Back to LFC123's Profile LFC123's Profile

After reading three chapters of this manga, I decided to drop it right there and then.

If you want to read about modern cupids who engage in frequent gunfights with each either to arbitrarily decide the love partners of other people, you have come to right place, or did you? I believe the previous sentence summarizes the show pretty well. As matter of fact, it doesn't do it enough justice. Why guns? Why would the cupids shoot at each other as if it was just a normal Tuesday? Why this and that... A lot of things just does not make sense in this manga and ... maybe it will get explained down the road, but this was not even the worst part about the story.

For one, the guns are one of the big selling points of this manga. I am not a particular fan of this genre of things, but the authors introduces these gun fights in the most anticlimatic of ways possible. Small disagreement over the cupids' target? Guess we have to shoot it out to sort the matters out. Oh and what happens if your stray bullet hits a random person in the background (because yes, it is part of the mechanics)? Too bad for them, not my business and they can go screw themselves. The author does try to address this point, but if you decide to read it and find out his solution for the problem, maybe you will be thinking the same as me: what a lazy way to address a fundamental problem in your manga.

Characters
The 4 main cupids that form the team of this manga are not yet introduced properly in the manga, but with how little we know about them, I can already say I am not gonna like them. There is that one rowdy, over energetic girl that causes 90% of the fights, constantly overstepping her boundaries and acting as a sort of bully. Worst part, she gets treated as a fellow teammate by the other cupids, which makes it difficult for me to swallow. The MC's personality is still not hashed out as of yet, but she is meek and rather cowardish, and at the same time can make some pretty level-headed choices. If we were stricting evaluating the manga based on the MC, I would actually give it a decent score of 8. Too bad the side characters ruins the dynamics for me.

Plot
The plot is straight up an attempt by the author to gut the readers deep in the heart, right of the bat, as he is still making the introductions. The crueling and heart wrenching developments are not up my valley in the first place, and if you combine those with the spontaneuos and up beat gun fights that happen for no good reason, it completedly destroys its significance to me as a reader.

Overall, a 2 out of 10.

My review is mainly about the main character, Masaki. Contains spoilers for ep 4.

For starters, this character is flawed. The show begins with the premise that Masaki gets kicked out of her original group, and we soon get a glimpse of why does that happen through her personality. Borderline, she is an attention seeker that is not self conscious of her actions and those around her. Currently we don't know what happened in her old group for the situation to deteriorate that much, but her nasty personality definitely played a part.

In her new group, she begins by treating the members as mere tools to ... gather views. This fact in itself is not outrageous, if you think that she will have to essentially die at her goal. But the only one standing to benefit are Masaki and Live, the other members are kinda dragged along (only the original members). In episode 4, she truly begins to show her selfish and nosy side. First, she goes into somebody's room uninvited (not the first time it happened) and begin looking around, with no sense of privacy whatsoever. Then when she grabbed onto something that could bring in the views, she deadass demanded Fu to sing for her, even after several rejections. Finally, with no regards whatsoever to what might have happened to Fu in the past, she begins to dig around behind Fu's back and further invades the privacy of Fu. If Fu didn't notice her scheming, I will bet it would have been one of those scenes where the daughter is suddenly reunited with her purposely estranged mother, who she did not want to see. Just so happens that in the show their interests were somehow aligned, but my basic principles were touched watching this show in several occasions. When I put myself in Fu's shoes, I would most definitely be bothered by these actions.

Everything else:
Pretty great. Really loved the song at the end of episode 4. The animation is unique and lively as well.

I came in this manga expecting GL, and guess what? The author did not deliver on that one bit. Sure, we had some gay panic moments and whatnot, but I find it appalling that this manga uses yuri bait and has a bad, cliche plot line (unlike Euphonium Sound, which actually has a decent plot and build on its characters).

The story is about Mimi, who is a former idol who couldn't get along with its previous idol group for being too serious with her work, and Ibuki, a current idol that faces about the same problem. The two get together and decide join the ... Star Ship contest, a contest held by Aria (the great idol) to select and form an idol unit from girls all over Japan. The contest itself had some pretty big scale, involving 10000 participants, and then gets narrowed down to 16 girls that get to go on a cruise ship to take part in a reality show to hone their skills and further dwindle their numbers to 5. That is the gist of the plot, which is honestly not too original.

Characters: 4/10
First off, having 16 contestants as your pseudo main characters is a lot to work with, making it hard to focus on each character and understand what are their quirks, motivations and so on. Something else that I find conflicting is that these 16 girls have been chosen from more than 10000 all over Japan, and even if not all of them are serious, I would consider that the 16 girls must have some serious talent with singing and dancing to actually get selected. Well guess what? The instructors of the contest come in and lay it on thick on some of the characters about how they are lacking the "foundations" for dancing and singing, which is just absolute garbage. How is it that you had your pick of 10000 girls who are all aiming to become idols and have put in a considerable amount of effort, and you still ended up with suboptimal picks? That is the problem of the producer team, or in this case, Aria (the oh so great idol, like the league champion in each Pokemon region, almost).

Aria as a character is as generic as she gets. She serves the role of the positive mentor, most of the time, providing motivation and advice to the contestants. She also is the kinda gal to act to her instincts and whims, since it is insinuated that she selected some contestants that weren't objectively the best, but rather she had a good feeling about them. So far so good. The problem comes in a double deal. Aria is the character they use to deliver all the gimmicks of the different selection processes, and it gets boring really quick, since we understand the dynamics of this contest to be divide its contestants and provide an environment to foster conflict and in my opinion, unnecessarily amounts of competition. As the person who is the spokesperson of this mechanic, I can hardly bring myself to like her character at this point. The worst part comes when she acts as the main judge of each round of selection. Her feedback to the contestants are as vague as it is generic and useless, barely contributing anything to the plot most of the time. She will also give especially harsh feedback to a few individuals to move the plot along (forcefully), using logics and arguments that are flawed once you savour it and give it some serious thought. I can't go in the details without the context, but just pay attention in chapter 23 when they announced the first elimination (keep in mind my argument about the girls not having the fundamentals). Something that I can use as an example, however, is that she prioritizes the judges' opinions, over that of the audience. It does not take a genius to figure out that it is an idol's job to appeal to the masses, not to some damn judges, hence her messed up priorities.

Plot: 3/10
The plot suffers along with the characters, showing plot holes after plot holes, with the obvious intention of the author to use yuri bait for as long as he/she can without actually making any romantic developments. There are a lot of points where I found myself wondering, why can't these characters realize something obvious right in front of their eyes? The author also finds himself/herself struggling to depict all the characters, sometimes focusing so much on the story of group A and neglecting the other groups. This leads to the author making developments off the panels, and then bringing it to you on a platter to try and force it down your throat, sometimes with no build up, sometimes contradicting its previous settings. Spoiler: in the singing duel between Mimi and Yuri in Ch.24, we were not given any information about the drastic difference in the singing abilities of the two contestants, and yet, the author just forces it on you and you are supposed to accept it. In the first place, they were trying to see who was a better singer out of two people, so it is stupid for both of them to sing at the same time since one person can drown the other out in so many ways.

Art: 7.5/10
I like the simplistic artstyle of the manga, and it is one of the only reasons I made it to chapter 24 in the first place.

Honestly I don't write reviews all that often unless a show really warrants it, and this is one of those cases.

This season has been nothing but dissappointing, with long dragged out dialogues that stretch on for episodes and random character introductions that will only have a minor part in the show. The anime has chosen to include a lot of the details of the original material, and it has paid the price for it by being tedious to watch and outright boring.

I don't have many complaints about the animation to be honest. As others have pointed out I wouldn't have had any chance ... to do so since the season barely features any action scenes and the scenery barely changes from episode to episode. Coming from its previous two seasons, which in my opinion were really good, it is sad to see how this season will turn out. After briefly taking a look at the following manga chapters after the latest anime episode, I have to say that I am not particularly looking forward to any of the remaining plot. For those who hailed that the third season it is building up for something big later on, I am sorry but take a look for yourselves (edit: after reading other comments I realized that the anime is adapted from the LN, but my point remains since the manga has probably the exact same material as the anime anyways). The most the animators can do at this point is to adapt the festival and the battle tournament. Both events are honestly quite dull, especially the tournament, since there has been barely any hype for it at this point and it is probably the climax of this season.

Something else I wanted to say is that the cringe element of this show has gone up significantly. I personally dislike the way Rimuru talks nowadays since it feels like he is addressing a bunch of children, and as you know, his subordinates may have monster origins, but most of them are not stupid. Veldora as a character really fell off, since I was expecting him to be a big fighting force and he does nothing but read manga and laugh like a maniac in all the episodes (which yes, it sounds cringy the more you hear it). There is also the romantic development with Benimaru, which I think they could have handled it way better because it just outright feels like I am watching a outdated romance anime, where two girls fights over the oblivious guy. Ah and let's not forget Diablo, which would have a very interesting character, if not for the fact that he barely shows his powers and acts like a simp boy as well (which we don't need anymore since every other side character already fulfills the role). In the previous seasons, the haremish feel that Rimuru had was a bit of a sore point for me but it was pretty acceptable since it wasn't half of plot in most episodes.

Let's go back to the introduction of the minor side characters, and I will be using the example of the Lightspeed guy and the company. First and foremost, the character has no charm and the audience can tell his gimmick after the first 2 minutes of the introduction. Second, when they were introducing his gimmick, everything was cringy af: his teammates (which I would call simp 1, 2 and 3), the population, the nobility in the small kingdom, you name it. Third, as you may have figured out by this point, I would have much preferred it they introduced the guy in 3-5 minutes instead of making it half an episode. I don't know what it is exactly, but hearing him speak in that carefree manner and knowning that he is the kind of creep who will discuss women while they can still hear you (at the beginning of his introduction) just makes him unbearable for me.

Note that my opinion may be biased as I only talk about the points I dislike. But to judge this season as a standalone show, it gets a 5/10. I believe the only reason most people still give it decent scores is because of how invested they were in the previous seasons. To make a comparison, I have watched Boruto, mainly becauase I wanted to see more of Naruto, and as you may understand, both are quite different in terms of cast and quality. It is not the perfect analogy, but I hope you understand my meaning.


Edit: I come here after reading the battle tournament, and I must say it was another dissappointing event. Expect the yapping to continue during the festival as well, we aren't escaping from it. This season is truly doomed from the start.

I am going to keep this review simple, since I am only venting here.

Characters
Akko is too predictable in her actions, and there is a recurring theme in her trying to learn about the future despite having been told and proven that it can only bring trouble. Her two main friends are barely be called friends. Lotte is wimpy and is not really willing to go the extra mile most of the time. Sucy is just an unsupportive jerk whose whole comedic relieve is based on taking advantage of Akko one way or another. Overall, all the characters in this show have been so far ... unlikeable (I am at episode 14) and I can't find a reason to.

Plot
The plot is straight up convoluted as hell. For the first 6 episodes or so there isn't any story development at all. More often than not, you will find yourself yelling at the characters (Akko especially) because they don't realize things that have happened before their eyes. Therefore, the character setting is very inconsistent, where Akko can be sometimes on the mature side, but most of the time goofy and outright stupid. As mentioned, the story has holes in it every step you go, so be prepared to be frustrated if you actually want to enjoy the plot.

Execution of the episodes
I am currently at episode 14, and so far there has only been 1 episode that I liked from start to finish. It seems the creators of the show like the structure where Akko & Co. fuck up early on, but everything gets solved by the end of episode. Too simple, too braindead, and it leads to the plot hole problem mentioned before.

At this point, I am only watching this show because I want to see what happens to Akko as the MC. I don't give a rat's ass about any of the other characters, because the show just did not try to sell them to you, thus making it impossible to emphasize with them.