First, I should admit that the animation is amazing. It's definitely a step up from the original series, and you can see proof of that in the very first episode. That doesn't stop it from having CGI dance sequences, though. The only one that was fully hand-drawn was the performance by the "rival" idol group that is only relevant for about one episode.
The music is also amazing. As much as I love Muse, Aqours just has better singers. However, some songs do tend to bleed together. Yume de Yozora wo Terashitai sounds very similar to Mijuku DREAMER, for example. However, there is a fatal problem related to the music, which I'll go into in a little bit.
Now that I've talked about the good aspects of this series, it's time to talk about what killed it: the writing. Unlike in the original series, the MC here has no particular reason for becoming a school idol - whereas Honoka wanted to save the school, Chika wanted to be an idol for its own sake (a realization that took Honoka a long time to have). I have no problem with this - though it does make Kimeta yo Hand in Hand (the Susume->Tomorrow of Sunshine) lose a lot of impact.
But wait! There is a reason! Several episodes in, we learn that - *gasp* - the school is in danger. And this is when the problems with this series start to really show themselves. Simply put, Aqours is a bunch of Muse fangirls. They could hardly go a single episode without making a reference to them, and they were even HAPPY when they heard the bad news about their school - because now they could be more like Muse. This series lives in Muse's shadow and never really steps out of it.
Speaking of Muse, let's take a moment and remember why we loved that series. The original Love Live anime was a story of nine girls pouring in blood, sweat, and tears to protect the school that their families have been attending for generations. Then they poured in blood, sweat, and tears to be the best idols they could be. Then, once they were standing on top of the world, they poured in blood, sweat, and tears to ensure that school idols would live on forever.
Notice how much I said "blood, sweat, and tears." There were countless scenes of the characters practicing their dancing, worrying about costumes, asking Eli to coach them, and so on. We saw all the effort they put into their activities, which made their successes all the more rewarding. Sunshine has... maybe two practice scenes? There was one in episode eleven, and I think there might have been one or two brief ones earlier. The original series used the practice scenes for character development (and the performances, which I'll get to in a second), while Sunshine does character development in other ways. Which is fine, but we still need to see the girls practice. When their performances happen, they don't feel believable. It doesn't feel like they've earned it.
AND speaking of the performances, let's talk about why the ones in Sunshine were disappointing. In the original series, most of the performances (not quite all, but nearly all) were situated within the context of the anime. It was "okay, we're going to perform now," and then they performed. In season one, the only one that wasn't like this was Susume->Tomorrow. Since context was given for these performances, we knew that they were actually happening. We could focus on the lyrics - which were ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, as they often served to summarize or even develop the characters' feelings up until that moment. Who can forget the moment when Honoka, Umi, and Kotori performed START:DASH!! in an empty auditorium? Who can forget the moment when Rin led the team in performing Love wing bell? Not only did we see the characters earn their performances (as discussed above), but we also saw how their performances affected them.
In Sunshine, three of the six insert songs are just kinda... shoved in there. With no context. Even the movie had little segues into Hello, Hoshi wo Kazoete and ?<-HEARTBEAT. But Sunshine just plops the characters into stage outfits and shows them performing in some random place. We have no way of knowing if they're actually happening in-universe. How, then, are we supposed to take them seriously? Why are we supposed to care?
To be fair, episode eleven of Sunshine is good. We see the girls practice, we see their feelings develop over the course of the episode, and the insert song is rooted in the context of the story. Plus, its lyrics are extremely relevant to the characters' feelings. It felt like classic Love Live. It made me wish we'd been getting that all season.
Oh, I haven't even gotten to the writing yet. The writing is... man, I wish I could say it was good. But it wasn't. I talked earlier about the "save the school" plot being reused. I can't say I'm entirely opposed to it, but I feel like it would only have worked if they had been up-front about it. Bring it up in episode one. Don't fake us out and make us think you might be doing something different. But anyway! The constant references to Muse get old really quick. They happened so often that I thought they were set-up for a "we need to step out of their shadow and be our own group" realization, but that never happened.
And then there's the third-year subplot. This permeates the first half of the series, eventually being resolved in episode nine, and the tone is unreal. It feels very gloomy and depressing - very strange for Love Live. The rest of the time, the show's tone is exactly what you'd expect from a Love Live anime, and the juxtaposition is jarring and rough. It feels like the plot to a late-night drama got mixed into the happy, fun idol show. And when this subplot does get resolved, the reasoning behind the offending character's actions is very flimsy, hard to believe, and - frankly - insulting. When it was first revealed, my reaction was, "They expect me to buy this?" It left a lot of actions unexplained, it blatantly contradicted plenty of other scenes we'd seen in earlier episodes, and it just reeked of bad writing. And then, in the very next episode, Chika does the exact thing that this subplot condemned - and gets rewarded for it!
Oh, and let's not forget the yuribait. It was very heavy. In fact, I'm not sure it can even be called "bait." It was just plain old yuri (that never ended up going anywhere). Don't get me wrong - I love yuri. I own eight NicoMaki doujinshi. But it didn't add anything to Sunshine. The involved characters didn't gain any development, and the yuri never went beyond one line at the end of episode ten. A line that, might I add, would be the precursor to a romantic subplot in just about any other anime. It felt like they were trying to pander to fudanshi in the same way that they were pandering to Muse nostalgia for the rest of the series. I was, again, kind of insulted that they thought we'd buy it if they splashed a little yuri in there somewhere.
Then good things spontaneously start happening for our characters for no reason, as they'd only canonically had two performances so far (one of which was a local event, the other of which was a flop). And half of episode thirteen is dedicated to a recap of the season. No, seriously. And this recap illustrates all the things I've been talking about. They never really earned any of the popularity they got at any point in the series. There never really was a good reason for Yohane to join the group - they even glossed over it in the recap. And there never really was any reason to care about the group's successes and failures.
I really wanted to like this anime. At first, I figured it could never live up to the legacy of the original series, but I decided to give it a fair chance. And I realized that my original misgivings were right on the money. Sunshine was plagued by bad writing, meaningless performances, and nervous desperation as it tried to simultaneously lean on Muse for support and ignore the secrets to Muse's success.
My final rating for Love Live! School idol project Sunshine!! is a four out of ten.
Oh dear lord this review is long. If you've read this far, thanks.
