The second season of Love Live! Sunshine!! is once again at 13 episodes long. After the first season ended with the characters competing in the regional finals of Love Live, this continues and completes their journey to revitalizing the popularity of their school. The anime is a spin-off from Love Live! School Idol Project but with a different cast of characters, who all look up to the original anime's μ's. The key character is Takami Chika, joined with her best friends and a few other characters from different grades to form the nine-member idol group Aquors.
In the first season, Aquors is formed initially because they all want to be a school idol, based on the popularity of Love Live but eventually has the aim to prevent their school from shutting down. Yes, this is exactly the same objective as μ's and the characters spend a lot of time comparing themselves to them and looking up to them. The group is given an impossible objective in order to save their school. The second season's main story arc isn't much better since it is still revolving around the group competing in Love Live and hoping to get the top spot. Now that Aquors have formed and supposedly improved, the group's performances are stronger and their popularity is higher.
The anime tends to focus more on the characters' day to day activities rather than their efforts on practicing and getting better. Thus, when they massively succeed in their performances it can seem contrived. Once again, the group gets help from literally everyone from their school but at least this time, it is somewhat plausible given the situation. The problem is that the anime never provides any tension or anticipation that comes with competing in such a large scale competition. We're only ever given a random performance in the middle or end of an episode, and then we find out the result. There's no suspense or commentary on how the rounds are going, and as a result, this whole aspect feels segregated and detached from everything else, like it was tacked on just for the sake of an excuse to have songs in the first place. It should have been more central. As the season goes on, the focus on Love Live actually decreases.
Given that we don't see the group do any practice at all or any of the events that were of such importance before like making costumes and creating the lyrics, you don't get a sense of pride when suddenly they have a song performance at the end of the episode, and by the next, we're told that they won and progressed to the next round. A few episodes gives focus to some characters and flesh them out a lot more. From Dia's awkward attempts to become friendlier with everyone else to Riko overcoming her fear of dogs. These scenes are interesting but at the same time, can also feel dragged out when it goes for a whole episode and not much happens. The episodes are bloated to stretch out the time into 13 episodes.
Aquors closest equivalent to a rival, Saint Snow, holds promise as they both compete to become the champions of Love Live. Despite the buildup, the resolution is disappointing to say the least. However, this did lend the series to explore a sadder and realistic aspect of members graduating and moving on (even though this was already done before in the original Love Live...).
Scenes with obvious 3D are frequent and they look out of place. It's a bit more jarring when the 3D is on group shots but when the scene transitions during the song to show close ups of the characters, it is back to normal animation and then goes back to panning out and 3D models. The second half starts to have cheesier and cheesier scenes, where it is too overly positive that it's implausible.
To be fair, season 2 is a lot better than the first even if only for the fact that they do not compare themselves to μ's anymore. This allows the characters to stand on their own. The final resolution is equal parts expected and unexpected. It is a good thing that it differentiates itself from the original Love Live but at the same time, briefly covering the final Love Live finals is bizarre. Overall, the second season of Love Live! Sunshine!! improves upon the first. Despite that, it still retains a lot of the flaws from the series, from the lack of showing the effort required for the characters to win each round, to the slow pacing of each episode.
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