Anime fans not alot of you will know this but i'm actually a fan of the Love Live franchise and well since i've been reviewing episodes of various anime before and yes I do have at least one more planned I thought that i'd take on a few episodes of this series. If i'm being honest it's always hard to for me to choose how many episodes I should do a review for an anime since I like it when a bunch of episodes tell a complete story but here I went one episode beyond that simply because I was enjoying myself and so here is my review of the first four episodes of the first season of "Love Live! Sunshine!!" enjoy guys and girls and yes there will be spoilers all throughout this review and so you can consider this your official spoiler warning.
The overall plot of these first four episodes is that Chika Takami is trying to get a school idol club up and running at her school and has trouble recruiting members. That's really it in terms of story and really for a slice of life show that all the plot you need since the main attraction to these shows isn't the deep and complicated plot it's seeing the characters grow together and form friendships and with that said the overall story for these episodes was really good and it was not only fun but also entertaining to see it play out.
Starring in these episodes are Jad Saxton as Chika Takami , Jeanie Tirado as Riko Sakurauchi and Michelle Rojas as Kanan Matsuura. Also starring in these episodes are Morgan Garrett as Dia Kurosawa , Apphia Yu as You Watanabe , Morgan Berry as Yoshiko Tsushima , Megan Shipman as Hanamaru Kunikida , Jamie Marchi as Mari Ohara , Sarah Wiedenheft as Ruby Kurosawa , Colleen Clinkenbeard as Shima Takami and Monica Rial as Mito Takami.
Honestly this was one of the easiest cast lists i've ever had to do just because all of the main girls appear in all four episodes hell every person i've credited appears in all four episodes. In terms of what I thought about the acting in the episode it was honestly really good all of the main actors give the characters voices that actually suit there characters which for a dub is always a plus since they very rarely give the characters voice the fit the characters and it helps that all of the main actresses give really good performances.
Doing the animation for these episodes as well as the rest of the series is Sunrise who of course did the animation for Love Live! School Idol Project and both the Love Live movies and will be doing the animation for the next entry in the Love Live! series. I honestly feel that the animation in these four episodes was nothing special which is oddly what I was expecting since no one goes into an idol anime expecting the dialog scenes to have great animation they do expect the musical scenes to have good animation and that's true for these episodes.
Since the animation in those song sequences is actually better then the animation in the dialog scenes which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because anyone who watches an idol anime knows that the animation in the musical scenes is going to be good but it's a bad thing because the animation in the whole episode should be up to the same quality of those musical scenes as such one shouldn't be better then the other they should both be equally good.
To me these first four episodes seem to be not only about creating a group but also about friendships and the lengths people will go to for them. We see all throughout these first four episodes people trying to please there friends as well as people making new friends of course I could be wrong but to have the first four episodes have something to do with friendship or making new friends seems like to big of a coincidence if you ask me.
That being said if it is true then i'm glad that is featured in these episodes since it shows that not all members of the group are friends and that those bonds either need to be built or repaired. Which I find to be really interesting because whenever we do get an anime based around friendship it'a always about making new friends and never about repairing old bonds which is a shame because that does open the door to a lot of story and character development.
Honestly just going back to what I was talking about before about friendships being a theme in these episodes there is one group of friends that are good example of doing whatever it takes to make the other happy and they are Ruby and Hanamaru. For you see in episode four titled "Two Girls' Feelings" we see Hanamaru agree to do something that she knows that she wouldn't like but she knows would make Ruby happy but in the process she ends up falling in love with wanting to be an idol but convinces herself she can't do it that is until Ruby reminds her of how much fun she was having with the group.
This to me is an important part of Ruby's character because all throughout the show we see her do things to makes others happy and yet very rarely does she do things to make herself happy. Whenever you here of a person who is nice well to me Ruby is the very definition of that due to the fact that she's so selfless as well as being an genuinely enjoyable person to be around and to talk to and it's due to these reasons that I think she's the best character in the show.
Now I want it known that i'm not going to talk about the songs in these episodes just because I can't think of anything to say about them. As such i'll get straight to talking about the comedy in these episodes which for me at least was very hit and miss when there was a good joke then it would be really funny like anything to do with Ruby I found to be freaking hilarious but whenever there was a bad joke or they dragged a joke on for so long that it became unfunny then you really felt it and sadly alot of the unfunny jokes came from Yoshiko who is just a one joke character with that joke being she's pretending to be someone else and that's it that's the joke but it's one where they have scenes that drag that joke on so it becomes even more unfunny.
Overall these were some really fun , funny and at times heartwarming episodes and to me they are a great introduction to this series. That being said however there are problems with these episodes all of which i've covered in this review but those issues didn't really stop the episodes from being enjoyable but that doesn't mean that they weren't noticeable because they were as such these episodes get a collective rating of 7.5 out of 10 from me.
All images used in this review were gathered from the official Love Live fandom wiki page or from Google Images. I have to admit I wasn't expecting any of the images to be as high quality as they were simply because Love Live isn't a well known mainstream franchise but every image in this review is shockingly high quality as such if you want high quality images from Love Live! Sunshine!! then use either one of these websites and for once I have no joke here so freaking yeah.