Love Live! Sunshine!! is a spin-off from the first Love Live. The first season is 13 episodes long and takes place in the small seaside town of Uchiura. Sunshine is pretty much a retread of everything School Idol Project was, with near exact same plot elements. It follows Takami Chika, who attends Uranohoshi Girls' Academy (yes, the whole anime pretty much only has female characters). She is a huge fan of μ's and is inspired by them to create her own school idol group at her school. She is joined by her best friend Sakurauchi Riko.
Unfortunately, Sunshine is too familiar and does not feel like it makes any effort to differentiate itself more. Chika encounters the same issues in starting up the club as Honoka did in the original. From the resistant student council president (where it is obvious that she is a future group member) to a disastrous first concert. Even the whole subplot of recruiting the other members to form their group of nine is similar, which feels lazy and disappointing. It literally feels like they reskinned the original with new designs.
In terms of personalities of the characters, there are some similarities also. Naturally, Chika is akin to Honoka, with an extremely positive attitude and at times, airheaded. While Riko has a hint of Umi being the rational one and grounding the ideas that Chika has. Ruby is a shy girl but has dreams of becoming an idol and with a little prodding, she joins. The group frequently mentions μ's and their good traits. Thanks to this, it feels that Sunshine is always living in the shadow of the original and that the characters can't stand on their own. The group tries to copy μ's to help them stand out more. Rankings on the idol website is a focus with the group starting at #4999 and of course, find themselves improving in rank fairly rapidly, even though we're shown nothing that suggests that this is reasonable.
However, the season redeems itself somewhat where despite their successes, the group still finds roadblocks on their journey to Love Live. It is more like reality has finally caught up with them and as they try to cope with this, in particular, Chika, you feel that the characters have developed and grown. Unlike μ's, the role that are placed upon each character, such as the composer, and the person writing the lyrics, don't seem to fit. This is probably due to the characters initially stating that they have no experience and are just trying to wing it.
A surprising move is how late the full group gets together. More than half the season goes by before the final few members join to form the group of nine. Up until that point, it felt incomplete. An improvement to the original is the animation quality of the performances. While it still uses 3D, it matches the normal animation a lot better and doesn't look awkwardly different. A rival group is introduced around midway in a very melodramatic way, where it can be hard to watch without cringing. Similar to the purpose of A-Rise in the original, however, this rival group is not the top rank so it feels more realistically achievable for Chika and her group to catch up and surpass them.
Characters will sing insert songs from time to time and the quality of these are decent. While not super catchy, there are a few good ones. Like the original Love Live, sometimes these insert songs don't make a lot of sense considering the context of the scenes that they were played in. The season ends with a crucial performance in the group's career but is obviously a setup towards a second season considering that it doesn't provide too much closure to their current predicament. Depending on your tastes, their last performance can stray towards the more cheesy and cringy side. They pretty much summarized the whole season's events in a few minutes, which both shows the small progress the group has made and how boring it was when you just wanted them to start singing.
Overall, Love Live! Sunshine!! feels very familiar to its detriment. It shares so much of the same plot points of the original that it feels like a shameless cash grab and very lazy. That being said, the focus on the characters and their backstories feels a lot more interesting and stronger. Whether you like this or not will really depend on whether you like the new characters.
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