White Album 2 is a thirteen episode anime adaptation of the visual novel. While it is a sequel to the first White Album, it is not a direct sequel as it features different characters and takes place twenty years later. There are some references during the earlier episodes, and several key songs in this anime are from the first White Album. However, you don’t need any knowledge at all to understand this anime.
The anime follows Kitahara Haruki, who is a third year high school student. He’s a member of the light music club but that club has been suffering in numbers, with nearly all members quitting. Kitahara plays the guitar, but only seemingly at a casual / novice level so he isn’t too engrossed in it. However, once he learns about Setsuna Ogiso and Kazusa Touma, the former who has a great voice and the latter who has amazing piano talent, he sets about recruiting the two into the club and then performing at the upcoming cultural festival.
If you have watched the first White Album, then you will immediately notice the difference in tone and target demographic. White Album 2 is a lot more stereotypical, containing many tropes from your average shonen anime. That’s not a bad thing because at least the story is easy to understand, and the characters are familiar and likeable. Kitahara, Ogiso and Touma are all characters that you can relate to and the story is told in a coherent way.
Naturally this is a romantic anime, and Kitahara will develop strong bonds with both Ogiso and Touma. Ogiso is like the energetic girl of the group, with good looks and an outgoing personality, although she has several issues of her own that she has to overcome. While Touma is more reserved, like a misunderstood prodigy. This anime has strong music as well, which fits well with the music club theme.
Having the characters form the band and then learn three songs for the festivals within two weeks is a bit of a stretch, and a herculean effort. This rushed feeling extends to how the trio have their feelings form for each other. However, since everyone has a common objective that they’re aiming towards, it is a sweet bond and works really well. Since all the characters are fairly likeable, it’s hard to take sides and pick the pair that you’d want. This includes Kitahara, who is your typical overly nice protagonist, but he doesn’t cross the line of being annoyingly so.
When the cultural festival arrives and the performance happens, it was worth the wait. It perfectly captured the fun and the satisfaction of working so hard for a particular event. The happiness of the characters was infectious, and this is where watching the first White Album is beneficial as the songs will resonate with you. Since this will be the characters’ first and last performance given that they are in their final year before university, there is a bit of a bittersweet feeling once all is said and done.
With such a strong build up and culmination into the climax in the middle of the season, you might wonder what would carry the second half. This is where the romance aspect of the anime comes more heavily into play. Carrying on the themes that begun from the first half, it becomes a complex and delicate situation in which no matter what happens, either Touma or Ogiso will get hurt. Seeing how affected the trio is, you can’t help but wish that the happiness that peaked during their performance and the lead up to it could be snapshotted and held there, but alas, time marches on and it becomes painful to watch the trio try and deal with the situation in their own way.
You might have thought that the story rushed a few things, especially in the way the characters got to know each other. This is because it then rectifies that later on and completely fleshes out their encounters, adding a lot more context to the way the scenes were set up in the earlier episodes. At this point, it’s hard to pick the “true” pairing between Kitahara and Ogiso, or Kitahara and Touma. It’s also hard to put the blame on Kitahara, since he is as confused about his feelings as everyone else. It’s just a shame that he causes a lot of pain to everyone instead.
As the season gets closer and closer to the end, your suspicions turn into certainty on how it can end on a happy note: it cannot. No matter what happens, someone will lose and that’s the sad part of all this. It’s a double whammy since they have to deal with the sadness of farewells as people move on after graduation.
The final episode can be really hard to stomach. All the emotions and feelings from the characters hitting boiling point and spilling out of them. You might want to put all the blame on Kitahara, since he’s made some terrible choices as well as acted selfishly towards the end by not really being considerate of the other. At the same time, some of the other characters had made mistakes of their own, so it can be a bit of a grey area. This is what makes the anime so engrossing and layered though.
Overall White Album 2 is a really nice surprise. With the combination of the high school setting, light music club and teenage romance, it could have easily fallen into a rut of generic developments and stereotypes. Instead, it weaves together a strong, solid and complex tale of the characters growing, building and experiencing intense emotions. While the ending isn’t idealistic, or realistic, or conclusive, as it is “an” ending, it was a fitting ending with the emotions it left behind complete with the fantastic music.
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