Clevatess Season 2 Review: Can a Beast King Survive Magic School?

When Clevatess premiered in 2025, almost nobody had it on their radar, and by the end of its run it was one of the summer's quietest success stories. A dark-fantasy show about the Lord of Dark Beasts reviving a hero he personally murdered and then adopting an orphaned baby should have collapsed under the weight of its own premise. Instead it worked, and it worked because it took its ridiculous setup completely seriously. Season 2, officially titled Clevatess II: The King of Magical Beasts and the Legend of the False Hero, arrived July 8 on Crunchyroll with a gamble baked right into its premise. It sends the Beast King to school.

A refresher for the uninitiated

Clevatess is based on the manga by Yuji Iwahara, and its hook is tone. Clevatess is a demon dog of destruction, one of the Lords of Dark Beasts, and by every genre convention he should be the villain. The first season spent its time complicating that. His reign fractures when he resurrects a hero he had killed and takes in a humanoid infant said to be the last hope for a dying world. What follows is a story about a monster reluctantly bound to the very things he was built to destroy.

That antihero core is the whole engine. Clevatess is cold, powerful, and genuinely unsettling, but the show keeps finding cracks where something like care leaks through. Yuichi Nakamura's performance in the lead sells it, giving the Beast King a weary menace that never tips into cuddly. When the writing trusts that dynamic, Clevatess is one of the more distinctive dark fantasies going.

The magic academy problem

Here is the risk, and there is no dancing around it. Season 2's main setting is a private magic academy, where Clevatess and his party infiltrate under false identities to keep shaping the development of the young Prince Luna. The moment you hear "magic school," a specific dread sets in, because it is one of the most exhausted settings in the medium. For every Little Witch Academia there are a dozen shows that use the academy as an excuse to run through the same beats: the entrance exam, the rival, the tournament arc, the mysterious transfer student.

The early episodes lean straight into that furniture. The academy introduces a full roster of new faces, including Nathan Franc, a shy underdog, the blonde bully duo Tygel and Leon Blouyer, the overconfident Sarasa, and Ray Forester, a white-haired overpowered kid who immediately clocks Klen with a suspicious glare. If you have watched more than a handful of school-set fantasies, that lineup will feel familiar down to the hair colors.

What keeps it from feeling like a downgrade is the tension underneath. This is not a group of students. It is a monstrous king and his companions wearing disguises, and the show wrings genuine friction out of that. Naei Chiffonlits, a former student who appeared as a minor antagonist last season, shares a history with Klen and Alicia, and none of them can afford to expose the others. That web of mutual blackmail gives the academy setting a spine that most wizard-school arcs lack.

What actually works

Two things carry the early run. The first is that the dark-fantasy aesthetic and lore survive the location change intact. This is still a world where death is real and stakes have weight, and the school is a Trojan horse rather than a genre reset. The second is that Lay-duce kept its band together. Kiyotaka Taguchi returns to direct, Keigo Koyanagi is back on series scripts, and Souichirou Sako remains character designer and chief animation director, with Nakamura, Mutsumi Tamura, and Haruka Shiraishi reprising Clevatess, Klen, and Alicia. Continuity like that matters. It is why the season feels like a genuine second chapter and not a soft reboot with a familiar logo.

Myth & Roid handle the ending theme "Awake Anew," which is a fitting pick. The band has a long track record scoring exactly this brand of ominous fantasy, and it reinforces the tonal throughline from Season 1.

The honest caveats

The premiere is not flawless. It opens with a flash-forward featuring characters the audience has not met yet, a choice that reads as trying too hard to promise payoff. It also leans heavily on Season 1 events without coherently recapping them, so a lapsed viewer or a newcomer will feel lost in the first stretch. Season 1 also drew fair criticism for pacing dips and inconsistent animation, and there is nothing yet to guarantee those issues are behind the production.

Should you be watching?

If you skipped Clevatess the first time, start with Season 1. The premise only lands if you have watched the Beast King earn his contradictions. If you are already on board, Season 2 is worth your Wednesday slot with a caveat: the magic-academy setting is the show betting it can make a stale trope feel fresh through sheer strength of character. So far the antihero at its center is doing the heavy lifting, and that is exactly the bet a show this confident should be making. Whether the academy becomes a cage or a stage is the question the rest of the season has to answer.