The Familiar of Zero: The Knight of the Two Moons aka Zero no Tsukaima: Futatsuki no Kishi

Anime Review by ShonenPunk

Okay, so I’m trying a new format, because I wanted to be like Yahtzee over at Zero Punctuation, except I can’t talk that fast and I couldn’t use Windows Movie Maker to save my life, so bear with me. This’ll also save me the time of not having to write pathetic pieces about the art and music which I really don’t care about, and saves you the trouble of reading the aforementioned crap. Right. So, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about The Familiar of Zero, Season Two.

Let’s start with the basic story. It seems that it’s a bad time to be in Medieval Fantasy World with Magic #475™, as there’s a war going on. The evil country from last season is still evil, and has sent in the army to destroy the country of everyone’s favorite psychotic bitch, Lousie, and her not-so-faithful familiar, Saito. The story revolves around Louise and Saito coping with the war and doing everything they can to help out the mother country, and by “doing everything”, we of course mean finding out if silly harem anime clichés can do anything in a war. And of course we find out that, to the shock of absolutely no one, yes, it seems they can do quite well.

Do you remember how, in my Season One review, I praised the story of the show? How a well-written fantasy plot allowed it to go beyond the basic “Boy meets thousand girls” plotlines that were tired in the 90’s? How it had characters that were good enough to hold up the plot, and enabled everyone to have a good time? Well, throw all that out, and you’ve got the idea of what’s in Season Two. It’s like the staff looked at the final product of Season One and came to the startling realization that, while making quality anime that makes money is nice, making mediocre anime that makes money is also nice, and it also saves you the work of trying hard, so they got rid of the effort involved in the equation and made Knight of Two Moons.


The really brilliant thing about Season One, though, was that, while it had plenty of the delicious fanservice that otaku love, it never really needed to sacrifice the story for it allowing us the best of both worlds. This is the major failing of Season Two, as the plot is sacrificed, garroted, decapitated, and left on a pike as a warning to others. As such, while the fanservice is certainly as delicious as ever, the plots come off as boring and uncreative. It’s kind of amazing that there’s a war going on, yet the characters are still stuck in harem fantasyland. You’d think that there’d be a number of good war-related plots that they could run on, but this show doesn’t seem to figure that out until there’s about 3 episodes left, and they’re suddenly rushing to put together a meaningful plot.

I found only two side plots of any interest, one involving a new character, Agnes, and her quest for revenge, the other towards the climax at the end of the series, and both of these were handled rather poorly. When it’s painfully obvious when the plot twist is coming, who it involves, what happened and how it will al be resolved three episodes before said twist actually happens, then you know something is either terribly wrong with the foreshadowing department. It’s like trying to playing a game of Clue and finding Colonel Mustard covered in blood, wielding a knife in the Conservatory. It won’t be that hard to piece it all together after that, and takes quite a bit of the fun out of it all.

Moving on to characters, the cast of Zero has certainly seen better days. Maybe they used all their character development on Season One before realizing they needed to make a Season Two, but it still stands that there is little to no development to be had in a span of twelve episodes. Maybe it’s just because the relationship between Saito and Louise had gone as far as it could, seeing as they were practically dry humping each other by the end of Season One, but since they can’t really move past that and into a serious relationship since that would kill the harem aspect of the show, they keep them in this quantum state of pure love and murderous hate, sort of like marriage without the shiny ring, with each episode ending either in Louise beating Saito senseless or yearning for his seed.


It would help if the side characters could keep up, but they’re kind of dead as well. Apparently the side characters from Season One weren’t quite cutting it, since most of them are practically replaced by completely new characters that do pretty much the exact same role. The flirtatious, high and mighty noble boy, who was a nice addition alongside Saito, gets sent to war and is promptly replaced by another flirtatious, high and mighty noble boy, with practically the same character design to boot. Not that it really matters, but it just strikes me as odd that this whole process is necessary at all, like someone rearranging their furniture just to see what it looks like, then realize they could have left it the way it was, and saved themselves the heavy lifting. Again, the only original, good character is Agnes, the captain of the Queen’s guard, whose own story arc makes her entertaining enough so that the show’s not a complete waste of time.

Overall, let me put it this way: by the end of the Agnes arc, I was constantly finding myself fast forwarding through the show so I could hurry up and get to the ending. No, not the end of the series, but the ending theme, which was probably the best part of the show, a nice little number with highly amusing lyrics and background animation. Really, though, I can’t recommend The Familiar of Zero: The Knight of Two Moons to you unless you’ve already made the vested interest in Season One and want a bridge between that and the upcoming Season Three, The Shinys of Magicawhatsit. Of course, if you have a thing for mediocre harem anime with more fanservice than it knows what to do with, then go right ahead and try it, but speaking as someone who loves harem anime in general and the first season of Zero in particular, I think you would be better served pretending it doesn’t exist.