Squid Game Season 2 Review: Korean-Style Battle Royale Is Spectacular But Pointless

On December 26, 2024, the second season of the popular series "Squid Game" became available on Netflix. It immediately became a success with viewers and topped the rating of the most popular shows today. However, in our opinion, the situation with it is not so clear-cut. We watched all seven new episodes and are in a hurry to share our impressions.

Battle Royale is a genre of multiplayer action games in which the battle goes to the last player or team. It is he or the surviving group of people who are considered the winners. The name comes from the 2000 Japanese film of the same name, which used a similar concept.

The first season of "Squid Game" also resembles a royal battle. To survive, the participants had to show strength, dexterity, ingenuity and even the ability to convince another person of their rightness. Luck also played an important role. Largely thanks to it, the main character Song Ki Hoon turned out to be the winner and received a huge amount of money. What is happening is filled with an interesting meaning — it can serve as a metaphor for what happens to desperate people who cannot get out of the debt hole and only worsen their situation with each passing year. Sometimes this situation pushes them to desperate actions. It should be noted that there is a "Squid Game" in real life, only it is called differently. Moreover, the first season turned out to be a finished work that does not need a sequel.

Meanwhile, 3 years later, a continuation of the story was released. Son Ki Hoon could not enjoy the life of a rich man. He decided to find the island where the deadly game was taking place at any cost and stop it. For this, the man was ready to spend any money. He really managed to track down the organizers, but they turned out to be more cunning and did not allow themselves to be trapped. As a result, the main character decided to once again become a participant in the "Squid Game". Son Ki Hoon hoped that he would be able to save the lives of the victims of this crazy entertainment and defeat the local guards. But he underestimated human greed.

The second season is accelerating slowly. The first two episodes can be called drawn out, because there are too few bright events. The situation improves a little when the deadly game begins. And the final episode turned out to be really interesting, which is filled with unexpected moments. But it was literally cut off in the middle. We don’t even have a clear ending — we’ll have to wait for the third season to find out what happened to the surviving heroes.

Many serious topics are raised during the story. The problem of deportation of people from North Korea to South Korea, guys who abandon their pregnant girlfriends, bad investors who invested millions of dollars in a failed cryptocurrency, and much more. The problem is that none of this is adequately revealed. It’s as if we are asked a question, but they don’t even try to answer it. And while some storylines may develop in the future, others have already been cut off, because the characters associated with them were killed.

A lot of attention is also paid to the internal security system. We see snipers breaking orders, and other fighters trying to rein them in and force them to act according to the rules. This may be interesting for fans of the series who are ready to study every frame and put forward unexpected hypotheses. Casual viewers will probably perceive such scenes as an attempt to stretch the running time.

The death games themselves are the best thing in the second season. They are well staged and keep the intrigue, because we do not know who will die and who will survive another children's game, which was turned into a severe test. However, it is worth considering that the novelty effect is no longer there. Moreover, there are only three games instead of six, and we have already seen one of them before.

The result is disappointing. It's as if we were shown half of the film, and the most interesting part was left for later. But without taking into account the future continuation, the seven new episodes look mediocre. If you are interested in the universe and want to learn new details, it's worth watching. Everyone else is better off limiting themselves to the bloody trials and the ending, or watching a brief summary of the main events. We hope that the final third season will be much better and will be able to competently complete all the main storylines.

***

The second season of "Squid Game" turned out to be much worse than the first. From a complete author's work, we were offered a strange postscript, which at the best moments becomes a kind of self-repetition, and the rest of the time is a set of boring scenes and meaningless dialogues.