Love Live! School Idol Project 2

Title:Love Live! School Idol Project 2
ラブライブ! School Idol Project
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , , , ,
Notables: MIMORI Suzuko
NITTA Emi
TOKUI Sora
UCHIDA Aya
Just when things have gotten back to normal, the girls of Muse learn that they have a second chance at success as a School Idol Group: another Love Live competition has been announced, this one even bigger than before.

13 episodes


[edit] The Love Live franchise:
Love Live! School Idol Project
Love Live! School Idol Project 2
Love Live! Sunshine!!
Love Live! Nijigasaki Gakuen School Idol Doukoukai
Love Live! Superstar!! S1
Love Live! Superstar!! S2
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch Stretch [series:2877#628]
(Watch+ or Rent-)

(All episodes watched):

While I would have preferred that Wake Up, Girls! continue into a second season, if I can't have that I'll take Love Live 2 for my Idol themed anime of the spring. While hardly brilliant, the girls of Love Live are likeable and you can root for them to win. The song and dance act which refreshed our memories about where season one ended was fun. This show has a little depth to it, by which I mean you don't know exactly how it will procede to the conclusion (which we pretty much can guess). While not a LOL show, the jokes are a little better than average. I'm glad that LL wasn't abandoned after one season, because I really did want to see how things would work out.

I got a LOL out of episode four, when main character Honoka has a bad premonition of how Muse will score in a preliminary competition. That was pretty good. These good jokes don't happen often, but the series as a whole is modestly amusing and you can care enough about the girls to want to know how things will work out for them. The comically troublesome member, Nico, gets some development in this episode as well. This show has a slightly more zany, silly, less realistic tone than WUGs did. For some reason a joke in episode two (I think), regarding several girls running down a steep slope, reminded me of the sort of physical comedy you would see in American Cartoons.

To be honest, this show isn't terribly funny and will probably only earn a 'Watch' rating. The jokes are amusing but seldom of laugh-out-loud caliber--more 'smile' jokes than 'laugh' ones, in fact. As a result, LL2 gradually became a low priority show for me. It has a little spirit, but it seems to have drifted away from the overriding issue--will the Muse group win Love Live 2 or not? There are still too many girls to keep track of the personalities of each one, and the group as a whole doesn't seem to have much personality other than that they really, really must win the Love Live competition. Since the comedy of LL2 alone isn't good enough to make this a noteworthy series, it would be nice if they discussed a little why winning and competition are so important to them, what they are gambling, and what will happen if they fail. That might give them some collective personality. An honest effort is made to depict the friendship between the girls of Muse, and their regret that several of them will be graduating and leaving the group soon. But I couldn't feel all that moved; maybe when there are no less than nine main characters, personality has to be spread so thinly that it's hard to identify anyone.

Individual episodes have individual themes to them, mainly for the sake of comedy: like the abortive attempt to give Muse a distinctive, new personality, or several girls needing to go on a diet. It's sort of like a situation comedy. A more serious theme was whether Muse should attempt an ambitious love song or stay with it's tried-and-true tunes. The problem was that nobody in the group had the slightest romantic experience to call upon in writing such a thing (which was played for some good laughs). The answer seemed obvious to me: write a song from the perspective of an inexperienced girl dreaming about what love might be like. It wouldn't have to be realistic if they did that, and they'd have boatloads of material to work with.

Something must have been done right, however, because after their climactic performance in the final round of Love Live, it felt as if no matter what score they got from the judges, for all intents and purposes the girls of Muse had already won. To make it official would almost be an anti-climax. I have to give this show credit for not using the usual cheap, stereotypical teenage boy targeted jokes (at least not too often). It wasn't terribly funny, but you could like these girls and root for them.

Last updated Wednesday, September 10 2014. Created Tuesday, April 08 2014.

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