My first exposure to this anime wasn't the anime, itself, but the smart-phone music-rhythm game, "School Idol," associated with this. I downloaded it about 4 months ago. I knew the game was based of this anime series, but I was reluctant to finally watch this, because I felt it would ruin the game's immersion for me.
But I'm really glad that I did finally decide to watch this!
The plot and characters are so cute! I love the little flashbacks.
I quickly loved the plot. It actually adds drama to series, but it's not a brilliantly big problem, but there is at least some conflict. I felt the plot took too long to develop in the beginning. And at the end, it got really sped up.
The art is overall really good, but something that bugs me is that during the dance scenes it seems as if the animators were indecisive (or lazy???) and kept on switching from 3-D figures to 2-D drawings, vice versa. It kind of threw the choreography and the immersion off. I wish that they would pick one art style...
However, I do prefer the 2-D dance animation, because it seems more expressive and less robotic compared to the 3-D dance animation.
The characters are a little cliche. It's easy to tell which characters are the air head, the soft spoken one, the tsundere, the shy one, the intelligent one, the cool-acting one, etc.
I do very much enjoy this anime, though. I cried a lot, maybe because I'm sensitive and sentimental! But scenes pulled at my heart strings and made me blubber.
