Positives:
+ Solid main characters. With only 6 episodes, they could have easily rushed establishing the characters, but they actually manage to make all of them interesting and give them compelling motivations. Eriko is the energetic girl that wants to inspire people the way music inspired her after she was abandoned by her mother. Ruka is the foreign girl from a poor country trying to bring light to the lives of her countrymen. Miu is the caged princess fighting for a life outside of the role she was born into in a powerful and prestigious family. They're likeable and you want to see them succeed.
+ Has a more mature take on life than you typically see from idol anime. Bad things happen, actions have consequences, and not everything magically works out in the end. A character even gives up on their idol dreams after losing in the Rookie Queen tournament and this is not portrayed negatively, but as her simply taking the next step to find herself.
+ The 6 episode length and brisk pacing means there is absolutely no filler and it never feels boring or like it's stalling. Even the obligatory beach episode is more functional to the plot in terms of giving Eriko a recovery arc than an excuse for fanservice and watermelon splitting (though there is still plenty of that). It can be a bit *too* fast, and the 5 other girls in the tournament besides the 3 main characters do get glossed over, but overall I think it was the right length for the story it was telling
+ Good ending, which I will talk about now, so skip down to the next section if you don't want spoilers. Going into the final episode, I felt strongly that Ruka deserved to win both as a matter of her story being more compelling than Eriko's and her specific struggles with her weak voice, but that Eriko would ultimately win by virtue of being the main character. Cue my pleasant surprise when Ruka did in fact win, even though it was a pyrrhic victory in some ways. It upset my expectations in a good way and made me feel like the writer actually had a strong grasp on the story they were trying to tell and knew what the ending that felt right was, even if it went against conventional wisdom.
Negatives:
- Bad directing and action choreography makes the battle sequences feel boring.
- Animation is subpar overall, and the dancing in particular is so bad that it's almost comical. This series really must have had no budget if their resources were spread this thin for only 6 episodes.
- Poor voice acting. It often doesn't match the tone of a scene or the expression on a character's face, and the dubbing of the voices doesn't match up well with mouth animations.
- Music is generic and forgettable J-pop that leaves no impression.
- Mechanics of the Venus system make no sense. How are singers being knocked unconscious by a robot battle that's happening strictly in virtual reality on a screen? How are they yelling typical anime battle retorts like "take this!" and "I'm not done yet!" when they're supposed to be singing? How does it even determine a winner when both singers are always in perfect sync with both their dancing and singing? The entire competitive karaoke robot battling system falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
- Calling the impoverished fictional post-Soviet republic that Ruka lives in "Pooristan" is both shockingly lazy and pointlessly offensive. Was that really the best you could come up with? Furthermore, the idea that 80% of this country is fervently following the Japanese idol scene is laughable, and the fact that things only get better when Ruka inspires them to leave the bars and start working during the day instead of drinking feels like a cruel bit of bootstrapping Reaganism that says poverty can be solved by simply working harder.
- Spoilers for the ending follow. The coach's death in the final episode was unnecessary and felt like it was done for shock value. While it wasn't totally unexpected given that he spent much of the series in the hospital and was hinting about how much time he had left, having him show up in ghost form and only revealing later that he was dead the entire time and not actually there seemed like it was done just to catch the audience off guard (though his white clothing is an obvious giveaway anyway)
