The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls 2nd Season

This review is my personal thoughts on the show, you may agree or disagree and i dont care.

So first thing first, The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls is an original series produced by A-1 Pictures, the studio famous for Sora no Woto, Gate, SAO, Ano Hana and many more... this anime provided another look at a very interesting idol industry of Japan.

This show has good setting from the start. A producer will seek for potential idols from the street and ask them to join the project which will raise them to top idol. This refreshing start helps the viewer to get a full look at this industry ... and get the story running pretty smoothly.

The charm of shows like this lye in the variety of characters and this show nailed it very well. A huge cast of colorful, likeable and charismatic girls that will surely get to the heart of the viewers. But beside that, this show has many problems.

The story progressing in season 1 is very slow and when it gets to season 2 it's very rush. I may sound like an asshole here but the relationship between the main characters- no matter how touching it is when you're watching- makes no sense. It's like a triangle love between 2 boys and 1 girl but instead of fighting for the girl, they just love the girl and the girl loves both of them. End the story.

So why is the high grade? Becoz no matter how nonsense it may seem, i get attached to the idols, i feel for them very much. And it's nice to see ppl doing their dream work.

The music of this show is amazing. Very pleasant to hear. The animation is fine to say the least. Overall, it's still a good look at the idol industry.

Damn this shit sucks!

As a humble Im@s fan who's been carefully eating all the junks they produce for years, That's the first thing i felt when I started this show and yet despite all that I put up with it just so I could see my favorite girls in motion. (And ended up getting no more than a few frames, yes frames and not even seconds, worth of screen time especially For Kanade chan. Jesus...)

You probably have read the summaries already(No MAL'a ofc), I believe The Project Krone had enough potential as a bait to push the story and the characters forward but the ... end result was...boring, plain and simple. You can already predict the flow of story to the last bit of details. That's not the only part the writers did wrong unfortunately, This show suffers from bland characterization, weak punchlines and anything along that line.

Considering the studio behind CinGirls, which is A1, and their attitude toward similar shows, I didn't expect to be impressed in regard to motion, art style and overall cinematography, and I wasn't. Well it ain't no big budget Anime ,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶F̶a̶n̶ ̶S̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶k̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶k̶e̶y̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶h̶.
Though it's not all bad quality wise, i actually liked the few seconds of Nebula Sky playing in the background and glimpses of Anastasia solo staging through the song. But I wish there were more.

Still there's one big thing that this show did very wrong and that is Art, it ranges from uncanny to downright wrong in some places. I remember that one scene where Anya's eyes were hilariously drawn ill sorted. But we should give credits where it's due, the coloring scheme they used is pretty ok.

I'm not gonna delve deep into Voice Acting and Sound direction which is made well. At the very least You can feel the impact of the stages and its Idol standing at the center of it + fans cheering give a nice vibe to it, alas that's bare minimum, I know.

All in All, This Show is no Love Live, if you're not into the franchise it's not a good place to kickoff(putting both seasons together in this review). Just Like most other adaptations you better off playing the games first because it can never ever replace them.
And to those of you familiar with the series, search the Characters' list and if you didn't find your favorite Idols among the MCs, don't bother; Otherwise I believe there's some joy to be had. (Then Again you better invest in Gekijou series if you already haven't, It's a lot better in drawing out the characters, doesn't take itself too serious and it's actually fun!)

P.S: I Wanted to give a 4 but I'm gonna add another point because Anya was cute.

Idolmaster's most recent installment is yet another bummer of an idol show. Imagine a rocket launching through the air at full thrust: suddenly it starts tilting and then, out of nowhere, its engines also begin to die. It starts to fall faster and faster, spinning and spinning out of control, until finally it hits the ground and explodes into a massive ball of fire. This is pretty well what the transition between Cinderella Girls' first and second season feels like.

That is not to say that the second season is an absolutely abysmal, unwatchable mess, but it is sure one hell of a disappointing way ... to end a show with promise. Whereas the first season attempts to build towards something meaningful, to give you a reason to care for the characters, the second season takes all that away and presents you with a dull husk of a story. It wants to be dramatic, it wants to make you root for the characters in spite of their crappy situation, but it just doesn't quite understand how the structure of anime is supposed to work.

I was one of the four (maybe it was five?) fans of the first season, in spite of all its issues, because the show still carried some of the same charm and energy that the original TV series and the games had, which I have very much enjoyed spending my time with. It certainly delved into melodrama territory at times, but the conclusion of the first season still made me excited. It made me excited to see how the second season would finally develop the show's large cast of characters, and how it might deliver an emotional 'final concert' to send everything off.

The second season is like one boring, obnoxious episode stretched out to twelve. Everything is constantly bleak and depressing-- literally, since the weather is constantly either rainy or cloudy, and the animators apparently decided the show is now too cool for colour. I understand that weather can sometimes be an effective way to create atmosphere, but when it is non-stop for an entire season of anime it becomes a bit overbearing. Why can't it be sunny on a sad day or cloudy on a happy day? This may seem a silly thing to complain about, but after having seen so many anime attempt to pull off the whole 'my heart is dark and bleak like the rain' thing, I have lost some of my tolerance for it.

It might be a bit surprising, but most of the drama itself, at least in terms of its execution, is honestly pretty OK. Uzuki's voice actress, for example, does an excellent job at the end of episode 23 (or 10 if you count from the start of the season). You can feel the emotion in her voice, her sounding as if she's about to lose it and start crying at any moment, and it still manages to feel authentic--not cloying-- at the same time. There are several moments like this throughout the series; the problem, rather, is that they are out of place. We don't yet have a reason to care about these characters. They have not accomplished anything of significance as idols, and their friendship and their motives have scarcely been explored. Miku and Rina have a whole episode dedicated to their relationship with each other, and it's probably the best in the entire series. But what about all the other characters? Why could we not have more episodes like that focusing on them specifically: their motivations and the little quirks that make them tick? Take a look at Chieri, for example: her design immediately grabbed me at the start of the series, but absolutely nothing is done with her. I couldn't even tell you a single thing about her personality other than that she's shy all the time. And that's a bummer. A real, real bummer.

Contrast Cinderella Girls with Love Live, another popular idol show, and you'll see just how much of an effect strong characterisation can have. All the girls in Love Live (well, maybe excluding one or two) are developed and interesting. A few of them, like Nico or Maki, are among some of the best characters in the genre, and in Nico's case I may even argue for anime as a whole. And you know what? Nico's characterisation was largely developed in a single episode. It turned an adorable, entertaining character into one that genuinely felt human and even pushed the meaning of what being an idol is and can be. I did not feel anything even remotely similar with Cinderella Girls. They are worlds and galaxies apart. It's not just that Cinderella Girls doesn't try to do or say anything new-- it's that it does a poor job even at the generic.

The drama in Cinderella Girls is certainly not helped by the dialogue, which can at times be downright embarrassing to listen to. Most episodes end with juvenile "I'll do my best from now on!!" and "Nothing will ever stop us if we work together!!" dialogue, and will often devolve into nonsense about how they want to "shine" more. Nah, I'll pass on that stuff. Talk like actual human beings instead, OK?

I suppose the sound design can be quite nice from time to time, as the concerts sound like actual concerts with the audience roaring and clapping in the background, and the music itself sounds very much like it's coming from a microphone rather than being ripped straight from a CD like most insert songs in anime do. However, the performances can be pretty disappointing, as highlighted at the end of the first season where three of the songs are skipped over with an image of them playing (since when was this a slideshow?) and maybe five seconds of music in the background. The second season's final performance fares no better. Considering that the music in an idol anime is the single most important aspect after the characters, and when compared with other shows like Aikatsu, Love Live and even the original Idolmaster series, all of which have excellent performances and catchy tunes, Cinderella Girls fails completely at being an idol anime.

Cinderella Girls could have been far more than it is. I could not really recommend it to people on good conscience, even if they may be fans of the main Idolmaster series. It is more mediocre than it is terrible, but the label of "mediocrity" is not by any means a compliment. Maybe you'll come across a character design that interests you, but you'll inevitably find yourself disappointed when you watch the show and realise it doesn't actually give a damn about them. See, Chieri has twintails and, as far as I'm concerned, not giving twintailed goddesses the time of day is an absolute sin. There's a lot of things wrong with Cinderella Girls, but maybe that is the one that ticks me off the most. Screw you, Cinderella Girls.

Mika was a cutie, though. I'll give the show that. Her doujins are probably the one good thing this show has spawned.