Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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In its own way, the daylit parallel present-day of Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is a utopia. In the show’s first season, from back in 2020, there were few if any conflicts that could not be solved with a song. It was a fairly far cry from the franchise’s stereotypical portrayal as being obsessed with school-in-danger plots and melodrama. Its highlights, uniformly, were livewire “music videos” that disregarded any pretense of realism for pure visual splendor. What it may have lacked in minute detail–although it could do that too, at times–it more than made up for in a truly rare dedication to pure spectacle.

Nijigasaki High School Idol Club‘s second season continues that devotion; opening as it does with a delightfully bonkers promotional video shot by the titular Idol Club. We get reacquainted with most of the first season’s highlight characters here, although the actual narrative, in as much as there is one, stays firmly centered on club behind-the-scenes-er / sort-of manager Yuu Takasaki (Hinaki Yano), and new girl Lanzhu Zhong (Akina Homoto).

Before we discuss what that narrative actually is, though, we should take the broad view for a moment. Nijigasaki is in an interesting place in 2022. The first season’s only real competitors in the idol anime format were Hypnosis Mic, which targets a different audience and has vastly different aims, the already-forgotten Dropout Idol Fruit Tart and Lapis Re:LiGHTS, and the utter train-crash that was 22/7. In the present day, though, Nijigasaki is no longer the only smart kid in the class, and there are other, equally-bright pupils of the genre present. Mostly in the form of the admittedly yet-to-premiere wildcards Healer Girl and next season’s SHINE POST, but even this season has Ya Boy Kongming!, which despite its absurd premise and smaller focus on just one singer, is very much in at least a broadly similar tonal space. There’s even a fellow Love Live season, also premiering in Summer; the followup to last year’s Love Live! Superstar. In other words; there is an actual level playing field for the first time in a while. Nijigasaki‘s status as Idol Anime of The Year is no longer a given.

In a way, the increased competition is mirrored in the first episode’s own story. What we have here is pretty simple, Lanzhu near-literally steals the show during the Idol Club’s promotional time at a school event. Her songwriter Mia Taylor (Shuu Uchida) makes a bit of an impression earlier on in the episode, but Nijigasaki is Lanzhu’s show, this week. And tellingly, it’s she, not any of our returning characters from season one, who gets the premiere’s music video. It’s a thing of beauty, and also as pompous and grandiose as any real pop diva’s videos, which, as we soon find out, fits her character pretty damn well.

The music video, it must be said, carries on the tradition of total showstoppers from season one very well. These are the episode’s centerpieces and need to convey important information in addition to being visually compelling, and Lanzhu’s knocks it out of the park on both counts. The scene transitions have her doing all kinds of random but awesome-looking nonsense like posing in a bubblebath, standing on top of a bunch of aquariums, and dancing in an elevator while wearing what looks like a borrowed Revue Starlight costume.

^{By this, do I mean “it has epaulettes”? Yes.}

Shot made and sunk; Lanzhu is immensely talented and also hugely egotistical.

That latter point is followed up on at the end of the episode in what is the only real development of conflict here. Lanzhu basically calls the Idol Club a bunch of posers and announces her intent to enter the Idol Festival by herself and to upstage all of them. She does, admittedly, come across as astoundingly bitchy here, but it says a lot that this is what passes for villainy in the Love Live universe.

This does raise the possibility that the second season of Nijigasaki might possibly be more in-line with the melodramatic Love Live baseline than season one was, which would, admittedly, bum me out ever so slightly. But on the other hand, the Idol Club end the episode resolute that their new rival simply means they all have to work harder, and that “where dreams come true” tagline rears its head again in the premiere’s closing moments. That in mind, even if Nijigasaki High School Idol Club isn’t the shoe-in for its genre’s nebulous AOTY award that its predecessor was, it’s hard to imagine the girls won’t be alright. These are school idols we’re talking about, after all, and if my decade-plus of anime watching has taught me anything, it’s that high school girls can do anything.

The Takeaway: Obviously, you should watch season one first, but unless you just hate pop music, you should, of course, check this out.

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Special Thanks: Additional Idol Research for this article was provided by Josh the Setsuna Fan, thanks Josh.

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