I agree that both cours of S2 weren’t great. It got sort of better in episodes 22 onwards, but not enough to make up for slogging through the confusing mush of 2 seasons worth of episodes.

I can understand introducing new characters because S2 started a number of years after the end of S1, on a completely different floor, etc.

But then the story doesn’t commit to it: The old gang of characters are brought in mid-story, reducing character development space for both old and new character, it’s just a mess.

IMO, one or two old characters showing up, and giving brief hints on what happened to the rest would be fine, but throwing all of them in there, and giving them more-or-less equal screen time, just didn’t work.

It’s probably a problem in the source manhwa, so not much the adaptation writers could do without wholesale changes.