It's another year with the game-making employees of Eagle Jump! I loved it, of course. Season 1 was charming and Season 2 is equally adorable. I've got my fingers crossed for Season 3.

That said, there's some relatively hard reality under the fluffiness. The games business isn't a charity. Getting promotion might mean shoving out the person who's already there. There are different views of this Darwinian process. Some assume that it's a foregone conclusion and think there's no point in participating in the first place, since the decisions will have already been made behind the scenes. Others will see you as a rival, not a colleague.

Similarly you might have your due credit taken away by the sales team because you're not famous. A bigger name will sell more games. Then finally there's the development at the end, which you'll see coming in the most satisfying way. You just need to have been watching the characters.

There's some difficulty with promotions. Being given a new role can be intimidating, especially if you hadn't wanted it. There's comedy in Hifumi's attempts to be a team leader, with are capable of throwing off colleagues who'd been used to Yagami's rough-and-ready style.

It's effectively two half-seasons. The first half is showing us the early stages of game design, which we didn't see in Season 1. You've got to get the publisher's thumbs up for your prototype, or else months of work will go in the bin and the company will have to start again from scratch. We see the ideas stage. (We also see more of Aoba's usually hidden darkness, although it's always played for laughs. Her game involves killing and skinning the inhabitants of a fantasy world, then wearing their hides to let you stalk your victims' friends and kill them too. It also has cannibals. However this is seen by everyone as cute and family-friendly because it's a world of teddy bears and other stuffed toy animals.)

After that, the second half-season has interviews and some strong but slightly difficult new hires. That was less cuddly, but it all ends well.

I've just realised what I like about the name Eagle Jump, incidentally. It suggests to me a cross between Eagle (iconic British comic, 1950-1994) and Shounen Jump (Japan's biggest manga magazine). I'd love to see that. On the downside, though, there's some fanservice. It's almost vanishingly occasional and far less than in the 2017 OVA, but it's raising the level from "none" in Season 1 to "I noticed it".

The bottom line, though, is that this is a lovely, warm show. I liked the fact that its cast are a bit older than the anime school default, so you'll get episodes like ep.9 where they'll be talking about what they were like in high school and how much they've changed. The show has the lightness of a four-panel comedy manga (which it's based on), but also enough weight that it completely owns its full-length format and it wouldn't occur to you to cut it back. Always delightful.