(This review was written before Love Live Superstar season two came out)

If you had told me three years ago that I'd actually watch a Love Live season, I probably would have called you insane. Yet here I am having watched three Love Live seasons, one of which is a sequel and the subject of today's review. Long story short, I watched the first season of the Love Live Nijigasaki anime on a whim and wound up liking it a lot, moreso upon finding out it finally ditched a certain trope that I outright hate that was present in the original series and Sunshine. When season two was announced, I was hyped as hell, and I liked Love Live Superstar as well, though not quite as much. It helps that the second season of Love Live Superstar is going to air right after this. But that's another review for another day. So how did Nijigasaki's season two fare? Well...sequels have it rough. To quote another reviewer I know, if they change too much they risk losing their audience, but if they change too little, then the audience will grow bored. It doesn't help that the mobile game's second season is pretty infamous for being flat-out terrible from a writing and narrative standpoint. Then again, the first season did a lot to improve on most of the characters in the game, so surely the second season did the same, right? Yes, to an extent, but while I do love Nijigasaki's second season, it's not without its issues.

Hot off the success of their first School Idol Festival, the school idol club is fired up and have decided to try their hand at setting up a second idol festival, with the help of the new student council president Shioriko Mifune. Plus, now that Yu is taking music composition classes, she's excited to see where this new direction takes her. Things get a little spicy when an ambitious transfer student, Lanzhu Zhong, decides to become a solo school idol and tells the school idol club that their way of doing things isn't right in her eyes, with her friend Mia Taylor making her music. Will Lanzhu dethrone the Nijigasaki school idol club as the newest hot thing, or will the club be able to win her over with the power of friendship and music?

So like I mentioned before, I've never played any of the Love Live mobile games, nor do I have any plans to. But I did do some research and apparently the character of Lanzhu and her writing in the game were pretty poorly received, mainly because she debuted as a super petty, relentlessly self-centered alpha bitch who was needlessly cruel to the girls, but the other characters kept shilling her as this awesome person who deserves the world. Later chapters would try to make her nicer, but with haphazard results that felt more like it was just trying to recon her earlier behavior rather than actually having her own up to her earlier actions. While I can understand having some drama in the Love Live franchise to spice things up, there are definitely better ways the game could have integrated Lanzhu into the series or even tackled her narrative arc. The anime, true to its mission of rectifying issues the game had, doubled down on fixing Lanzhu's overall character, as she comes off as more of a friendly rival to the girls rather than a straight up bitch, with her actions being not as openly malicious or adversarial as they were in the game. Thank God for that. This also extends to the characters of Mia and Shioriko, who were also more adversarial in the game, though not to the same extent Lanzhu was, and being made significantly nicer in the anime.

As much as I appreciate the anime's attempts to introduce new characters into the fold though, it does result in the cast being rather bloated. There are now a total of 13 main characters in the Nijigasaki anime, in a 13 episode anime. Having new characters come into the limelight does wind up resulting in a few of the other characters being relegated to the background and not having much development as a result, which is an issue that's been pretty common with Love Live anime in general. Granted, many of the Nijigasaki girls already received time in the limelight in the first series, but several of them could have benefited from having more time to show what they're like outside of the club, examples being Karin, Emma, and Kasumi. Even a lot of the new characters they introduce, such as the idols from other schools, are only there to either help with the idol festival, or in the case of the Kurobane sisters, a random Deus Ex Machina to progress the plot when the creators write themselves in a corner. Juggling too many characters in a short time frame doesn't allow them much time to grow or evolve. Though it's still better about it than the trash heap that was Lapis Re:Lights, that's for sure.

There isn't much to say on the animation or music front, as they're both the same as the first season, and the quality is consistent across both seasons. There aren't as many songs in this season as there were in season one, and some of the ones briefly used in the final episode were songs taken straight from the game. They're still very well sung and well made though, with Stars We Chase being my favorite among them. Plus, the story here is a lot less episodic compared to the first season, for those who felt like the first season didn't come into its own until the finale. But not every episode sticks the landing. One episode shows Ayumu, Yu, Shizuku, and Setsuna hanging out together, and at one point, they all put on an impromptu play...which winds up not panning out, and the circumstances that prompt three of the girls to form their group A-ZU-NA feel really contrived. But those were really the only episodes that I felt didn't really hold up. So yeah, while Nijigasaki season 2 isn't as good as the first season I feel, it still has a lot to offer, even if its buckles under the weight of its expanded cast and a few haphazard writing decisions.