Disclaimer: While I don’t get into the specifics of the anime I do talk about its general flow so read if you dare

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Lapis Re: Lights presents itself with something relatively new to the table. School Idol and Magic aren’t genres you really see together. While often in Mahou Shoujo there might be one girl working as a celebrity/idol, in Lapis Re: Lights we are shown the concept of every girl being technically both. So fans of each were definitely, at least intrigued to check it out.

Unfortunately, I would say this anime fails to reach any expectations. While not a bad show, it pretty much suffers from its narrative choices, particularly failing in any proper Character Focus, that ultimately hindered any impression it aims to give by the end.

The synopsis of Lapis pretty much sets Tiara and 4 other members of Lights, who I will refer to as, the main characters. And we get that for the very first 3 episodes; we are introduced to the girls and their circumstances and start exploring/developing their dynamics. But when we reach episode 4 the show goes very hard into its Cute Girls Do Cute Things (CGDCT) aspect while Lights (and the set plot) pretty much take the backburner. While not completely irrelevant in the episodes proceeding, they are no longer the focus or related to the message and goals. Instead, this focus is given to other girls and the anime continues without any overarching plot.

While it was a bit weird, it's not a completely bad experience. The other girls are interesting and have their own charm, Alpha definitely being a fan favorite. It started to seem like CGDCT was the main goal of the anime, especially considering the number of characters they were utilizing (at least 20 girls!!). But this becomes weird when episode 8 rolls around and Lights becomes the sole focus.

We are pretty much thrown right back into the plot. Episode 8 had basically everything I thought the first half of the anime would tackle all squished in its 24 min run time. From then till the end we focus solely on Lights, and the girls we spent almost half the anime introducing and getting to know are rendered practically irrelevant.

This hosts a few problems. For one it's very weird, to me, for us to spend so much time on the other girls just for them to not matter to the plot till the last 10 minutes. Feels almost like a waste of time? If we spent less time with these girls and more time with Lights, the ending would have basically been the same but we would have known more about the main characters.

Secondly, from episode 8 and on, everything Lights does pretty much holds no weight. Comparing this to a similar anime like Love Live! School Idol Festival, despite their CGDCT antics, they still have an overall goal that these antics work towards. We still get to know these characters, see that they’re trying, and empathize with their efforts. But we don’t get that with Lights. For half the anime we’re getting antics from other girls who are very much not relevant to the plot and very much do not have the same goals as our main five. And while everything Lights does maybe to their goal, like I said they are not the focus of the episode, so we don’t get enough time to know them, sympathize with them, and their efforts. So when episode 8 rolls around, there’s no real impact on the audience during these very important moments.

Now going into this I wasn’t aware that the anime was a Precursor to a gacha game being developed by Klab. As some of you idol lovers know, these are the same developers of Love Live! School Idol Festival, who also did the same thing with the anime and game. However, even without considering the success of Love Live!, there’s no excuse for an anime or any show to be bad just because of its connection to a game. I can understand the developers wanting all the girls and their groups to be well-established characters, however, I feel like they went about it the wrong way.

Basically, the anime fails to blend the plot and the girls in one cohesive narrative. The last half of the anime is a bit disconnected from the first half, and because of the lack of build-up, the anime doesn’t leave the viewer with any sense of emotion or achievement from the characters. All in all, this is something you’d watch for the characters and not the plot, but that was probably their goal all along.

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And for those who watched it, here are more personal tier lists I made for fun!~

Spoiler, click to view

Groups

Characters