Made in Abyss Season 2: What You Need to Know Before Watching

After five long years, the second season of the exceptionally mysterious and deceptively grotesque anime Made in Abyss is just around the corner! While the first season debuted on Prime Video, you’ll need to sign up with the anime streamer HIDIVE to catch the new episodes in English once they begin airing in Japan on July 6, 2022. Whether you’re new to the series or you’ve cheerily repressed all those bad memories from Season 1, here’s everything you need to know before jumping into Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun AKA Season 2.

Where can I watch the new season?

Starting on July 6, 2022, Season 2 will be simulcast in English exclusively on the anime streamer HIDIVE.

And what is this show about?

Riko, a young adventurer, descends into an increasingly hostile canyon known as the Abyss. She’s joined by her handy robotic companion Reg, who wields a strange power and suffers from an unknown past. Everything seems kind of twee or cutesy until we get a closer look at what actually goes down deep in the Abyss. It’s full of tremendous supernatural forces that outclass and threaten Riko and Reg at every turn, often to traumatic lengths. It’s a hard-to-watch tour de force of sci-fi anime insanity. 

Where do I watch the first season?

While Prime Video is streaming the first season, you’d be better off watching on HIDIVE, which also has the two recap movies, the sequel movie, and will be the only place streaming the new season. There’s not much of a difference between Season 1 and the two recap movies, Journey’s Dawn and Wandering Twilight, but you’ll absolutely need to watch the third movie to get all caught up. 

Pro-tip: After Season 1, watch the third movie, Dawn of the Deep Soul!

While the first two Made in Abyss movies simply recap the first season, the third movie Dawn of the Deep Soul is a bonafide sequel that picks up exactly where the first season left off. It covers an entire story arc that you’ll need to have seen to make sense of what Riko and Reg are up to in Season 2. Currently, it’s only streaming on HIDIVE in English and Japanese.

Will there be a third season? 

If it happens, it probably won’t be for a long while! We still don’t know how long Season 2 will be, but going off my nerd math I’d say it could adapt the Iruburu arc from start to finish in about 10 episodes. And because the manga comes out so infrequently, it only just started the next arc, so there won’t be enough source material to adapt into more anime for a long, long time. And that’s to say nothing of the time the people making the anime need to actually make the anime! But hey, at least there’s a cheap-looking video game on the horizon!

SPOILERS AHEAD: For those who are caught up but don’t remember some specifics…

What is the curse again? 

If you’re in the Abyss and you try to go up back to the surface, the Abyss itself will inflict a psychic attack of varying intensity called the Curse of the Abyss. Delvers know that the effects of the curse get worse the deeper you try to return from, but no one knows why, that is until Riko meets Nanachi. Nanachi’s a rare survivor of the sixth layer’s curse, a blessed post-human creature, who now has the ability to see the aether-like invisible force field that permeates throughout the Abyss. As it turns out, the reason going up hurts so bad is because you’re violently tearing into the force field above you, which in turn inflicts you with the negative effects. Nanachi described it like sliding down thorns and then getting pricked on the way up, if that helps. 

What happened to Reg’s hand?

It’s easy to forget that Reg is a walking, talking relic of the Abyss of the highest class. The veteran divers call him an aubade, a relic of the most supreme order. Most veteran delvers/certified Abyss freaks are just focused on finding crazy artifacts and figuring out what the hell is happening in the Abyss that you’d think they’d do anything to capture and study Reg. While the first vets that made contact with him basically decided to let him run around on his own, the white whistle Bondrewd “the Novel” acted more rationally. Within a few hours of meeting Reg, Bondrewd has him restrained in a no-holds barred operation and just immediately cuts his hand off. Bondrewd just really likes learning about the Abyss! Sadly, by the time the crew escapes into the next layer, they’ve got Reg’s hand back, but it’s still having an out-of-body experience.

How did Riko get her white whistle?

It turns out that those famous white whistles aren’t just handed out for a job well done! As we learn at Bondrewd’s house, they’re made out of your friend’s dead body. Yup! If someone wants you to challenge the Abyss so bad that they’d die for it, you can sacrifice them in the fifth layer. Once your BFF bites the bullet, a white whistle pops out from their body and is ready to power up the relics. So, who went through all that for Riko? Prushka, a new friend who had to say goodbye before she was ready to go. Tragically, she was mostly killed during a different sacrificial ritual, this time for her dad’s sake, but her desire to journey on with Riko was so great that she became an honest-to-god life-reverberating stone and is still kind-of maybe alive. 

How many layers are left?

Where Dawn of the Deep Soul left off, Riko and company are on the verge of entering the sixth layer. From the start of the series, we know that there are at least seven, but there’s never been any verifiable information from the sixth layer, let alone the seventh. So, assuming all goes well for Riko, she’s got the sixth layer to deal with and at least one more after that. 

Am I supposed to recognize the people in the trailers for Season 2?

No, you haven’t met them yet! Strap in, it’s going to be a hell of a ride!