It's a pity there's so much terrible stuff before it that people often don't even get around to seeing Mother's Rosario...
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and claim it's brilliant. But by the standards of the series itself it's almost as if someone stopped for a moment and thought... "you know, we should maybe write something proper this time, and uh, not obsess so much over sex perhaps?"
Yeah... I would say to anyone inclined to watch it (yes, I know I'm repeating myself here), watch the first arc and the GGO arc if you can stomach something which is... Kinda bleh. Avoid the second arc unless you have a super-high tolerance for stupidity and stuff with creepy implications...
But above all, watch the mother's Rosario arc (the last arc in the second series.)
I mean, keep in mind that Mother's Rosario is basically as good as the series ever gets, so... Expect any other part of the series to be worse than that. But it's decent at least.
Lightspeaker said:
Thunderous Cacophony said:
(and I guess I'll need to call those divisions 'arcs'; Do anime shows usually change their titles or add a '2' for the second season?)
Usually add a 2 as far as I'm aware. Rarely see much different. Closest to something different I can think of off the top of my head is Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA ILLYA which added "2wei" for the second season but the upcoming third is "2wei Herz".
Alternatively they just make the sequel a movie. Examples: Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Girls und Panzer.
In my experience it depends on the kind of series.
Something which is a short one-off series will typically be either 13 or 26 episodes (sometimes it's 12 and 24, or the extra 2 are blatant filler 'flashback' episodes).
A series like that may have a second season later on, which either has a number (eg. SAO 2, Black butler II), or a subtitle (Eg. Gunslinger girl: el theatrino)
Some series don't bother with that though. (Spice & Wolf's second season is still just called 'spice and wolf', the same as the first. - You need the DVD's or some other method to tell them apart).
Longer-running ongoing series have distinct seasons too (still either 13 or 26 typically), but lose the distinction completely.
Naruto Season 2 is still just Naruto unleashed!, just like the first, (and 3rd, and 4th, and so on).
Identifying the seasons for a series like these is pretty tricky unless you have a point of reference.
The same goes for longer series that are more coherent and shorter. Fullmetal Alchemist:brotherhood is 64 episodes, and the title never changes throughout, but even so it is logically divided into the same arrangement as every other series. Although in a case like this it gets a little finicky because the numbers don't add up to a whole number of seasons.)
Still, that's just like a US series (Star Trek, or um, CSI or Whatever else you can think of also follows the same 26 episodes a season logic. Series made by the BBC in the UK on the other hand don't. 6-8 episodes is common, though some things like Doctor who get up to 11 or 12)
Anyway, that's a bit of a pointlessly long explanation, but long story short, you can be fairly certain regardless of how they name things that a 'season' in an Anime is either going to be 12/13 episodes, or 24/26 episodes.
Which it is depends on the series and may not be immediately obvious, since it has more to do with TV release schedules than the logic of the story itself.
But that's basically how it goes.
