Review for Jormungand: Perfect Order - Complete Season 2

Introduction

I was disappointed by the first season of Jormungand, as it didn’t live up to the hype. That was even more of a problem as it was hyped to the max as another Black Lagoon. So there I was, expecting hyper violence, coupled with complex characters and a vein of dark comedy in the middle of all the action drama. I got the hyper violence, but for the most part Jormungand never really broke out of its otaku focused anime mode. It was only with the final four episodes that it added some complexity to its story, and then with the final roll of the narrative dice, it threw in a CIA character, and revealed a hidden side to one of Koko’s bodyguards. For what was for the most part a mediocre series, Jormungand finished on a high, and it definitely left us wanting more. If Jormungand Perfect Order continues in the way that the first series ended, and develops even further, the second series might have the chops to live up to that hype.

Jonah is a mess of contradictions. He’s a survivor of a conflict, despises war, soldiers, and weapons, especially the weapons that were responsible for the deaths of his family. And he’s a skilled child soldier himself, a dispassionate and ruthless killer. Among his list of hates in this world are the arms industries, and especially arms dealers. And he’s hooked up with Koko Hekmatyar and her team of mercenaries, as she plies her trade, selling weapons around the world. And Koko might very well be loco, but it’s hard to stay on an even keel if you try to retain some semblance of humanity even while forging a career as a ruthless dealer of death.


Anyway, Koko has taken a shine to her newest recruit, and is intent on training him up on conforming to her idea of a resplendent human being, which is more than just a child soldier. And she is more than a little unhinged, apt to throw a tantrum or two, often unfazed by perilous situations, and oddly enough for an arms dealer, possessing her own code of ethics. It certainly has Jonah reconsidering his hatred, but that’s only made complicated by the rest of the Hekmatyar family, who also are in the business, and Jonah has more than enough reason to loathe Koko’s brother Kasper. Things get really serious for the second season of Jormungand, subtitled Perfect Order, when the CIA get in on the action.

The twelve episodes of Jormungand Perfect Order: Season 2 are presented across two Blu-rays thus...

Disc 1
13. Serpents Looking to the Heavens
14. Dance with Undershaft phase. 1
15. Dance with Undershaft phase. 2
16. Kasper and Jonah
17. Castle of Lies phase. 1
18. Castle of Lies phase. 2
19. Pazuzu
20. New World phase. 1

Disc 2
21. New World phase. 2
22. New World phase. 3
23. Warmonger
24. Century of Shame

Picture

Jormungand Perfect Order gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p. It’s a pretty decent Blu-ray transfer for an anime, clear and sharp throughout, with good detail levels, strong colours, and bringing across the action animation in a pleasing manner. The usual banding associated with HD anime transfers from Funimation is kept to a minimum, but there are rare moments of shimmer and aliasing on fine detail, for which you’ll have to get up close to the screen to see. Jormungand uses a deliberate layer of filmic grain to emphasise its ‘realism’, but the character designs are appealing, while the emphasis on military hardware detail and authenticity goes above and beyond the call of duty. Also Jormungand has some seriously pretty skies.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR, and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese, with player locked subtitles for the Japanese audio, and player locked signs for the English audio. I went with the Japanese track, and the dialogue was clear throughout, the action represented as well as stereo allows, and Taku Iwasaki’s exceptional music a highlight of the show, driving the episodes with zeal and impact. The subtitles were accurately timed, and marred only by the rare and minor typo, the sort that gets past spellcheckers.

I really don’t get Funimation sometimes; they’ll whack a 5.1 up-mix on practically anything. Pick up a Funimation DVD and it will default to DD 5.1 English and DD 2.0 Japanese, and the same sound design usually applies to Blu-ray, regardless of the show’s content. Even something as dialogue focussed, and effects light as Kamisama Kiss gets 5.1 English. And then along comes Jormungand, one the more intense action shows that Funimation have released of late, and the English dub is merely laid down in stereo, just like the Japanese. Add to that a rather good dub from Funimation, with the actors cast well, suited to their characters, a fair script translation, and actors that really play to the strengths of the genre, means that just like the first season, Jormungand Perfect Order is for me the rare anime that I can watch in Japanese or English.

Extras

These are the US Blu-ray discs simply repackaged for the UK, and present their content with animated menus.

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for Blood-C The Last Dark.

You’ll also find a commentary to go with episode 15, with ADR Director Christopher Bevins (Tojo), Jamie Marchi (Hex), and Mark Stoddard (Bookman). It’s another one of those commentaries that I so love. In it, they compare experiences with guns, which I guess is a little more appropriate to the show than comparing breast sizes as they did in the first Jormungand commentary.

Disc 2 autoplays with a trailer for the plastic looking Dragon Ball Z Blu-rays.

Episode 24 has the audio commentary this time with ADR director Christopher Bevins, Gwendolyn Lau (Dr Miami), Micah Solusod (Jonah) and Anastasia Munoz (Koko). I’ve got a new game with Funimation commentaries; timing how long it takes before the inanity makes me switch them off. This one lasted 9 minutes.

Team Koko – A Look Inside with the American Director and Cast sees Bevins, Munoz, and Solusod on screen talking about their respective characters and the show. This featurette lasts 10½ minutes and is presented in HD.

You’ll find the ‘textless’ credits here with subtitles locked on...

The US trailer for the show is here, as well as further Funimation trailers for Robotics;Notes, Black Lagoon Roberta’s Blood Trail, Psycho-Pass, Akira, Eureka Seven AO, Aquarion Evol, and the Funimation Classics label.

Conclusion

For the first three episodes of this collection, I thought that Jormungand had done it; it had lived up to the hype, and delivered on the action, and the complexity of narrative that I had hoped for, if not the depth of character. You’re never going to get away from its anime stylings, and the inappropriate interjections of oddball humour. But with the opening three episodes, it really played up the CIA angle to the story, revealed something new and interesting about one of Koko’s crew, and changed the universe in an irreparable way. In season 1, despite all the death and destruction that Koko’s team dealt out, they themselves seemed invulnerable. The lie to that assumption is made clear at the end of episode 15, and suddenly it looks like the Jormungand story is getting a whole lot more serious, the conspiracies all the more detailed and involving.

And then we get to Kasper and Jonah, episode 16, and it’s back to normal service, a sequences of individual or two part episodes that happen to look at the past of one of the main characters, whether it’s finding out what happened to the children that Jonah went all Terminator for, after they’d been relocated to Japan by Kasper, finding out Tojo’s mysterious past and the corrupt secret service that he once worked for, and how Wilee first met Lehm. Just like in the first season, the stories aren’t particularly deep, characters fairly simplistic, and the out of place humour tends to detract from whatever serious implications the episode might have, this is despite the CIA and the odd other agency showing greater interest in Koko, and flitting around in the background of each episode, adding to the feeling that something big is going to happen.


That something big does eventually happen in the final five episodes, as Koko’s masterplan becomes clear, and she sets about implementing it. She wants nothing less than to change the world, as indicated by the title of the three part story, and what she has in mind is as extreme as her personality. The one person that she does want to convince of her plans is Jonah, and the reasons behind her intense belief in him also become clear towards the end of the show. Things do get complicated and intricate again for the finale, that CIA angle now being played even more strongly, but there are several factors that detract from the ending. One thing is the Hollywood school of computer hacking deployed as the key to Koko’s plan. One minute of scrutiny reveals that it just wouldn’t work. Another thing is a remarkable degree of naivety (admittedly acknowledged in the show by Kasper) to Koko’s plan, and a whole lot of wishful thinking, and an odd lack of understanding of basic human nature. The final straw is the final episode itself, which begins after a two year time-skip, and with a phone call full of exposition to get us caught up, before delivering a ‘read the manga or pray for a sequel’ non-ending.

It’s a conclusion that doesn’t even live up to the mediocre standard of the show, let alone the hype that surrounded it. Other than that, just like the first season, the second season of Jormungand is fun enough to watch if not exactly inspiring contemplation or analysis. I do have to raise an eyebrow at a couple of moments of remarkable prescience. Jormungand was made in 2012, so while its vision of a war-torn future where nations fight for dwindling resources maybe exaggerated and bleak, it isn’t too far off its Middle East unrest spiralling out of control, although given the Middle East, you don’t need to be a soothsayer to foretell unrest there. What did give me a chill was the vision of a New Soviet Union looking to annex more resource rich former states. They only guessed wrong in terms of which state, Azerbaijan instead of the Crimea.