*awkwardly revives thread*
I had Love Live School Idol Project - which I've had on my to-do list for a while anyway - which I have just finished, soooooooooo...yeah. Awkward mini review time.
The first and most important thing about all of this is that Kotori is best girl and if you ship her with Umi I will rip your still-beating heart from your chest and feed it to you and this is an undisputable scientific fact proved by real scientists somewhere who study best anime girls, and if you argue with them you are objectively wrong in every conceivable fashion and you will burn in the fires of Non-Idol Purgatory until your soul is charred black like your heart was to ever disagree in the first place.
...or something.
Yeaaah. I really adore Kotori. She had her own hobbies and quirks that weren't sacrificed in the name of the Great Goddess Honoka (I'll get back to that) and she developed a surprising amount for a 13 episode series which she shared with eight other characters. I felt it was kinda fitting that the last two episodes would be trigged by Kotori actually wanting to have a life and a future...and I was so pissed when Honoka pulled her out of it. Selfish bitch ruining everyone else's future. Hrgh. As an aside, Kotori has the best outfits, the best songs, and the best facial expressions. I watched the show for her when I wanted to stop watching it.
...and the rest of the girls...well, I frequently forget Nozomi's name, for starters. The thing is, I liked a lot of the girls when they made their debut, and I wanted to like them more than I did. Nico was eccentric and amusing, Hanayo was adorable in glasses, Maki was a strong solo artist, Nozomi thought she was in Yu-Gi-Oh! for some reason, Eli at least stuck to her principles initially, and Rin was...uh, Rin. Then they all joined μ's and their individual personalities were just swallowed whole by Honoka.
Gone. Poof. The only ones who seemed immune to that were Kotori - who was the best girl - and Umi, who turned into an Elitist Bitch Queen. Umi was everything wrong with this show. I don't want to talk about Umi, because everything she did was wrong. She was completely out of place, out of line, and I only wish she was out of mind, because everything she said or did irritated the hell out of me.
Go away, Umi. Nobody likes you.
So I don't have as much to say about the characters as I would like, but I'm not surprised...13 episodes isn't very much when you have 9 characters. I didn't expect much in the way of development - which is perhaps why I'm very taken with Kotori, who got tons proportionately - but I AM annoyed that their individual personalities were just...wiped clean, after the episodes it took to introduce them were actually pretty good. That'd be my biggest complaint.
Pacing was pretty good, but this show suffered from a rushed ending, like most short shows these days do...and it was another mood whiplash. God almighty, I don't see WHY we have to have drama at the end of a light-hearted fluff show. Things were going fine without it! I'm not too irked, as Kotori had been building up to it, but I AM annoyed it focused more on Honoka and Umi than it did her. Like Honoka, I didn't know what Kotori was feeling, because Umi wouldn't shut up and let the show focus on someone else.
Animation and stuff was fine. I only noticed the transition to CGI every now and then; it wasn't super disruptive like certain magical girl series I could name (mostly the later Precure seasons after Dokidoki) that have been obnoxious with it. It was OK. I'm not an animation expert and I wasn't watching in super HQ anyway, so I didn't much care. It was fine. Fine.
The music wasn't really my thing. Honestly I think my favourite song was the one A-RISE was singing at the beginning on the TV screen. I'll attribute the mediocre songs to μ's being a beginner group, I guess. I've been reassured there are better songs and that they're not featured in the anime. Not that this helps the anime in any way, but even so. Some of Kotori's solo songs are nice.
So...yeah. I'm going to watch season 2 next - although I won't be watching Sunshine for a while - to see if their personalities decide to resurface from whatever hell dimension Honoka put them in, and I'm going to watch the dub later in the year, because Awesomesauce. If I have to give this a score - and I do, because MAL demands it - I'd go with a 7. It was better than average - and 5/6 is my average - but not so good it's going to be something I'll remember for years to come. But good enough to keep me invested for another season. Cute girls doing cute idol things.
Thanks for the rec, don :3