Thoughts on Love! Live! School Idol Project (2013-15)

It took me surprisingly long time to get to this series considering that it has seemingly everything I search for in anime, and especially considering how huge the Love! Live! franchise is. 

Season 1

With the show having 9 main characters I think it did a great job giving enough spotlight and personality to each of the girls. Despite this, I still think that it was rather unnecessary to make all nine of them to be idols, personally I would’ve preferred some of the characters taking auxiliary roles instead (Eli could’ve been a coach, for example, since the way her personality did a complete 180 felt a bit forced to me), while still being members of the club and participating in its adventures. 

While the episodes were generally fun, they felt somewhat out of order. The way µ's (which is a really cool name for a musical act) progressed through the leaderboard felt incredibly rushed, and considering that they didn’t even participate in the first iteration of Love! Live! anyway, I feel it would’ve been better if they got to the 50th place only by the end of the season. 

7.6/10

Season 2

Despite it getting higher ratings than the first, I enjoyed the second season somewhat less. It felt like the strength of the writing was changing on scene by scene basis, although the story got significantly more interesting by the end of the season. And even despite this I still felt a bit disappointed by the Love! Live! event episode, yet the graduation episode was probably my favourite from both seasons. There were quite a lot of emotional moments that unfortunately fell flat on me. Also I think it was a missed opportunity to not make an episode focused on a student council elections that resulted in Honoka’s victory, as I think it’s one of the most fun types of episodes and would’ve given more significance to her getting that role. 

7.4/10

Movie

The movie, and the New York City trip in particular, was by far my favourite part of the series. The way the city was portrayed felt incredibly atmospheric and cozy, and the character interactions felt the most genuine out of all of the series. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t even take up a half of the movie, with the concert that was the goal of their journey, appearing somewhat out of nowhere, as if some other adventure was left out. I don’t really enjoy the type of music characters perform, but I liked the songs and performances in the movie the most out of the entire series. 

7.7/10