So after finishing this anime, I decided to do a review of it, seeing as it's idol related! First things first, here is my 1000% accurate and ultimate list of idol anime, from best to worst!
AKB0048
Aikatsu
Miss Monochrome the Animation
Pripara
Locodol
Pretty Rhythm Rainbow Live
Idol Jihen
Sekkou Boys
Fine, maybe not that accurate. I didn't know where to put WUG because I didn't enjoy it that much, but it was a good anime, and obviously I have a bias towards Aikatsu because it's my favourite but AKB48 was better in both story and general quality AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON LOVE LIVE but we'll muddle through and I just realized(Haha! Realize! Geddit?) that this isn't an Idol Jihen review at all, so... Uh.... Bye.
One day I'll make an on topic blog post. One day.
Idol Jihen is... It's an anime. It has characters. Many characters. I started watching this show, then dropped it after the first episode, which was, to be fair, terrible. Mainly because of the rushed pacing, the throwing characters at our faces and then creating drama around those characters that would have been really good if we had been given time to get emotionally invested in said characters, which we didn't because IT'S ALL MOVING TOO FAST DYUIOP{KJH*&GFCXERTKL:":LKJ*H^BG%VFCXERTHY&J*(KI)_OP+_P&^T%RE%$S
ahem.
As you can see, I didn't like the first episode.
Things pick up a bit, though, when the show goes into more... Episodic episodes? That doesn't make sense. Ok. I'm talking about episodes with a small, self contained narrative introduced in the episode and resolved in the episode. These are what the show does best. I found this to be a very cute show, when I picked it up again, but it isn't a good anime. It's entertaining, and I like it, but it's not good, exactly. If I were to compare it to another idol anime, I'd say Locodol or AKB0048. Anime like Pripara and Aikatsu are more... Magical girl shows. Instead of fights every episode, like in Tokyo Mew Mew or Sailor Moon, we get performances every episode. Not that all magical girl shows have fights every episode, Madoka didn't, although it's debatable as to whether you could even call it a magical girl show as such, rather it's an anime about its themes, and happens to use magical girls as vessels for its themes. Actually, that's not fair. Madoka wouldn't have worked or sold as well without the magical girl element, or been as impactful. Sorry, Shaft.
Uh, that got off topic.
Anyway, I'd say that Idol Jihen is a bit of a cross between AKB0048 and Locodol. Locodol is more of a slice of life anime that happens to have idols, and AKB0048 can be slice of life at times but also very sci fi and story driven. Idol Jihen is a mix because like AKB0048, it's blended idols and some other weird stuff together that you wouldn't expect idols to ever come into contact with, which is in AKB0048's case spaceships, and in Idol Jihen's case politics. It also kind of gives me a Locodol vibe, because in both series I had some pretty intense yuri OTPs going on. I don't know what it is, but if you've seen all three series' then you'll get what I'm talking about, I hope!
Hm... So this series has many characters. Too many characters! I can only remember two of their names there were so many! Let's talk about the two characters whose names I remember first, then move on to the hard stuff. So there's Natsuki, the main character, who is worryingly obsessed with onigiri, and the other character is Chinatsu.
Sakurako Iizuka: Calm
Ume Momoi: Surfer
Mika Kozuru: Astronomer
Chinatsu Ryuusekidou: Angry
Kuruha Amou: Loli
Yami Ringo-sama: Goth
Sachie Kondou: Mature
Mizuki Fudou:
Ahaha, well, we stop here because... Mizuki has NO personality. Even on the official wiki page for her, the personality section is BLANK, which further drives home the fact that nope, she has NONE.
The two main characters are Natsuki Hoshina, the genki one, and Shizuka Onimaru, the emo one. Let's look at Natsuki first. Natsuki is a girl who manages to join the Idol Dietwomen by running up a hill. I'm not even kidding. In Aikatsu, they had to audition. In Pripara, they needed a ticket. If only somebody had told them that the only thing you had to do to become an idol was to run up a hill. Bloody hell. So, anyway, Natsuki is a typical shoujo protagonist, you know the type, and that's about all there is to her. We move on to Shizuka, the most complex character on the show.
She has a harmful aura that has hurt other people who performed on stage with her, so she's pretty lonely, hence the emo-ness. But, it doesn't hurt Natsuki for some reason! So they partner up. She's very driven, and very focused on winning, and the whole harmful aura thing is very compelling and I wish they'd touched on it for more than about THREE SECONDS! "(>-<)" Smh.
So, this could have been a really good anime, if it had been 25 episodes instead of twelve. It would have made it less rushed, and we could have learned more about the characters, and it would have been overall just better. At the moment, all we can hope for is a second season, but that's really unlikely, so as it stands, I'd give it 2.5 stars. It's cute, you should watch it, but don't expect great things.
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