If you can’t stand the heat, head for the beach…
What They Say:
Otonokizaka High School is planning to close within three years. However, nine female students come together with one thing in mind – form a pop idol group to revive the school’s popularity and keep it from shutting down. ‘In order to protect our beloved school, there’s only one thing we can do…become pop stars!
The Review:
Summer! Heat! Too hot to train in the usual spot on the school roof, that’s for sure – and so at Honoka’s suggestion that girls head off to Maki’s family summerhouse for a little training camp. Meanwhile, Eli’s decided that having the usual senpai / kouhai relationships in the group isn’t really good for teamwork – but that proves to take a little getting used to for the girls…
If you’re looking for any musical numbers, then this week’s episode is unfortunately not for you. While last week’s episode wasn’t exactly plot heavy, this week’s pretty much does away with any semblance of story altogether, because such things only get in the way on beach episodes. So we have water fights, pillow fights, a summer house large enough to make you wonder what Maki’s parents do for a living, and plenty of opportunity for the girls to have a little downtime ahead of the pressures of the Love Live competition itself.
Which would be great, if I hadn’t been half-expecting that last week was the downtime episode, and we’d be getting into competition mode this week. Expectations: unfulfilled. That’s not to say that this episode isn’t fun in its own right – it is, and there are a lot of little moments in it that had me happily sniggering along. Pretty much the whole cast get their moments in the spotlight, too, while the show’s ritual mocking of Nico continues unabated throughout.
So, yeah, it’s an enjoyable 25 minutes that I didn’t feel was wasted. I’ll just admit to hoping that this week’s episode would’ve been a little more… substantial. But we don’t always get what we want.
In Summary:
All fun & games for this week’s Love Live, then, and very little to really complain about in the way that the episode plays out. But I can’t help looking at the episode count and wondering when they’ll get onto the important stuff…
Content Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: 27” Apple iMac, 2.9GHz Core i5, 32GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.8.2
