Shuhei Yabuta, the director of Vinland Saga Season 2, revealed in a recent interview that was published on the official website of anime that the second season of Vinland Saga will have an entirely different feel from its previous season and also most of the other anime out there.

Vinland Saga Season 2 is set to adapt to Farm Arc or the Farmland Saga from Makoto Yukimura’s manga. Unlike its predecessor, this arc sheds the high octane action seen in the story till that point and adopts a slow build-up that focuses more on character development, trying to hit home the underlying message of Vinland Saga.

As the Farm Arc progresses, Thorfinn, the protagonist of the series, grows through his experiences and finds new purpose in life.

Yabuta was touching on this aspect of the arc as he talked about it in the interview, revealing how he and Hiroshi Seko, who is in charge of script composition, agonized over how to present the arc to viewers.

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“The atmosphere and pacing of the farm arc is different from Season One’s — a different feel from most anime, really— so we ended up discussing a lot how we could make it entertaining for viewers who hadn’t read the manga,” Yabuta said in the interview.

“We’ve portrayed tilling land and growing wheat as humanity being productive. All we can say now is how this will change as Vinland Saga goes on? I think it can be seen as a starting line for all of us moving forward, so I do hope plenty of people the world over watch it,” he added.

Yabuta and Seko spent a lot more time working things out prior to outlining the story for the second season, than they did for the first season.

The director also discussed how Einar, a character who is described to be cheerful and kind in a world filled with violence, had a huge impact on how they approached the second season of Vinland Saga Season 2.

According to him, Einar was a superhuman and he ended up focusing on what could have made him like that. Yabuta continued to heap praise on the character, who he thought was very cool.

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“The lynchpin of the start of Season Two is definitely Einar. He left a strong impression on me when I read the manga, so when we were outlining the series, Seko and I started with discussing where his strength came from. I didn’t think we could start mapping out the series until we understood the source of his strength,” Yabuta said.

“We tried hard to portray him with the same strength and kindness we felt from him in the manga. The challenge was how to combine those two to make his character. Einar’s way of relating to Thorfinn in the beginning is superficially different from the source material, but his fundamentals haven’t changed. Think of it as new scenes being born in the process of trying to make an Einar close to his manga version,” the director added.

Yabuta also spoke about how the relationship between Einar and Thorfinn is an essential part of the second season in terms of watchability and entertainment factor. This made them spend a lot of time on it.

The director had also revealed earlier that there will be several small changes in the content of Vinland Saga Season 2.

Vinland Saga Season 2 is set to premiere in Japan in January 2023. A new PV and key visual were released for the anime on June 8, 2022. Though the studio in charge of animating Vinland Saga Season 2 changed from WIT to MAPPA, the staff working on the anime is same as Season 1.

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Season 2 of the anime is confirmed to have 24 episodes.

Vinland Saga is a Japanese historical manga series written and illustrated by Makoto Yukimura. The series is published by Kodansha and was first serialized in the youth-targeted Weekly Shōnen Magazine before moving to the monthly manga magazine Monthly Afternoon, aimed at young adult men.

As of July 2021, the series has been compiled into twenty-five bound volumes. Vinland Saga has also been licensed for English-language publication by Kodansha USA.

An anime adaptation by WIT Studio premiered on July 7, 2019, to December 29, 2019, consisting of 24 episodes.

Source: Official website of Vinland Saga via Crunchyroll.