Somehow Ive never heard of this show until recently to me it has been completely drowned out by Love Live and Idol Master which I have not watched either. I thought Id take a dip and this and it has been somewhat mid of an experience I would praise its character work and writing but the biggest weakness would have to be production value and some questionable fan service decisions. The first strange thing about this show is it basically has an episode 0 which they call a movie but its only 50min long and feels like its one of those catchup episodes where it just quickly show you old footage but no this is not reused footage most of it only exist in this movie however I do suspect that the original plan was to have a longer season but they removed half of it and turned into a short movie. Thankfully the remaining 12 episode season 1 is still decent the characters are done especially well for a show with an ensemble cast. Rather than just having episodes that specifically focus on one character like most other such shows the stories of the 7 girls are woven together throughout the season. There is setup and payoff something about a character can be shown in the ep0 movie and explored in ep3 and then still comes back and mentioned when appropriate toward the end of the season this is good writing in my books. The only bad character I guess would be the manager guy Im not sure why hes here probably just to be the audience avatar since the remaining cast are all female which is totally fine but I guess they didnt have confidence in that. I also like the antagonists in the story I1 group which is basically AKB48 is a corporate idol leader of the industry they remind me of the bad guys from Ready Player One where the members are referred to by their employee number they practice constantly and whoever dont make it just gets fired on the spot. That sounds pretty stereotypical and boring but thats just the surface level the actual members of I1 group their manager and protagonist Mayu former member of I1 group all have interesting back story and motivations for what they do theyre not just boring corporate bad guy although youd have to go beyond season 1 for most of that as this season is mostly focused on the WUG group. Production issues this show just doesnt look very fancy there are many deliberate attempts to not show you dances or live performances because those are expensive to animate. Its not a bad looking show but I just think an idol show needs some more impressive onstage moments to truly shine. There is also the issue of the songs themselves there are only two for this entire season which is... lacking and they only have one polished studio take of it. So even when in the story theyre supposed to be new and inexperienced the song we hear is performed flawlessly and just sounds like a studio take rather than what you would get from a video recording of live performance which breaks immersion. When they enter this idol competition against other groups all around Japan again we dont see the performances from other groups because again that would be expensive we just see some freeze frames of them performing which is again underwhelming. Then theres the fan service for someone with Strike Witches as a favorite show you would not expect me to complain about fan service but I think the issue is not fan service perse. Instead its the fact that unlike your typical bikini episode 7 where the girls enjoy an onsen or beach vacation here its framed as the girls being exploited for sex appeal which is uncomfortable for them and the audience and still the camera man keeps pointing at their asses for an entire episode. While I often enjoy fan service in anime it shouldnt be at the expense of the beloved characters. To be fair the story idea for that episode is fine it just didnt need to be the whole episode a couple of scenes would be enough they just went too far. 320https://i.ur.com/mGBKg10.png