After five long years away from Ryohgo Narita's tangled web of Ikebukuro intrigue, Durarara!! has finally returned with a second season, split into three cours, which have been split yet again into six releases (of six episodes each) from Aniplex. So to break the math down, that means this first blu-ray of Durarara!! x2 covers the first 17% of the long road to the end of Celty, Mikado, Izaya, and everyone else's story that's been years upon years in the making. That's a lot of content!

In fact, it might be too much. Unfortunately, Durarara!!'s long-awaited return is fraught with pacing missteps and odd directorial choices, as this final tripartite season kicks off with a confusing and strangely lifeless first episode that leans too heavily on assumed nostalgia without offering fans anything they really want to see.

Sure, the emblematic Celty is one of the series' most important and beloved characters for good reason, but she doesn't have much to do with the tangled subplots the new season is already rushing to set up. The show's attempts to marry her iconic presence with unrelated wads of new information create a tonal disjunct that's hard to describe and much harder to get excited about. Our first episode back in five years is desperate to inform us (through Mikado's narration) that nothing in the city has changed, while shoehorning the daily ephemera of Celty's life into haphazardly edited scenes crammed with unrelated exposition. It's just a lot of "things happening" at completely different levels of dramatic relevance with no guide to how any of it is supposed to make us feel. It's a bad foot to step out on, and it's only a small sign of many ill-advised adaptive choices to come.

The five episodes to follow are more focused in their narrative goals but the tone and pacing problems remain. Where season one of the show was permitted to adapt three books of content into 26 episodes, season two crams the whole of book 4 (and snippets of book 5) into just six episodes, all while trying to maintain the lackadaisical tenor that made the first series so memorable. Events of great magnitude roll out in rapid succession, from a series of serial murders incorporating both Saika and the Russian mafia, to a perverse love quadrangle between Izaya's twin sisters and Shizuo's brother and a new kid with shady connections to Masaomi's old foes, to a motorcycle chase involving multiple gangs that puts Celty's career as a transporter at risk— a career that she is rapidly reconsidering as her relationship with Shinra becomes more serious. The stakes aren't as high as they've ever been in Durarara!!, but they're definitely firing us back into the adventure on all cylinders.

That makes it especially disheartening when all this narrative ruckus gets introduced and then resolved with surprising emotional impotence. The audience is told but never shown that things are serious, wild, and intense, as the dramatically more conservative production output from Studio Shuka struggles to give payoffs the energy to differentiate them from their buildups. Action scenes are minimally animated, and the show's reliance on diverse narrators from (often completely unrelated) parts of the cast undercuts the impact of even dialogue-driven drama. In the first season, the narrators and their weird perspectives acted as a clever adaptive choice to tie multiple storylines together and stand in for the novel's third-person omniscience in a way that only further endeared us to the colorful cast. This time, the choice and style for the narrator of any given episode seems far less thought-out, from Shinra's embarrassing attempts to break the 4th wall that destroy episode 2's pacing and immersion, to Namie's distracting narration of episode 5 that adds nothing and implies a relationship she might have to the onscreen events that doesn't actually exist. The narration is still a good idea in theory, but there's no time for it in this infinitely more rushed version of Durarara!!, so it feels like a slapped-on gimmick that only serves to sap time from an adaptation already gasping for breath.

So the anime series may have let itself go too much while it was on vacation, but the story underneath hasn't lost a drop of its spirit, and this should ultimately save the whole production for the most ardent fans. After the clumsy first episode shuffles out of the spotlight, the show immediately begins fleshing out its giant stable of new cast members, and neither Narita nor series director Takahiro Ōmori has lost their knack for crafting unforgettable character introductions. Mairu and Kururi Orihara are equally as fiendish as their egotistical brother, but their methods are so disturbing that they even give him the creeps. The Hollywood Killer's identity is at once shocking and sympathetic, raising more questions than answers about the murderer's past without letting that obfuscation ruin the character's immediate appeal. Rokujo Chikage has a bizarre definition of "feminism" that's bound to scare off as many women as it attracts. Slon and Varona are a pair of Russian mobsters with a chemistry so unique that it makes itself known from their first silly conversation. Akane Awakusu remains mostly a mystery at this point, but she makes one hell of a first impression on Shizuo! Even Aoba, the new character most intended to fly under the radar, exudes a subliminal and dangerous aura that makes his "harmless" conversations with Mikado and Anri genuinely unsettling to watch. It shouldn't be possible for every single one of these characters to be so immediately captivating, but they are. After creating dozens of unforgettable characters already, Durarara!!'s creator still hasn't run out of ways to surprise us with new allies and threats in unforeseen flavors.

The viewer's mind immediately strives to make connections between these big personalities in some way to predict what happens next, keeping even the biggest stumbles in these first six episodes compelling. The cast is fun to watch even when the audience is struggling to figure out what's currently happening in the plot around them, and what matters or doesn't based on the haphazard editing. It's a tragic combination of great ideas with lackluster execution. If the anime was renewed to encourage people to check out the original light novels, they've done a fantastic job. (Too bad they won't be officially released in English for many months yet to come.) As of its first six episodes, Durarara!! x2 is a troubled shorthand version of what seems like enthralling material on paper. All its substance is delivered with such inconsistent style that it mostly dampens the magic of what could have been.

Extras on the Aniplex release include a pre-air talk show segment, where even the Japanese cast warns the viewers that this return to the story is going to throw them in the deep end fast without a life preserver. There's also a 16-page art booklet with basic character profiles, a pack of post cards, and the standard clean opening and closing themes. The English dub for this release sports all the same cast but a completely different ADR team from Bang Zoom!'s dub of the first season. Those who enjoyed the first season's dub probably won't take issue with this very similar effort, but for those who found that original iteration unconvincing, this season's dub is not an improvement. Well, it's better in one regard. The literalism of the first season's too-sub-faithful script has thankfully been replaced with a more natural adaptive script this time. There are with a few eyebrow-raising colloquial choices here and there, along with the unnecessary decision to dub lines into previously silent scenes, but it's much easier on the ears than the sometimes painfully unnatural script of the previous season. Sadly, the vocal direction has taken a turn for the worse, with even previous high points like Johnny Yong Bosch's Izaya swinging wildly between painfully wooden takes and painfully hammy ones with no connection to a consistent human motivation behind the words. Kari Wahlgren's Celty is one of the few performances to escape this treatment unscathed. She must have an understanding of her character that transcends bad direction, because it's pretty remarkable to hear her character conversing so naturally with fellow talented voice actors delivering bad read after bad read in a haze of confused context. If you enjoyed the first dub, this is mostly more of the same, but if not, this effort may grate even stronger than its predecessor.

With the change of animation studio and uncharacteristically frantic approach to adapting its source material, this isn't quite the Durarara!! we came to know and love in 2010, but the striking cast, editing style, and musical score haven't changed at all since its halcyon days. The clash between elation and disappointment is unique to say the least, and unfortunately, Durarara!!'s continuity-intensive structure makes it impossible to skip this "rocky takeoff" just to see how the whole thing ends. Durarara!! devotees will have to accept this continuation all-or-nothing, so this first set's value will largely depend on what each viewer comes to the world of Durarara!! for. If the wildly open-ended conclusion of the first season satisfied your curiosity about Celty and friends, trying to watch this protracted final season could be more of an exercise in exhaustion than enjoyment, as plotlines and hosts of new characters dogpile on relentlessly through rushed and sometimes poorly-animated scenes. However, if you're just dying to know the fate of The Dollars and how everything will tie together as the city plummets further into chaos, the experience will be worth it, warts and all. This final season definitely needs more time to finds its feet, and several moments of brilliance aside, these first six episodes mostly suffer from trying to do too much, too fast.