Having gone through 765 Production, Cinderella Girls, U149 and Million Live, Shiny Colors has been the most recent iteration of Idolm@ster that I and probably most have experienced.
One of the unique aspects of Idolm@ster and similar series with different “generations” or groups is how you get to see many different versions of characters, stories and interactions throughout the series. While one group is more on the serious side, another one might be more lighthearted for the viewer.
This is what made both 765 Production and U149 very intriguing to me.
Now take all the character writing, the different interactions, the written story and all that is important in any story…and just disregard it all because there is none of that in Shiny Colors.
But before I talk about my gripes about the season, I need to be fair and first talk about what worked and what I did find positive.
Sadly, this is where I have to stop since this is the extend to what positive I can say about this season. And in case you dislike negative reviews and only wanted to read the positive parts, thank you for reading and have a good day :)
Disappointingly, this season was a train wreck. There is not a single part that I am able to name that did things particularly well.
The characters look nice design wise but are super bland and get no characterization at all. No background, no circle like family or friends or even just school life, just them at their Idol job. Even the main trio that always gets the most screentime and thus development feels like a blank piece of paper that has one line drawn on it. Kano especially is the blandest character of them all, even though she is supposed to be the “protagonist” aka the center of the group. Not only does she have no interesting voice line (no criticism towards the voice actress) but her personality gets summed up to “staring into nothing” and “smiling”. The best we get for her is the bird she has as a pet but even that one we get to see like twice.
And just to emphasize on my gripes over her writing, here the previous center characters and their personalities very roughly summarized.
/anime/10278/the-idolmster
/anime/20693/the-idolmster-cinderella-girls
/anime/146975/the-idolmster-cinderella-girls-u149
/anime/120755/the-idolmster-million-live
And now we have Kano who is just nice. Especially the moment when she got chosen as the center of the group feels completely out of left field because there was nothing that ever suggested that decision. Her introduction also didn’t serve her any favors as she went from “I could never be an Idol” to “Okay” overnight without showing how she was able to change her mind. And no, I can’t accept the Producer’s phrase “Seeing a new world” as valid enough for one to suddenly change her mind on becoming an Idol.
I’ll end it here but basically her writing is very lackluster.
(By the way I am not commenting on the fact that 283 Production somehow feels even smaller than 765 Production as we only really get to know the Producer.)
Firstly, I do say that there is nothing wrong with focusing solely on the Idol side of things. Heck, the first half of the first series of Idolm@ster was written like this, all about Idol matters. But unlike there, where we established the characters that want to debut and become big idols, that part was super boring to watch in this one. It all got summed down to “Introducing the setting of an episode” to “They do the thing they’re supposed to there”. There is never a twist outside of those small ones in the first initial introduction episodes. The second half was especially bad since they still stayed in their little groups even after getting together finally.
What I especially disliked about this season was the lack of character interactions. No idea why but the groups felt like they were glued together. There is no scene where they were truly separated from one another. The best type of cross interactions they had were either still frame montages or “exchanges” during practices. It made everyone feel like they didn’t want to interact with the other groups, which obviously wasn’t the case as they approached each other in a very warm and open way when they finally have shared screen time. But even then, they would stay in their groups. The worst offenders of this are Alstroemeria. Even when the groups are together, you would always have the others react to whatever interaction anyone of them has with someone outside their group, always ending up with them just oddly smiling at them.
And that brings me to a point I never thought about ever. They somehow made it possible to write something that tries to be sweet and ends up overly sweet to the point of it feeling painful. Personally, I am a big fan of wholesome series and general settings in any story, especially when it is used a down time after big developments or moments. What I do not like is when all you get is everyone constantly just being nice and sweet to everyone. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a simple “nice” group, as many “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” shows use this quite well. What I do think is wrong is when the characters feel robotic while doing so. But this might also be a side effect of the lack of character writing.
And lastly the probably worst offender of the whole season is the background music. Like with the sweet setting topic, I think this might have been also the first time when the background music annoyed me. Almost every single track they use outside of the performances is either some melancholic piano soundtrack or something that you might as well find in the Sims games during loading screens. This really sounds like a bad joke but one time I audibly said "This sounds like some Minecraft OST".
I am not saying that those tracks are bad on their own but hearing them in this series at all just felt odd to me when they appeared. But ultimately there are probably three types of soundtracks that just get circled through.
I really tried to like this. I usually try to find stuff that I like about something rather than thinking about the negatives, but this season really tested my patience. I never ended up in the middle of an episode saying “No thanks, I’ll continue this tomorrow.” before this season.
And to those that did like it, all the props to you.
I hope that me writing so much negative stuff didn’t ruin the experience of anyone else. And ultimately, I will watch the second season with high hopes that they will improve things that I was missing in the first season. And who knows, I might end up liking season 2 a lot more. Though the fact that we got new characters teased at the end worries me regarding the character writing part.
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