The year was 2020. Like the rest of the world, I was in lockdown. I needed something easy and uplifting to watch, so I picked up Love Live! School Idol Project. I fell in love with Rin; I let myself relax and just have a good time with a cute anime, its catchy songs and charming cast. In 2021, during another fraught time in my life, I moved on to Love Live! Sunshine!!. There, I saw a maturation of the franchise's tropes, with more well-rounded characters, better music, engaging drama and, yes, a lot of that delicious Yuri bait. I cried during several points in Sunshine's second season, and its movie. I was surprised that something as utterly, shamelessly commercial as Love Live could have something to say. About art, about making things with other people, about finding meaning even when life hands you defeat after defeat.
In my excitement for all things Love Live, I ran excitedly in the direction of the mobile game Love Live! School Idol Festival All-Stars. I loved unlocking favourite songs and outfits for the idols. I was charmed by the new cast from the game, belonging to Nijigasaki High School. I was intrigued by how the story developed. I loved spending time with all of these characters, old and new, feeling one step closer to my dreams. And I wondered, aloud in empty rooms, how they might handle this in an anime where they couldn't fall back on having members of μ's or Aqours drop by from time to time.
Most of all, I wanted to see Rina's backstory, the girl who held up a sketch pad with doodles of facial expressions, because she found it hard to emote. A girl who was such a techie she built an LED mask that showed a pixel-face of her emotional state. What an interesting choice for a character, I thought. I heard the anime featured an original character to take the spot of the player's faceless in-game persona. All of this intrigued me. I was told by fellow Love Live fans to expect a terrible show. I thought: maybe it's a diamond in the rough? Instead, I found something much more complicated.
See, Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club is not a bad anime. On paper, it's an interesting new take on the Love Live formula: instead of an idol group, it features 9 solo idols plus a manager. It features decent music, fun music video sequences, great voice acting, and some interesting character choices. It features a series first: a main character who is not an idol, ~~you~~Yuu, who takes the place of the game's player character. I felt she could have been an ideal heroine. Yet, after its finale I didn't feel catharsis, or bittersweet joy, or... much at all. I thought I had prepared myself by reading the best review of this anime on this website. It still wasn't enough.
There is something comfy and familiar about Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club, like the caress of starlight under the skies of your hometown. If I had to compare its narrative style to anything, it is old-school, episodic tokusatsu. In each installment, an issue is introduced which brings one of the main characters into focus. She finds a way through this personal conundrum, usually with the support of another primary cast member’s well-timed “がんばって!”. The dramatic climax is the same in each episode, but instead of battling a monster, it's a music video. (if this description reminds you of Sailor Moon, that original series shared several writers with tokusatsu shows from its studio, Toei).
A well-made season of tokusatsu makes good use of this episodic format and builds on it, very much going somewhere. Take Kamen Rider Fourze, which uses each of its two-part stories to develop either newcomers to the main cast, or the victim-turned-monster of the week. Throughout, we get snippets of the relationships between the main cast members, and protagonist Gentaro Kisaragi's infectious desire to befriend everyone, no matter how difficult they might be. By the late show, when Gentaro is literally wielding superpowers that run on friendship, you're fully invested.
Sadly, Love Live: Nijigasaki School Idol Club is not like Kamen Rider Fourze. Instead, it resembles a mediocre, repetitive, and uninspired season of tokusatsu. Utterly predictable in structure, mostly lacking soul or creativity other than what its principal performers give it. And, yes, nothing but a shameless cash-in on your existing love for its parent franchise.
Comparisons to previous Love Live seasons are inescapable, so let's get that out of the way. A well-crafted Love Live show makes careful use of music sequences and focus episodes. In previous shows, many girls didn't even get episodes of their own! Instead, they were developed through an experimental narrative technique called "show, don't tell". We learned who they were through their relationships with other characters and how they dealt with whatever new challenge the writers threw the group's way. While music was a focus, we didn't have a song in every episode. Instead, songs punctuated small mini-arcs, and acted as a cathartic explosion that said: yes, we are here, in this moment, and we're doing this. We can overcome these difficulties, together.
It's a simple, uplifting sentiment, the default setting for Love Live. But it has weight because you see the characters overcoming either their own flaws, their hang ups, or growing to understand someone they previously clashed with. Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club doesn’t have this luxury, as its main selling point is the cause of most of its problems.
Making the main cast a group of solo idols isn't something the anime staff had a choice in. They were working with the premise from the mobile game, which this show was created to advertise. Yet, whether by executive fiat or poor creative decision-making, they chose to develop this in the least imaginative way possible. Simply put, every single girl has her own episode (bar Yuu, but we'll get to that). This means 9 out of 13 episodes are focus episodes, leaving precious little space for developing group dynamics in any meaningful way.
This isn't always bad, and I want to assure you that I am not immune to this show's attempts at winning me over. There was episode 5, dedicated to Emma and her friendship with Karin. As a reversal of the show’s typical formula, Emma isn’t struggling, Karin is the one with the problem to overcome. She's conflicted between the person others see her as, and who she wants to be. An utterly relatable conundrum. She's helped the School Idol Club out, but doesn't feel she would fit in as a full member because of her image as the one that acts like a grown-up. Much like other episodes, this is solved by the unconditional care and friendship Emma gives her.
And yet, in this episode it really landed. Karin's conflict made sense: she's a teenage girl who has worked as a professional model, and has had to grow up before her time. Emma is the bright-eyed foreign girl who just believes in school idols, and who desperately wants to get to know her aloof new bestie. She tells Karin she can be whoever she wants to be, as long as it brings her joy. She then performs a song for her and it just works, because it represents her breaking through and connecting with Karin.
When the show tries a similar type of story to develop Shizuku, it falls apart. Shizuku is such a cliché of the nice, pure idol, I'd have a hard time telling her apart from Ayumu if it weren't for their appearance. That she's supported by ~~craven cow~~ Worst Girl Kasumi, only rubbed salt in the wound. Shizuku’s episode tries to say something about the masks we wear, and yet it rings empty.
You might ask why I did not drop Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club. And there is only one, honest answer I can give to this question. I wanted to watch up to episode 6 at least. Why?
The first 4 episodes had been painful to watch, aside from some of the song sequences. Then episode 5 was... a good Love Live episode. Not outstanding, but up there with basically any random episode of School Idol Project or Sunshine. It was a perfectly serviceable story. Rina's episode was much the same, showcasing our lovable nerd and telling us the origin story of the Rina-chan board.
(Side-note: the Rina-chan board, notebook version, is exactly the kind of gimmick that barely works in animation. It's something you come up with for a visual novel, such as the story mode of School Idol Festival All-Stars. When a character is more than a series of static sprites, it becomes incredibly awkward, hence why Rina doesn't use it nearly as often as she does in the game. As for the electronic version, it's built extremely quickly and with little preamble.
Having seen these two episodes, fear filled me. For someone as opinionated as I am, I often feel an intense fear of rejection when I realise my thoughts on any given thing can be diametrically opposed to those of my friends. I didn't want this. I wanted to find a forest where I could simply sleep.
In short, those two episodes did the worst thing they could possibly do: they were good. They weren't excellent, of course. If they were excellent, then this would have been easier. I could've said this show was secretly great. Instead, they are just fine, which fostered anxious ambiguity: is this show good? Are those two episodes really that good? And if they are good, is the rest of the show going to be good?
Faced with this, my only choice was to keep watching. Episode 7 was sort of okay. Episode 8 wasn't. Episode 9 almost had something to say.
I felt like chasing after this show's essence was breaking my brain. Like the more I tried to stab at its heart, the more it ducked and wove like a capoeira master whose body is entirely made of jello. But, like jello, it was cheap and often tasted horrid. And yet: sometimes, all you want is a bit of gelatinous sugar on your tongue. The evergreen joy of the sugar high. I needed to know. Despite the heart-thumping beep-boop of emotions in my chest that hinted at a gnawing existential void, I pressed on to the finale. Spoiler time!
Things start fairly promising: Ayumu is jealous of Yuu's seeming closeness with the talented Setsuna. Yuu wants to tell Ayumu about her dream, and calls her over to her room to tell her about practicing piano. Ayumu's jealousy boils to the surface, pointing out she showed her piano playing to Setsuna first. Yuu tries to tell Ayumu of her dream, but Ayumu doesn’t want to hear it. In a scene that would not be out of place in a good Yuri anime, Ayumu breaks down and tackles Yuu into bed. She holds her tight, crying. She says she wants to be a school idol only for Yuu, and asks Yuu to belong to her alone. Episode 11 ends with an emotional bang. What could the show do to resolve this scene filled with character drama?
Love tackle? Check. Yuri bait? Check. Feet? Check, check, check.In the finale, rather than competing in Love Live, the idols from Nijigasaki have been working on a School Idol Festival and invited other school idol groups to take part. This lets the show repeatedly namedrop the title of its raison d’etre: the gacha game it’s shamelessly promoting. For ultimate branding synergy, the one time we see the School Idol Festival's name in print, it’s with the exact same logo and font as the game, available now for iOS and Android mobile devices!
Preparations for the festival are underway and every idol is working on her own stage, each with a distinct vibe. Yuu is at the epicentre, trying to help everyone do their best. Ayumu struggles to muster any real enthusiasm. She'd told Yuu not to worry about the night before, and that was that.
Setsuna notices Ayumu is struggling, and walks her home. Ayumu explains that she's conflicted: she's seen how Yuu is helping everyone out, and she's realised there are a lot of people aside from Yuu who support her and want her dream to become a reality. And yet, she was doing this for Yuu, at least at first. Here, I hoped Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club would deliver something at least somewhat solid, if not necessarily deep. Maybe Setsuna, an experienced idol, could give Ayumu some piece of sage advice that helps her cut this proverbial Gordian Knot, in true Love Live fashion. Something like "it's good to want to make things for other people, but you also have to find out why you want to do it for yourself, especially if it's something creative." That felt like the kind of message the show was building towards, and which a better Love Live season would have delivered. Something appropriate to both characterisation and theme, which would give the audience some kind of resolution.
Instead, Setsuna simply says she once had doubts too, but now she wants to do her best! So she encourages Ayumu to do her best. That’s it. This somehow solves things for Ayumu, and she runs away happily. Much like other times during these 13 episodes, I felt like I'd been had.
By the time the final episode rolled in, I was mostly checked out. We see the fully realised stage for each idol with their gimmicks: the lively Ai performs next to a food stall; sleepy Kanata has beds for her audience to nap in; total geek and Best Girl Rina is challenging the audience in a fighting game tournament; ~~craven cow~~ Worst Girl Kasumi has a wandering stage made out of a giant effigy of herself, a construct that fittingly acts as a testament to her enormous ego.
A towering, overwrought monument to unearned self-importance.Before the final act, a collab between all the school idol groups, disaster strikes. It starts to rain! My disbelief was so unsuspended by this point, the part of my brain with experience as an event organiser started to yell inside my skull. It said simply that girls who managed to be so organised as to put together a festival of this scale so flawlessly, would definitely have plans in the event of rain.
Eventually, the rain subsides. Of course, the audience is immediately back, because they believe in school idols! Our girls run to the stage, stomping on puddles as they speed past the statue of the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam, glowing green with ~~marketing synergy~~the promise of tomorrow. The final concert takes place, showing us a montage which makes prodigious use of motion graphics. This caught my attention, as it was not unlike the 3rd opening for another Sunrise production.
In fact, I just took a break from writing this review to drink a full glass of water as I watched that OP. You can do it too! Taking hydration breaks is good and healthy! You've come so far, you've done really well. You still have about 946 words left to read in this thing, so maybe a glass of water alongside some beautifully animated credits sequences is just what you need. See you in five.
While on my water break, I went and snapped this pic of my Love Live! Sunshine!! girls, just so we're totally clear that I'm a craven hypocrite.Anyway, the montage shows us several scenes that seem meaningful and dramatic. Like all the worst montages, these are mostly scenes we never got to see. The School Idol Club meets in the aftermath, their hearts filled by loving fan letters from all over the world and messages from other schools to collaborate. "I guess we’re going to have to have a second one," says Kanata.
Finally, the show ends with you. Yuu. You bow to the teachers as you sit down to play piano for the entrance exam to the music track in Nijigasaki school. This is the subplot Yuu was so excited about: she wants to play music so she can help out the Nijigasaki idols. But you are empty. Yuu has been empty throughout the show, nothing but a vacuous vessel for the audience's (expected) love for the show's cast. She is you, and she is nothing. She doesn't have a personality, or characterisation beyond wanting to support everyone. Yuu is the most wasted character in all of Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club. Here was a chance to do something interesting and different, and just like the rest of the show, it's simply not there. You are not there. Just another person-shaped void.
This feeling of emptiness, of lack, expands outwards to the rest of the show. You realise that this endeavour felt like a puppet show trying, with occasional success, to elicit the same emotions as previous Love Live stories. At worst, you realise the puppeteers aren't the creatives that somehow drew the short straw and had to take on working on the gacha game adaptation. The girls in this show barely feel like people. They are fantoches, shapes that vaguely allude to something you loved long ago. Inside them is nothing but the body snatching puppeteer's glove worn by the cold hand of the Bushiroad executive. He has hollowed out anything potentially difficult, any kind of emotional complexity or mildly bold creative choice that could in any way make these girls anything other than unproblematically lovable. There is no Nico Yazawa here, a girl whose acerbic two-facedness was the result of growing up in a poor family and having to look after her siblings. There are no layered personalities like Chika, who is as excited about creating together with her friends as she is prone to depression when things look glum.
Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club is a vacuous production. It's The Rise of Skywalker; Battlestar Galactica Season 4; Macross Delta; Game of Thrones Season 8 and Gundam SEED Destiny : something that makes what came before feel worse in comparison, and makes you~~(Yuu(it was always just you))~~ feel like a fool for caring in the first place. It made me question if I really, actually care about Love Live, or find idols at all charming or fun anymore. My bright, rainbow-coloured passion for Love Live was dimming.
And yet, Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club had catchy songs. It had many more Yuri moments than I've mentioned, which, due to who I am as a person, made me curious about its announced second season. Yes, they are introducing even more girls into an already-crowded series. But now that the main cast has been developed, maybe the three new girls can breathe new life into it. Maybe the creators won't feel like they have to so ruthlessly stick to the formula they put together for season 1. Maybe it will be a fully good season of Love Live, improving on the first just like previous shows have done.
Or maybe it will remain a pale imitation, especially with the advent of another true-blue Love Live series, which hits right every single note that Nijigasaki dropped, hoping ~~Yuu~~you wouldn't notice.
Regardless, they got me. I am weak. I will be watching season 2, listening to the music as my friends drift away from me, realising I am a lost cause. Maybe a year from now we'll be back here, and I'll manage to squeeze four thousand more unnecessary words about another anime I didn’t like. Hopefully not.
The only way I can think of to end this ~~treatise~~review is with a warning: save yourself.
Don't let your curiosity get the best of you.
If you see Love Live! Nijigasaki School Idol Club on your travels, keep walking; no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Don't play the gacha game (don't play ANY gacha games!).
Find other idol anime. Find other idols.
And remember that even in the most commercial and meticulously capitalist idol franchise, something can come along that crassly says the quiet part out loud: Yuu are the product.
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