Being a Love Live fan, the announcement of this spin-off came as a pleasant surprise. An alternative setting with our favorite LL girls, which could be filled with fantasy and adventure. Each girl had her own shtick, with Kanan being an engineer or Mari being a demon queen, and these things had a lot of potential to tell an interesting story.
But unfortunately, none of these came to be. The story revolves around a certain mystery that happens in Numazu which makes animals go berserk once in a while, and is therefore limited pretty much only to that place. The idea in itself isn't so bad, but it was never executed properly. Half of the episodes in the anime are purely SoL episodes with no relevance to the story, which later on, when the story actually progresses, it fails to actually be interesting.
The characters themselves also lose most of their personality and are reduced to a one-off shtick (as mentioned above), while all previous relationships established in Sunshine! are entirely gone. Kanan/Mari for example, or Chika/You/Riko feel like practically strangers in this show. Everyone focuses just on one single character - Yohane. Every sentence they utter is about her and regarding her. Yohane makes the world there go round.
Unfortunately, Yohane's character was another disappointment, as she never convinced me why she deserves to be a main character. For most of the anime's time, Yohane is spent moping, crying, being depressed or making drama. She can't do that, she doesn't deserve to do that, etc. are regular motifs in here. Every time, without fail, she'll be pushed up and supported by Lailaps, or the other girls from Aqours.
Not long after, Yohane becomes a celebrity in town and everyone focuses on her and supporting her, despite the fact that she has never shown us she's done anything exceptional. From an outsider's perspective, she's basically just a random teenager who does random errands for people and likes to sing. She cannot fight, and she cannot support anyone else. Because of that, it's bizarre seeing how everyone revolves around her.
Meanwhile, Yohane's development is a very mixed bag. At the end of the day, she did develop quite a lot, but the process was extremely tiring with one step forward one step back for a long time. Yohane tries to do something, fails or succeeds, then for whatever reason she goes back to moping in her bed. Lailaps comes to cheer her up, they argue a little, and then another chance comes to repeat this process.
Luckily for the anime, I think that the songs are definitely the stronger ones in the franchise (coming second after the series of bangers NijiGaku has released), and with the songs themselves and CGI lives being so great, it elevates the show by a lot. The quick succession of songs in the first half of the anime lulls the viewers into a false sense of security, forgetting completely that there's a story to be told (that is being skipped).
The anime also looks great. The new character designs feel really "soft" and nice, and the anime is very colorful and vibrant.
Ultimately, Genjitsu no Yohane is an eye candy and a treat with its songs for Love Live fans, but as a standalone anime, it's a huge disappointment, failing to have a proper story, and butchering the personalities of the characters we love.
