As previously established, Soul Eater is a show all about souls and the consumption thereof. Its title is also the name of one of its leads, who happens to turn into a scythe used to fight the demonic Kishin by his partner, heroine scythemeister Maka. The second part of Soul Eater brings some changes from the first. There's less to laugh at, for one. And your mileage may vary with what comedy there is. That established, these episodes are stronger overall than the first thirteen.

Within the first thirteen episodes, Soul Eater's first big bad was revealed to the viewer — but not yet the characters — as the DWMA school nurse, villainous witch Medusa. She tossed her abused, severely maladjusted, and very oddly cursed gender-ambiguous kid, Crona, at Maka and Soul late in the first set. Then she recruited frog witch Eruka and freed the imprisoned immortal werewolf with a magic eye, Free, to serve as her underlings. With her new allies, she further demoralized our reap-happy heroes with cursed black blood and the threat of insanity.

The majority of the episodes in this 14-26 set center on Medusa hatching her most nefarious scheme yet. But first, they start you off with a little comical filler to serve as a bit of a palate cleanser after the previous episodes' intensity. First, the DWMA kids have to take the written meister general exam — as good an excuse as any for an episode full of comical study montages, climaxing in an exam room scene full of hilarious failure. Next comes an episode further introducing a minor supporting classmate character, Ox Ford, that serves largely to showcase the eccentric personality of the world's most legendary and difficult weapon, Excalibur. Excalibur was briefly introduced within the first thirteen episodes when Black*Star and Death the Kid took it upon themselves to obtain the godly weapon. Shortly after pulling Excalibur from his resting place, they learned that as easily found as he was, the sword was completely unbearable to deal with and thus impossible to wield. This time, through the pitiable Ox Ford, the viewer is subjected to an entire episode of Excalibur's non-sequitur ramblings. How funny you find this episode depends on how much patience you have for the character yourself. There's plenty of legitimately very funny flashbacks throughout the episode, but all the same, Excalibur's cheesegrater personality can try viewers' patience as much as it does the other characters.

Following these episodes, a couple follow Death the Kid and the Thompson sisters to a haunted ship where the symmetry-obsessed gunslinger crosses paths with Crona for the first time.

As mentioned before, the meat of this set of episodes comes with Medusa and her minions finally making their move. While Lord Death, the faculty, and student body at the DWMA celebrate the anniversary of the school's founding, Free traps them all at the gala. All of them save for our fearless meister leads and unstable teacher Franken Stein. At the end of the previous storyline, Kid learned about the existence of a Kishin sealed beneath the DWMA, and it's no coincidence that that's Medusa's target. The culmination of her black blood research just so happened to entail heading beneath the school to inject it into and revive Asura, a madman meister who once worked for Lord Death and suffered an extremely violent sealing upon becoming the first Kishin. Stein and the young meisters mount a valiant offense against the intruders while Stein is made to question his own sanity and stability again. Asura's own madness-causing soul wavelength causes violent and self-destructive hallucinations as the characters press deeper into the structures beneath the DWMA. And in the end, Asura is revived just as Medusa loses her life to Stein and Maka's Death Scythe father's offensive, bringing in a new big bad for the rest of the series.

These episodes, while very violent, are unsurprisingly not exactly full of the yuk-yuks. People still use that term. During their seemingly unwinnable battle with Crona and his internalized demon sword, Ragnarok, Maka and Soul give in to pressure from a demon within Soul's mind to exchange their sanity for power, briefly becoming like Crona in order to reach out to and finally connect with him. Sounds nuts, doesn't it? It's every bit as absurd as you'd expect in execution, with scenes and dialogue within the characters' minds that feel almost like they were pulled out of Evangelion. Soul Eater doesn't lose its sense of humor and never lets things get too heavy, so you don't drown in teen angst in these scenes. And hey, these scenes lead up to Maka and Soul finally befriending the unstable Crona instead of blowing up the world and killing everybody — that's about as anti-EVA as you can get.

Episodes 25 and 26 bring in some enjoyable new characters following Asura's escape in Death Scythes Azusa, Justin, and Marie, who each have key roles to play in locating and tracking the incredibly dangerous escaped Kishin. Should they fail, he threatens once again to potentially plunge the entire world into insanity. This is what happens when you stick a guy in a sack made out of his own flesh for eight hundred years. It's to be expected. You could at least give the guy a box of Jujubes.

By the end of these episodes, life more or less returns to normal for the young meisters — now joined by the unstable-as-ever Crona — as they begin taking on new assignments, but an incredible new threat yet looms.

Outside of one or two episodes, there are very few laugh out loud funny moments in this set — but it doesn't lose its sense of humor, either. Most of the humor is somewhat more understated in the continuous absurdity of the entire series. This keeps the atmosphere light and fun, even in the most violent and borderline-angsty moments. Outside of this discussion of story content, there's not a lot else to be said about this Soul Eater release. Everything that worked well about the previous episodes still works. And because most of the episodes followed the events of a single evening this time, the disjointedness of earlier episodes is gone, and everything flows much more smoothly. This continues to be a series I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's what Bleach should have been.