By now, Love Live as a series is generally synonymous with the idol genre in anime, and that is not by accident. While Love Live is not some hidden Shakesperian classic, it is and has been surprisingly well made and only improves with each iteration. There are quite a few idol/music anime out there, but Love Live has consistent quality and good characters going for it as well as a plot that does not fully require one to like idols in order to appreciate it. It has also been around for ages. This, along with the popularity for the game, has made for an admirably tenacious fanbase, to say the least. The anime itself is streamlined, as compared to its predecessors, by having a slower pacing, relatively simple plot, smaller cast size and better direction.
The plot is, as always with this genre, severely limited by the fact that it is an idol anime. There is not a lot of room for originality in this genre, though there have been exceptions like Zombieland Saga. The screenwriters for Love Live seem to have a weird set of things that must occur in the plot and act as plot devices. For instance, in all four of the series, the characters are initially resisted in their efforts to start an idol club by some sort of school representative that later joins them. This is something specific that is repeated over and over again for some reason. Perhaps it is meant to draw some form of symmetry across the series? It seems very odd that this is a recurring plot instrument. It is also partially for this reason that it is very obvious which characters are going to join the group in the future, which is kind of a spoiler. The anime is set in a newly developed school that was originally something like a conservatory, which is similar to the situation in SIP.
In episode 8, the main "problem" was introduced as well as the main conflict with Hazuki Ren, the school president, which leads to a series of plot holes, which is rather uncharacteristic for this series as a whole. These plot holes include Hazuki's clearly radical decision of emphasising the music program over the general curriculum students in the upcoming school festival in an attempt to get more applicants. As expected, this worsened the divide between the two groups of students and put Hazuki in an unfavourable position. Moreover, it turns out that the reason that Hazuki was against school idols was that her mother was one but Hazuki believed that she hated it because there is no physical evidence of her participating. In reality she did enjoy it, and Hazuki just did not check the school idol room where they were located. These are very illogical elements that were made simply to create conflict and in the end only justify Hazuki being in the idol group. In particular the latter conflict is completely ridiculous. I do not remember such weak plot in other iterations of this anime and it is weird that this happened at all with this anime. The failure experienced by Liella to get past the prelims is also somewhat arbitrary. There was no real reason shown as to why it happened other than they were always the underdogs. This kind of ruined the ending.
Because of all of this, the plot is mediocre, though at other points it can be rather strong. Specifically the plot arcs of the other four characters are well written and believable. For example, Kanon Shibuya's constant battle with, what is in essence stage fright, spanned the whole plot and was well developed. The fact that the plot is relatively simple and clean also works well for this anime, in terms of pacing, it being easy to follow, and not trying to overdo itself with some massive plot twists. This plot has no continuity with other anime in the series, so there is no problem with a newcomer watching this.
Love Live has always made an effort into developing each character in the group, and Superstar is no exception. Normally in Love Live, the cast of the main band is made up of 9-10 characters and that is not counting rival bands. This is a massive number of characters to develop equally and there is no hope of affording all of them reasonable time in one episode. Moreover, sometimes it seems that certain characters have no contact with some of the other characters except through the main character because of this problem. Zombieland Saga went in the right direction by having only 7 main band members. This number fit its pace. In Superstar, the main band is only 5 people. This is probably a good choice in order to control the pace of the anime and cover the whole group in one episode. Another characteristic with characters in Love Live is that certain character traits are present in one character in all the iterations. For instance, there is a "foreign" student, which is written about below. There is also an almost cringeworthy and pompous person in each iteration. This time that trait belongs to Heanna Sumire. Also, as per usual, the few male characters that are present never show their faces, but stand there approvingly in silence, the moral paragons that they are.
Another omnipresent quirk within each Love Live instalment is the presence of a "foreign" student in the group, though normally they are half Japanese. In keeping with the spirit of Internationalism as was the case in SIP (this is a joke, just in case), the new foreign character is of Chinese descent. Like with Mari Ohara and Ayase Eli, Tang Keke is a well developed character, but some of her traits come very close to being stereotypical of a Chinese person. This was also noticeable with the aforementioned characters, but it is not overdone and these said traits are worked in well enough into the larger character. The character of Tang Keke is very odd if you think about what she could be representing. My guess is that her character traits of high enthusiasm for idols, zero stamina, and ability in rhythm games is meant to maybe be some kind of a callback to people overseas that play the Love Live games as well as those that come to Japan to actually be idols, though I have not heard of anyone doing the latter. Then again, maybe she is meant to represent just some regular person who plays something like OSU and likes idols, it could be as simple as that.
As this anime focuses on music, it should excel at it and it does I feel. Because of the relatively massive casts of μ's (Muse) and Aqours, quite often the songs sound as a choir rather than as a music band. Possibly because of this, some of the songs were made with much smaller casts of about 3 people at certain points of the anime. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes the music can get a bit messy. Cutting down to 5 people worked for this anime quite well in terms of music as well, because it made the music clearer I feel. The BGM is barely noticeable as with most slice of life anime and is used rather sparsely, adding to a more "cleaner" feeling to the anime as a whole.
The animation is probably the best so far in the franchise, both in terms of drawn and CGI. Many of the settings, such as the Citroen Takoyaki, Shibuya's cafe, and even the streets themselves are all drawn very stylishly. They have very good colour, but it is not oversaturated and the characters blend into the scenes very well. That last part is something even high budget anime often fails at. The character designs are very cute as expected, maybe the best so far for the series. There are also interesting directional quirks, like they finally decided to make more organic episode introductions that are displayed in certain scenes. The pacing is much slower overall than in Sunshine, which is good. There is also the infamous shot through Chisato Arashi's ballerina stature. I can't explain it any better. It is novel to say the least. It was close to being a fan service moment. I will say that they ought to really ease up on the panning the camera fast and try to make less shots when filming CGI dancing as it is dizzying and does more harm than good. Thankfully this is only really obvious in the opening. They are also starting to draw side characters better than they used to do.
One factor I found weird about the whole franchise is to who is it catering to exactly and its purpose. It is clearly a very girly premise, but it is still partially a slice of life anime and therefore can be viewed by anyone. For myself, the only reason I got into Love Live as a whole is through memes and I doubt I am the only one. As for its purpose, the only thing that comes to mind is to revive interest in the Love Live game as well as introduce and advertise a new band and their songs, only this anime is far too well made, I feel, to be as simple as that.
It should also be noted that less than a year has passed since another Love Live iteration has aired, that being Nijigasaki. This is a first for this series and may indicate that they have enough resources to work on two anime at the same time, but I am a bit unclear as to why exactly they would do that. When School Idol Project ended with a movie, about two years passed before Sunshine started airing, and about one year passed between Over the Rainbow and Nijigasaki. Now both Nijigasaki and Superstar are slated for a sequel, though one year apart or so.
There will probably be an element of sentimentality for many people who have watched previous Love Live iterations. This series has been going on for a while and each time a new cast is introduced. I personally got into watching Love Live through memes so I am not a particular fan of the series, but there is an odd melancholy around this season ending that you don't get when a certain season of another anime ends. Could be the very similar plot is calling back to the past Love Live anime. This is an unexpected byproduct of the plot limitations written about earlier and if so, it is not impossible that this symmetry is intentional.
To conclude, this anime has improved overall as compared to Sunshine in just about every way, though the plot, specifically Hazuki Ren's arc, was a very weird moment for the anime. There are also certain plot limitations that remain and it is unclear why, such as the continued almost-stereotypes that each character fills from one iteration to another
or the school closing down or the school president being initially against idols
. However, the character development, the music, and the animation are all in this anime's favour, so much so that it is probably among the more stronger anime of Summer 2021. I have found that opinions diverge on which Love Live is better.
For instance, many have disliked the first season of Sunshine. My guess is that it is because the direction overplays the failures experienced by Aqours a bit too much, but I can't see why that is worse than the plots of other iterations.
So it is very hard to tell objectively if Superstar is better than SIP for instance. For me, each series gets progressively better overall. This should probably best watched as a slice of life anime with cute likeable characters and decent music and should be treated as such. However, I suppose fans of the series as well as idol fans will enjoy this a fair bit more than if you are just in it for the slice of life.
