In adapting Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel, the first season of the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko” made a number of editorial decisions that gave the show its own identity. Most significantly, showrunner Soo Hugh and her writing staff split the story into two timelines, placing generations of the Baek family — so-called Zainichi Koreans who emigrated to Japan before World War II — side by side, separated by half a century. “Pachinko” also presented its dialogue almost entirely in Japanese and Korean, with color-coded subtitles that both distinguished between the two languages and showed how the younger Baeks used them interchangeably as a form of assimilation.

But for the most part, “Pachinko” was faithful to its inspiration, refusing even to compress Lee’s story into the trendier form of a limited series. (“Pachinko” is the rare source material that demands the multi-season treatment, as opposed to more forced extensions like “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) The approach paid off; Season 1 ranks among the best original series Apple has ever produced, from the compelling period detail to the Baeks’ painful tragedy, ravaged by historical forces — colonization, conflict, racism — beyond their control. Still, its quality was underrated. Where platform siblings like “The Morning Show” could make noise on sheer star power and ridiculous plot twists, the comparatively understated “Pachinko” earned just a single Emmy nomination for Season 1, for its admittedly excellent, dance-driven opening credits.

With Season 2, “Pachinko,” the series further diverges from the book “Pachinko.” This shift is both inevitable and a product of necessity, particularly in the more recent, 1989-set storyline that has been completely overtaken by Lee’s roadmap since the season finale, which aired over two years ago in spring 2022. That’s not to downplay the achievements of Hugh and her team, who continue to do justice to Lee’s refined characters and epic historical scope while increasingly putting their own stamp on the Baek family saga.

The season’s defining event, as for much of the mid-20th-century world, is the global war that saw the height of Japanese chauvinistic nationalism — an ideology particularly brutal for people like Sunja (Minha Kim), a young Korean woman stranded in Osaka with two young sons to care for and her husband, the kindly preacher Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun Noh), a prisoner. To provide for the family, Isak’s brother Yoseb (Junwoo Han) has taken a job at a weapons factory in Nagasaki. The knowledge of what’s coming to that city adds an undercurrent of dread to the season’s first half, juxtaposed with the hunger and scarcity that leave Sunja, a budding professional chef, with nothing to sell.