Story & Characters: Sound! Euphonium: Ensemble Contest Arc takes place after the conclusion of Sound! Euphonium: Our Promise: A Brand New Day, where, even though the band didn’t get invited to Nationals, the club activities still persists. Instead, they decide to take place in the Ensemble Competition for high school students, which basically has the same rules as Nationals, but instead, are for groups of two to eight students. Since only one group per school is allowed to participate in the qualifiers, it’s up to the students to select the best group amongst themselves to represent Kitaugi High School.
For the most part, storylines remain tame, ranging from how students will go about forming groups, to actually figuring out who gets selected amongst our favourite first and second year students. There still is some conflict without our groups, but none of the scale of either seasons or the movie. The group selections themselves are interesting enough, where students that we don’t know get to play together, and we focus more-so on Kumiko’s group. The group itself aren’t all familiar members either so watching as they rehearse was probably the high point of the story. What causes group members to struggle, what’s not working, and how do we fix them? These are strong ideas, and they don’t go quite as fast paced as the movie, which was welcomed here.
The third year students are basically out of the picture for this OVA, as they prepare for getting into post-secondary school, so end up focusing more on everyone in Kanade’s year and now-president Kumiko’s year. Mizore, Natsuki and Yuuko get some interesting scenes as we catch up with them though. Kumiko is obviously our focus, as she tries to ease into her new role as club president – which she basically picked up before starting her official third high school year, due to the club not participating in Nationals. We get to see some minor flaws she has, but her interactions with Reina, as brief as they were, are still really nice to see. Hazuki and Sapphire, who weren’t really involved in Season 2, get more screen time this time around and they were interesting this time around. I didn’t love them in the first season, but they were strong here. Kanade follows Kumiko around the school a gets some minor screen time, but nothing nearly as stark as how she acted in the movie. Taki is mostly uninvolved in this season.
As you get to the end of the season, you likely wish the season ended on more of a high note, pun intended, as it doesn’t feel like the story completely wraps up. They also don’t really show much in the final performances – which was equally disappointing. Still, this OVA likely only serves a warm-up of what’s to come in the third season. (Story: 7/10, Characters: 8/10)
Art: Kyoto Animation is still puts out a strong product, but due to the story, they don’t really have much of a chance to shine like they did in previous seasons. Scenes with characters further away also looked noticeably dull, though it mostly didn’t matter anyway. (8/10)
Sound: I’m still not sold at that finale should have been structured the way it did, so like the animation, the sound didn’t get much of a chance to show itself off. Still, instruments still sounded really nice in the context of the anime and the ending song and VA work were solid. (8/10)
Overall: Sound! Euphonium: Ensemble Contest Arc is a fine distraction for Sound! Euphonium watchers before Season 3 airs in a few months. Whether it's bringing characters together or playing music together, both both, we get to see that here and I love those little moments of when something cool happens. It’s still Sound! Euphonium and it still remains strong for what it aims to do – get characters together to play music. And it does that. (8/10)
