Did you notice that the world of K has a city divided into seven clans, but so far we've only seen five? That's a promise, from the studio to us, that a sequel will come. In creating a sequel out of a work with a definitive ending, there always has to be an “other”, not featured previously, pulled either from free space in the world’s backstory or simply concocted out of thin air. Missing Kings had the free space to pull the Green clan from the city, but still created an enemy bland enough that it could have come from anywhere to the same effect. The Green clan could have been the invading American mages and it would have been identical.
The first season ended with the death of the Red king, and his clan is still in a state of suspension. Their grief is fine, but does this mean we won’t be seeing the Blue and Red clans at odds this time around? Even if the Red clan was in better shape we know that the Green clan is where everything will nucleate around, so the chance of seeing the same sort of character study as K is fairly low. It becomes even worse when we see the Green clan themselves: we only see the top Green clansman, who is clearly strong enough to oppose any of the forces from the first season on his own. He apparently serves a king even stronger than him, a king who we will certainly get to meet in the upcoming season. Why neither of them were even mentioned in K despite this clear power gap is a mystery. What it guarantees is that our whole familiar cast of characters will have to bond together to fight the new other, even though that other has been around the whole time, and none of the cast should be able to get along after the first season. If we get a whole season of infighting and the Green clan dies offscreen I will be satisfied.
Missing Kings ends up being little more than flashy action sequences strung together with new characters and dialogue to prepare for next season. We get the setup: there is no Red king, the Silver king is missing, and the Green clan is attacking the Slates, the source of power for all the clans. And besides setting those up and knocking some down, nothing is accomplished aside from showing off how much stronger the Green clan is than the rest of the clans. Nothing outside that setup looks to be resolved by the end of the coming season either. K will have to sell it all on execution, something it moderately succeeded in with the first season and failed at with Missing Kings.
There are two character changes I want to highlight. The first is Lieutenant Awashima, the competent top clansman of the Blue clan. Her purpose throughout the show was a steady support for the Blue king, as well as micromanaging the clansmen themselves, and of course fighting. She appears sparingly in Missing Kings, and has no effect on the story, but has been consciously given the upgrade of jiggle physics for her oversized breasts. The second change is Kamamoto Rikio, a fat, dark-skinned, strong Red clansman. His appearance in Missing Kings is marked by his actual appearance: he has slimmed down to typical bishounen proportions. He purports to have lost weight from sadness for the Red king’s death. Personally I couldn’t care less why they chose to make the change. Both are relatively minor characters with purely aesthetic differences. And yet this is the clear direction the show is taking, where competency and characterization are being lost to standardized models of eye candy. The music is getting better, the art is crisper, the color palate is stunning as always. But in playing to that side of the show and making glorified fan service, K is losing the meager degree of substance it started with, and its method for doing it is disgusting.