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I'm not surprised that the series composition for this season is credited under some faceless committee; I certainly would be embarrassed to attach my name to this uninspired follow-up. While the first season definitely fumbled how it handled its drama, there was clearly real heart and charm to its writing, especially in how it depicted the friendship between the main three in Protostar in such a natural and effortless manner. The second season however is bad in the same unremarkable way that many idol shows are bad: shallow episodic stories with dull stakes and a too large cast that only pre-existing fans care about. Theoretically ... the deep personal drama and emotional climaxes in each episode would be fine, decent even, but aside from Protostar, it's a struggle to care about them because the audience has no attachment to these characters. Their stories hinge upon a foundation that the writers never spent the time to build up in the first season, and it's not like the Protostar episodes this season were all that compelling either. To exacerbate the issue, the writers clearly weren't lacking for time in this season. Almost every episode is fluffed out with some extended montage as if the writers couldn't bother writing a full script, and it's egregious to the point that even the winner of their big season-spanning idol competition is revealed in a montage sequence. At least the soundtrack is competent and the unique EDs are cute, but they can't carry a show by themselves. Aniplex mismanagement at its finest, I suppose.

Everything about this show comes across as low effort. From the outset, I got the distinct impression I was watching a drama CD that was then animated completely independently after the fact. The animation is minimal. The storyboarding is cut-and-paste. The performance is perfunctory. The frigging lens flare-esque filter that's thrown on top of every scene is super ugly. Why did they do that. I would honestly be more offended if someone did put effort into writing this, because god, the first episode of this has our main dude explain his backstory like every time a new scene starts. If you're not just throwing every ... manga panel into your storyboard one-to-one with no changes to be lazy, how little must you respect your audience?

Adaptation quality aside, the substance is weak. The show has your typical one-joke premise comedy problem, but it frequently tries to be touching and profound, and it only succeeds in coming off as patronizing. Every setup basically boils down to our protagonist telling some sob story to his boss who then comforts him while everyone watching cries and claps. That sounds like I'm making a joke, but no, they literally do clap. Multiple times! For complete strangers! They even have background extras comment multiple times verbatim how they are "healed" by this viewing experience, and it's so hollow. You don't know these people! You don't know this situation! What are you connecting with?! The fact our main characters work in advertising is the superficial cherry on top, like they're taking credit for the hard work other people do. Inspiring the public at your planetarium or aquarium? Eh, whatever. Telling people about the planetarium or aquarium? Now that's the ticket.

Our cast of characters is full of caricatures: the downtrodden protagonist, the kind and understanding new boss, and the vile, evil, nefarious, heartless ex-boss. That's all they are. There's zero depth to any of them. People are just good or bad. It's black and white morality—literally, look at their names—and never tries to be anything more. It's shallow to the point of being cynical. The side cast is equally disappointing, featuring a cat so fake I doubt the mangaka has ever seen a cat in real life and an insecure man whose gimmick is inserting himself into conversations to be insecure and who loves an insecure mascot. If I had to pick one single thing I detest most about my viewing experience, it'd be him. Seriously, what is the appeal.

I know people watch this primarily to daydream and draw hearts around the boyfriends, and more power to them, but come on. There's better shows for that. You're better than that.

Opus.COLORs starts out less than promising with murky direction and unimpressive animation. The setting is poorly explained, centered around an original form of "perception art" involving some element of VR, but how the mechanics work is vague to the point of obtrusiveness. We know that the art process is inherently collaborative, needing both the efforts of an artist and what the show refers to as a grader, who appears to take on some form of editorial role. It's unclear how the grader actually contribute to a project beyond things like basic marketing or choosing what frame to put a painting in, which all seem like ... tasks an artist could easily do alone. Moreover, the perception art obsession the world has is relatively new. Not a decade ago, the public were up in arms protesting over its growing popularity. How could something as inconsequential as an art medium inspire such fervor?

Beyond that, the show seems to function like an average insecure gacha adaptation, featuring a bloated cast size and surface level character exploration in an attempt to please every fan. The first half of the show are focus episodes rotating between new characters learning how to better understand each other in mundane, predictable ways. The show is dogged by a sense of soullessness, that a committee looked at what character dynamics were popular out in the joseimuke space and copied them down while ignoring all context. While a few of the musical numbers at the end of most episodes are more visually creative than others, they all feel shoehorned in yet still artificially short. It's as if they were the cutting room floor scraps of when the staff were still working on Starmyu and hey, they might as well go into this project too.

Eventually though, the show does find its footing, and that footing is, no joke, morphing the narrative into the mold of a murder mystery. The show starts with speedrunning our protagonist's tragic backstory, orphaned as a child after losing his parents in a traffic accident, evoking feelings of sympathy and pity with all the subtlety of a hackneyed light novel. But about halfway through the show, we go back to that accident in a flashback episode, and we get to see the parents seemingly fine and dandy walking out of the crashed car. So what happened? How did they die? The element of intrigue builds somewhat slowly, initially relying on its audience to doubt what is shown to them for any sense of momentum, until it intensifies enough to become the centerpiece of the narrative. The VR art gimmick of the show that seemed largely pointless suddenly takes on a more interesting, even conspiratorial angle on if people really saw what they thought they saw. The resolution doesn't quite live up to its potential and the art worldbuilding never escapes feeling lacking, but the emotional core in the final product works fine enough. The last few episodes give the show some much needed focus, exploring themes of loss, survivor's guilt, and learning to cherish what you still have. Or to be blunt, it's basically a BL melodrama that's too cowardly to commit to being BL, but it's carried by the voice actors doing as decent job as they could working with the material they're given.

Opus.COLORs is inarguably a technical mess, but it does something unique and weird enough to stand out among the mass production of anime that gets pumped out these days. It may not be what you could call good by any conventional means, but I can't say I wasn't ultimately entertained.

It's been 11 years since the original run of Tiger & Bunny in 2011, and it shows. It definitely shows. The first season way back then ended on a spooky cliffhanger implying that the nefarious secretive terrorist organization Ouroboros was real and not something Maverick made up to manipulate Barnaby. And I think they forgot what they were trying to do with that plot point. The chief issue with this very latest season is the focus it puts on Ouroboros that ultimately goes nowhere. The primary antagonist here is explicitly a member of Ouroboros, but it's revealed in one of the last moments that she ... was acting completely independently in her schemes. The higher-ups at Ouroboros, who are shown only in silhouette profiles, end up convincing her lackey to take her out for them before disposing of him themselves. The heroes are constantly on the back foot and end up barely mattering in how the conflict resolves. The whole thing feels like filler to wait out a future season that may well never exist.

Even ignoring the failings of the overarching narrative, this season is a mess. Little Aurora, who is seen constantly in the background in billboards and such in the first half of season 2, is jawdroppingly useless. She's gifted with the power of supernatural intellect whenever she closes her eyes, but all she does is show up to be targeted by the villains and a damsel in distress, never once actually trying to think her way out of the situation. The incredibly dumb racism plot, the motivation behind our primary antagonist, feels like something the writers pulled out of thin air, pretending anti-superpower sentiment was always a thing despite no signs of it in season 1, in a society were superpowers have largely been extremely beneficial. It's funny that it ends up causing the mayor, who brings to mind the Jaws meme about why it's important to vote in your local elections, to order all the supernaturally gifted into literal internment camps, at the behest of public outcry, but no time is spent on the aftermath. I guess everyone forgot about it once the day was saved.

The main saving grace of the season is the character moments, though they don't get nearly as many chances to indulge in them compared to the first half of season 2. Kotetsu's and Barnaby's concern and care for each other as partners is always nice to see, though it does feel a bit rehashy of material we already saw in previous seasons. The other buddy hero duos do get cute enough bonding moments, if a little superficial. The most unique element of this season is Yuri, and it's nice to see him finally work through his lingering dad-related trauma, even if the execution is pretty clumsy. I'd probably watch a season 3 for more of these characters, but at this point, my expectations are rock-bottom for a satisfying plot.

Shine Post has a fair bit of wasted potential, but the character interactions are enjoyable enough to help tug it to the finish line despite never really deviating from the structure of its generic narrative.

The early episodes are definitely where the show is at its weakest, working through very dime a dozen teenage insecurity character arcs to the point that they double up on the "no, I don't deserve to be center" plot back to back for two of the main characters. Then the show gets incredibly dumb, revealing that the group TINGS's main struggles boil down to how our protagonist Haru is just ... too naturally talented and has it hide it so the other members can keep up. The whole fallout with two of the girls leaving TINGS before the start of the show is revealed as a plot by the president to try to trick Haru into trying harder, which surprise, surprise doesn't work, but hey, it's all good. We got the gang back together! Just ignore the fact that we deliberately broke it apart ourselves to begin with.

The manager is easily the weakest character in the show. The most generous take is that he's a very reserved type of guy, but he basically does nothing but be Mr. Perfect whenever the girls need someone to help get their character development moving and is otherwise not really seen or heard. The show's main gimmick is that the manager can tell by supernatural means whenever someone is lying, but this is the most underutilized aspect of the show. The show at least respects its audience's intelligence enough to not explicitly state that is what's happening, but 99% its only function is to tell the audience things they already know. The one time it's somewhat useful is when it's used to reveal that one of the girls' fans was being insincere in her support, but any competent drama should be able to convey that kind of information without paranormal intervention. In the end, it's nothing but a lazy crutch for the writers.

The show does pick up in the last few episodes when the rival group HY:RAIN gets some focus. The main rival girl, Ren, showing up out of nowhere to repeatedly declare "It's time!" to Haru in front of her group and refusing to elaborate is very endearing and helps round out the fun cast of idiots. The other four HY:RAIN girls comparatively get very little characterization, but their role in playing the four-person straight man to Ren's antics is serviceable enough. And serviceable is basically what the show is. At its core, this is a story about newbie idols who are given a challenge with a clear victory condition, and though it's hard work, they manage get to it in the end. It's the boilerplate hero's journey, and while the execution certainly stumbles at times, when it comes to idol stories, you could certainly do worse.

The choice of story structure in A3! is bizarre. The time spent on the seasonal troupes is evenly divided, so you get six episodes with each of them. The show starts off with recruiting mostly theater newbies and watching them learn how to act. Then, six episodes later, the show throws them to the side to focus on finding five new guys, who you watch learn how to act, get tossed aside, and repeat. And repeat is the keyword. The whole show is just watching some bumbling idiots learn how to act four times in row. Most of the characters don't get enough screentime to ... differentiate themselves from the cast of 20 boys, so instead they have to fall back on one-trick pony gimmicks to have any memorability. There's occasionally some decent drama, though nothing unique, and most episodes end up quite boring.

The second cour is at least marginally better than the first. You have a solid character dynamic between two boys in the Autumn troupe who start out hating each other but end up forming some grudging respect for each other. The Winter troupe is where the show decides to introduce some supernatural elements for the first time 19 episodes in, including getting the boys stuck in a literal time loop. It's too little too late to really recommend, but hey, if you've made it this far, you might as well finish it out.

Shoot! Goal to the Future is sequel to the 1993 series Aoki Densetsu Shoot! which was a fairly standard sports narrative that became defined by its major character death midway through the series. It was an interesting exploration of how a death of a renowned player affects not only his team but also his rivals on other teams denied their chances of ever getting a rematch. The story often took a turn deep into melodrama, but the emotional charge is what sets the series apart from all the dozens of no-names to champions sports narratives out there.

Shoot! the sequel takes that melodrama and throws out ... everything else. Characters will suddenly turn incredibly jaded and selfish after some miscommunication. Situations will bring up crazy ultimatums and resolve with lots of loud sobbing. My favorite setup happens midway through the show, where one of the main characters becomes insanely jealous of his best friend (though it's pretty obvious he wants to be more than that) becoming close to the soccer team's new member, to the point where he's openly spreading rumors about the new kid on the team and trying to sabotage his reputation on the school newspaper in order to get him to quit the team. It should be noted that he had no problem playing with him for several episodes before this.

This kind of writing is fantastic if you love soap operas, but it's hard to recommend it to anyone else. There's little else Shoot! really has to offer. The animation looks awful to the point where it can be difficult to find stills that look halfway decent. The nods to the original 1993 series are cute if you know where to look for them, but they can't carry a full 13 episodes. You'll know immediately from episode 1 if this is the kind of show you'll enjoy, and if you do, I promise it's a great ride.

Nothing really stands out about Ahiru no Sora. At the immediate surface level, the animation never really goes beyond perfunctory in the basketball games, with many scenes being obvious manga panel stills embellished with some sliding motions in the foreground. As is rather infamous, the animation team tries to ape Kuroko's Basketball in conveying how fast the characters are moving, but without the polish of Kuroko's production it just looks comical. Game flow massively suffers as a result, so it's hard to get invested in games when it's often unclear what plays are happening.

Storywise though, I have to give the show props for not being ... a cookie cutter underdog narrative. We start with the basketball team as a complete sham and front for a delinquents' hangout brought about by the school's mandatory club rules. So when the team does get dragged into trying to play a game, they suck. A lot. They never win any of their practice games. They lose their first match in the tournament prelims. In fact, in the show's 50-episode run, the team plays five games and wins exactly zero of them.

The basketball games aren't really what's important in the show though. They're simply the medium for carrying the real meat of the show: the character arcs. You've got the usual spiel with the kids about finding a passion and working hard to achieve something even if you fail, but I find the advisor to be the most compelling character as the representation of the primary conflict of the series. Because of their reputation, the basketball team commands not an iota of respect from the school, neither from the faculty or the other students. The advisor comes in only because he is told to by the principal, and he immediately lays it out that he is not invested in the future of the team and would really have it be disbanded as soon as possible. He is convinced that people don't fundamentally change, but the team's earnest efforts to get better and make up for their mistakes slowly wins him over. They might cause trouble and get into fights, but they're ultimately just kids, and kids need to be nurtured and encouraged, not abandoned.

It's a sweet sentiment, but it's a bit undermined by how much of this show is its very lame treatment of its female characters. We get a scene early on with one of the main characters trying to peep on the girls' locker room and then steal their underwear, and that pretty much sets the tone for the entire show. The most egregious instance is when they play a practice game against the girls' basketball team. When the coach brings it up, the boys scoff at the idea that any game with such a lopsided physical advantage could possibly be worth going through, and one of them cheekily suggests that maybe they'll be motivated if the girls all strip naked if they lose. This turns into the captain of the girls' team getting stuck as the sole victim of the losing condition, and absolutely none of the boys even try protesting this despite the show presenting some of them elsewhere as good-natured and nice people. I've never been a high school boy, so perhaps having uncontrollably horny urges is simply accurate to real life, but I'd rather not see it in my media.

Ahiru no Sora is basically a melodrama in disguise, complete with an obviously dying mom for the protagonist, and to that effect it's pretty good. Worth a look if you can ignore the lackluster animation, somewhat slow pacing, and questionable characterization, but there's no doubt in my mind that the manga is the better format for the series.

Sasaki and Miyano is a shallow romance series, where our two leads consist of one guy working up to a 10-year-old's understanding of love and another guy who never learned about boundaries or self-reflection. But worst of all, nothing frigging happens over the whole show.

Let's start with that. The pacing is reminiscent of an adaptation of a never-ending light novel series. It's obvious the kids fall for each other pretty much immediately, yet they'll still waffle over what it all means for the majority of the show's total runtime. The grand feelings realization scenes that should be pivotal for any romance series have zero impact ... because they get recycled so frequently by the show, sometimes even in back-to-back episodes. On top of that, we get multiple instances of Sasaki telling Miyano he likes him, to which Miyano emphatically does nothing. At best, he'll hem and haw about not being able to give an answer right now, and Sasaki will accept it by saying he'll wait forever because he's a pathetic fool. The wheel spinning is made worse by the concept of time itself being completely weightless. When the characters see each other again, how much time has passed since we last saw them? A day? A week? Three months? It's impossible to tell until the characters explicitly inform the audience that yes, three months have indeed passed since our last banal conversation. The frequent time skips for seemingly no reason makes it hard to care about the cast it outright denies the chance of seeing them develop over the normal course of a school year. Or well, the chance would have been denied if they had developed at all, that is.

Which brings me to my second point: the extended cast is an empty shell. None of them matter except to exist in the periphery of Sasaki and Miyano. Thus, the setting comes off as artificial. This feeling is best encapsulated in the women in the show, because they effectively do not exist. We get about four minutes of screentime with Miyano's middle school crush in one episode, then we never mention it again, and that's basically it as far as named characters go. Multiple boys in the cast have girlfriends they frequently talk about, but they never get any names and we don't ever get to see their faces. Every opportunity for one of our leads to potentially meet one of them is conveniently brushed aside. ("Wanna visit my girlfriend in the hospital with me? No? Okay."; "Hey, I was gonna come to the cultural festival with my girlfriend, but she said she couldn't make it.") Halfway through the show, I was entertaining the idea that at least one of the girlfriends was completely made up, which would be some character trait to explore rather than the nothing burger the show keeps taunting us with.

All this could be tolerable if the central relationship was engaging, but it's the least appetizing element of the show somehow. The romance is vapid and fueled purely by physical attraction, despite what Sasaki might claim. But of course, what else could it be? The leads basically have no personality traits to speak of. They both like BL (boy, does the show want you to know they like BL), but other than that Miyano is insecure and Sasaki is prone to intense bouts of jealousy. Real keepers, the both of them. Supposed delinquent Sasaki never even gets shown breaking any school rules, aside from I guess briefly beating up some kids who were beating up another kid in episode 1. The most characterization we get is when the show dips into dated BL manga tropes that I remember being sick of in the early 2000s. For example, at one point Sasaki meets up with Miyano in an empty classroom, and he secretly locks the door behind him, and no one even comments on him doing this afterwards. I'm sure the show is going for the "Aw, he's so in love with him that he can't help himself from behaving badly" angle, but the sexual assault connotations really don't help its case.

What I'll give the show is that it's decent enough production-wise, though the overuse of geometry-adorned bloom effects gets tiring very quickly. It looks okay, which puts the show heads and shoulders over most BL anime. If you want something with substance however, I recommend looking anywhere else.

Love Live! Superstar is a solid show production-wise, but its position as the fourth separate continuity in the franchise only highlights the increasingly formulaic nature of Love Live's writing.

The show starts out promising enough. Kanon is our now apparently archetypal spunky orange-headed protagonist. Unlike Honoka or Chika though, she gets to have real character flaws. She's grumpy, she sulks, she talks back to her family. She loves to sing, but she has struggled for years freezing up in front of an audience. When we meet her, she's convinced she'll never make it as a performer. There's potential for a focused, if rather well-worn, character ... arc here that Love Live has never really done before.

Unfortunately, this lasts about two episodes in total. Within days of meeting Kanon, Keke sweeps her up into doing the school idol thing with her, with only token resistance from Kanon. One pre-concert jitters scene later, Kanon's stage fright is cured forever (or at least until we pretend it's still an ongoing issue nine episodes later to try to have some kind of conclusion for the end of the season), and we never see her acting moody again. Apparently, solving a lifetime's worth of anxiety issues is sometimes just that easy. A few episodes later, Kanon's childhood friend Chisato mentions that she specifically went into dance so that she could help Kanon out by doing the things Kanon can't do, but the implications of this put the opening arc of the show in a weird spot. I guess despite the two being close friends for nearly ten years or so, Chisato just never tried hard enough to help Kanon conquer her stage fright.

Aside from all that, Kanon herself is very popular at school, even though it is barely mentioned outright. Kanon handily wins a class vote for their idol group's center where most people voting would have no reason to care, and she's implied to have had a very good chance at the student council president seat if she hadn't refused to run. She's struggled with stage fright in front of her classmates for years, but the only bullying that ever happens is over Chisato drawing some stick figures in the dirt at a public park when she was a little girl. It's like a committee took someone's script and proceeded to shave off anything with the remotest chance of offending someone, all for the purpose of circling back to the safest route possible.

As we build up the school idol club, we're informed that—surprise, surprise—the student council girl, Ren, is against it. Why? Well, her mom was a school idol too, but she never kept any records of her club activities, and she apparently only mentioned her feelings about it once to Ren. But Ren forgot—yes, really—what her mom said to her, and thus concluded that her mom must have regretted being a school idol, it's the only explanation. She is thus very vocal on her anti-school idol position as she runs for student council president. Ren manages to get the votes of the general curriculum students by promising that everyone will get to participate in the upcoming school festival.

Once she's elected however, she insists that only the music course students will be performing, because she believes it's the only way to get more students to enroll in the school. Yes, apparently, the school is in danger of shutting down. Yes, again. Not only is the plot point derivative to the point of self-parody, but logistically, it makes little sense. Yuigaoka is literally in the very first year of its operation since it was formally refounded. How could it fall into such dire financial straits in the span of a few months? Are we to assume there's some embezzlement happening behind the scenes?

Ren's abrupt about-face in policy naturally upset the general curriculum students who start a petition in protest, and we see heated arguments break out between the general and music course students. Oh, but don't worry. All of this is resolved within the episode when Kanon and the gang showed Ren that no, her mom really did love being a school idol. So Ren relents and immediately reverses her position, allowing the general curriculum students to participate in the school festival. In response, the students all clap. Literally, everyone claps. Apparently, there's sometimes no one more understanding than a room full of irate teenagers. The school shutting down doesn't even get brought up again until it's suddenly solved off-screen in the final episode, so I guess it wasn't that important either?

Before Superstar aired, I had hoped that the smaller than usual main cast was a sign that we would see more nuanced, fleshed out characterization, but the characters are just as shallow here as when we had nine main characters in previous Love Live anime entries. Nothing the characters do have any real consequences, and every conflict is resolved almost immediately. There's never any stakes because the characters are never allowed to meaningfully fail. Early on, the fledgling school idol club is given an ultimatum: they have to win first place in an upcoming idol festival or they'll have to disband. They end up losing to the contest favorite school idol duo Sunny Passion, but the school just shrugs and lets them have their club anyway with no pushback.

Sunny Passion functions as our main rivals, but they might as well not exist for how severely underutilized they are. Their whole characters can be summed up in three traits: they're nice, they never sing on-screen, and they look like they got picked off the cutting room floor of Aikatsu character designs. They get a full episode where they invite the girls out to perform at their island resort, and even then they have barely any presence. I'd be surprised if anyone remembers their names because they matter so little.

Meanwhile, our main cast of girls get to have cute antics with good production values, but that's all there is to it. The only character flaws they have that aren't tossed aside are ones that can be spun as cute, as if they're disguised strengths in the weaknesses category of a job interview. The one exception to this is when the focus shifts to Sumire, whose hangups get treated some actual weight. She's insecure and afraid of failure, and that doesn't magically all go away after receiving one kind gesture from her friends. Two episodes cannot carry a series however, and the show otherwise never tries to be anything more, quickly quashing any hints to the contrary.

Love Live is a mega popular franchise with more than enough dedicated super fans to weather a few unexceptional anime entries, but a franchise that keeps playing safe is one that will eventually hit a wall in market saturation. As of now, Love Live is juggling three different active groups to run the live concert circuit: Sunshine's Aqours, Nijigasaki, and Superstar's Liella! Each one has the same basic premise of starting a brand new idol club in the face of student council disapproval. Sunshine, at least in its first season, distinguishes itself by having a consistent through line reinforcing its central theme. Nijigasaki flips the focus in favor of individual character episodes instead of any overall plot, and at least its school isn't in danger of dying for no good reason. In contrast, Superstar has little giving it its own identity.

On its own, Superstar is serviceable if light on substance, and it has enough great scenes to demonstrate that someone on the staff really cared about the show, but they're always fighting against the show's refusal to take a step outside the boundaries of past successes. Taken in the context of the franchise, it has little innovation to offer. Newcomers to Love Live will have no issues enjoying the series, and super fans don't need a second opinion. For everyone else though, it's more or less skippable.