Love Live! Sunshine Season 2 (Japanese audio) - Episodes 10-13
(Completed)
Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (Japanese audio) - OVA Episode 7
(Completed)
Sunshine!! Season 2 is still as solid as the first season. The show still has that same structure but it does manage to diverge a lot to make itself stand out against School Idol Project, for example you see Saint Snow (this show's friendly rival group)
actually fail and showcase the aftermath of what happened which I felt was one of the season's best side plots which was followed by an episode focused on Ruby wanting to do a song for her sister with Saint Snow which I also enjoyed. There's also individual episodes dedicated to specific characters like Dia and Riko & Yohane, but not everyone gets their shine. The idea that
they were not able to save their school is an interesting change, but the show still keeps its structure in terms of the group eventually disbanding at the end of the series due to the third years graduating and leaving.. Aside from that, Sunshine!! is still an enjoyable experience and Sunrise does the job when it comes to music, visuals and characters. 7/10.
Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn is quite hard to explain in words. Let's start with the visuals, the animation is really good and I like the character designs as it keeps the classic feel considering it's set three years after the events of Char's Counterattack. Characters overall were interesting and I liked the MC even though he basically follows the same trope that previous Gundam pilots have done (war is bad, I don't want people to die) but at the same time he doesn't become annoying which is a nice change. His school friends had no development so they were expendable. Music was pretty good and pacing was solid considering these episodes are 60 minutes at length (with the final one being 90 minutes).
The issue that prevents me from giving this a perfect score is down to its story, it's quite convoluted. There's a lot of discussion over Newtypes that will flow over your head if you didn't watch
Mobile Suit Gundam Trilogy,
Zeta Gundam,
Gundam ZZ and
Char's Counterattack beforehand. I think my main issue is that I dislike the whole Foundation faction and the fact that, with the exception of Mineva, Neo Zeon don't have much of an impact as you would think. Like Full Frontal is considered the Second Coming of Char, but he's really useless until the final two episodes (
and it doesn't help that he literally shares the exact same voice actor as Char, even though he's not actually Char but I get the idea). On the plus side, I did like the mystery behind the 'box' and what it actually meant in the end. Overall that being said, I do think Unicorn is very good and worth a watch once you have seen the main saga. 8/10.