my appreciation. The fights were over too fast or were too predictable. The characters were never explored enough. I felt bored and frustrated throughout the whole season with the pacing issues and poor plot execution. There was very little of anything that I was actually hoping to see – case in point, Rachel had only two or three significant scenes over twelve episodes. Also, I’m still sad that Nia was murdered. Regrettably, TOG: Return of the Prince was mediocre in presenting enjoyable elements.
Overall Score
Score: 6.0 out of 10.0 Floors Cleared
The overall score is the mean of the five scores for the previous categories. My rating for this anime fell on the lower end of the norm. Tower of God: Return of the Prince has a current score of 6.68 on MAL and a median rating of “Good” on ANN (as of Sep 4th 2025). The general opinion is that this season was significantly worse than the first. On the other hand, it also wasn’t outright bad, having several redeeming elements like epic music, interesting setting, and the return of season one characters. That’s all I have to say about this season of Tower of God.
~Thanks for reading~
Written by 7Mononoke at Anime Rants
Anime Rants 