Idol, one of a few genre at the pinacle of weebness, the teams behind them never half assed making product as a countermeasure for general labelling from society. And inside them there are two biggest title called Love Live! & iDOLM@STER. This time as well, they success making a great series in hope for strengthening their endangered species with Nijigaku.
School Idol Club, three words enough to give the viewer a prediction on how this thing going to be. There are a club that accommodate students who want to be an idol, because the setting is in school they’ll face a problem that usually, mostly, n’ definitely from Seito-kai. They will work together to solve this and reach a happy ending, the end. So I won't expect another story & just want to enjoy the performances, that's what I thought.
While our speculation is not wrong, at the same time it’s not totally corect as well. Instead of evading our forecast, they choose to just accept it. Story worth a dozen of episodes packed skillfully into just 3 ep without giving a bad taste of rushed script. Leaving the audiences running out of predictions onwards. (detail on spoiler down there)
The appealing part of Idol genre, yappari it’s the performances. As an experienced franchise they didn’t fail to meet our expectation. Generaly they are all good, even better than the source counterpart (game).
Chase! A great choice as the 1st performance, selecting manager (nominee) & pink girl as viewpoint is also a smart pick as they represent two type of targeted audience. Manager can be likened as a new fan of series who just taste the enjoyment of idol and Chase! did a great job at pulling them with passionate song & awesome stage effect combined with the story made us felt the same as manager.
Dream With You. Don’t want to give you expectation but it’s best performance so far. Pink girl suits really well with all type of watcher, a newb or veteran. Still like cute things (for her) or Idols (for us) made an adult felt embarrassed if the world found out, it gave us anxiety. Yet this performance respond it with: how come they won’t admit these kawaii-ness? The already great song still lifted up with great visual, cute choreo, smooth animation even transition into 2D still keep the quality. Costume feels a bit too big for her but that’s what make it cute & not much skin revealing as a prove that idol isn’t always about sexiness. Sasuga #1 fav char at latest poll on game.
(light spoiler ep 123)
Lot of things prepared beforehand so everything can be swept in one go (I mean 3). Problem from sassy child is just a different opinion with leader, so it can be solved by changing her point of view. I like how they pick an exact sentence to make her realized by herself. Seito-kai & Club leader have a relation since start, so the disband threat can be solved with a great speech by manager. I really like how they intentionally add a clumsy line after such a strong scold by manager to keep her character modest, so she doesn’t sound like a shounen protagonist solve anything with talk-no-jutsu. After these mainstream story of school club setting, the studio can freely write each characters’ specific story. So, what lay ahead?
