Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Review

2020 ‧ Music genre ‧ 2 seasons

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This will be the first time I’ve dived into a Love Live! series or game, so I’m about as fresh of a newbie as a first time anime watcher for this series entirely. So hardcore fans, please offer me a little grace here.

 I am going to have to be a little honest in that I didn’t love it, but I also didn’t hate it. There were some very obvious pros and cons for me.

Animation

 First things first, this was a really pretty animation style, in my opinion. The design was the first thing that drew me in to watch this anime. All the characters have their own charm and the lighting choices were great for each of their music scenes etc. It was a very colorful and clearly modern type of drawing. I didn’t even mind the CGI, which, for those that know me, know that I hate a hand drawn & CGI back-and-forth combos in any anime, especially when it’s super obvious. Luckily, season one wasn’t so obvious, and season two only slightly more so. Which made it very easy on the eyes.

Music

 Music wise, it was ok. I seem to default to picking up my phone for some of the music sequences, though I think that’s more because I’m not much of a theatrical musical enthusiast rather than there being anything wrong with the music at all. Of course, I still wanted to give the show a chance, so I tried my best to watch each one. I think if I was a student at the school though I would find it very odd for someone to randomly break into song in the middle of the nearby park, but I guess that’s just part of the charm?

Story

 Story wise, they kind of loose me here. Season one is all about forming the club, figuring out who each individual solo artist is and trying to make sure the school idol festival happens at the end of the series. So each episode focuses on each of the 9 individual characters and ends with the festival. There’s character development a little because of this, but it mostly focuses on their connection to each other.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing, but it leads to a lack of overall connected storyline and a lot of gaps in the process of them figuring out the details of the festival. Which seems to leave them just one week before the event to figure it all out and make all the venues and details happen. I don’t know if anyone has ever run a large-scale event like that before, but only 1 week with most of the details not done is pretty impossible to make happen. 

While the show opened with Yu and Ayumu, it didn’t really focus on them much at all and I was kind of looking forward to how their relationship as friends developed initially. They did not really address this until Season two, and even then, just barely, it felt like it was an afterthought and I was pretty disappointed.

I felt like they could have left out the new characters that season two introduced and focused on the ones they already had to make a more concrete story. Because of this, season two gave me this feeling like it was almost just filler and I was really unable to keep my attention to what story was left.

Conculsion

All in all, I’d say that my opinion places this anime squarely at three out of five stars. Not totally boring, but also not overly engaging. Maybe if I dive into the game, I’ll have a better appreciation for the series. Until then, I still recommend giving it a watch if you have the time.