This week on Love Live… I don’t get around to writing about it until mere hours before (or, at this point, after) the next episode airs. Whoops. Event travel decompression, compounded by Real Life Stuff and, well, a new iM@S game really served to eat way more time than it probably should have, and getting caught in a hail storm last weekend didn’t really help from a health point of view.

Also, flying macarons.
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This week on Love Live… it’s taken me until Saturday to get around to writing about it. For those who don’t follow me on Twitter, I was in Chicago last weekend on a cartoon idol related agenda, and didn’t get so much as a chance to take a look at this weeks episode of Love Live until Tuesday – I actually watched it whilst sat in Kings Cross (the train station of Harry Potter fame, I suppose) whilst waiting for a train back home, but having just gotten off a post-convention eight hour flight, I wasn’t really feeling up to actually writing about it.

Of course, by the time Wednesday rolled around, and I started to get my head back into order, I elected to grab the new iM@S game, One for All, off PSN and promptly, well, sunk way too much time into it. Not to digress too much, but it’s pretty good – whilst I don’t have the best grasp of it overall yet, it’s structurally the biggest departure from the format of the original iM@S that they’ve done in a production game so far. I’m off at another event this weekend, alas (from a playing OfA point of view), but I’m looking forward to cracking into it in earnest next week.

Getting back to actual Love Live related news, we are starting to see some new merchandise being solicited on the back of the second series now. This cute Honoka figure went up for pre-order on AmiAmi yesterday morning, but there’s a bunch of other, smaller items as well. I’m tempted to pick up a couple of pin badges myself.

Anyway, on with the show…
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This week on Love Live… a bunch of largely inconsequential, but amusing, things happen. It probably couldn’t be any more different in terms of tone and gravitas than last weeks episode without being something unrecognizable as being Love Live.

But, hey, before that, there’s some news this week. Twitter this week has been all, well, a-twitter with the fact that the previously announced English translation of the Love Live mobile game, School Idol Festival, was actually unleashed on both iOS and Android. They actually released this one in the UK as well, unlike certain other iOS idol-themed anime music games. This one is free-to-play too, so you can at least amuse yourself for a while until you start to feel the need to throw money into unlocking the rare idol cards. I’ve been playing it, anyway. It’s pretty fun, and definitely not at all the reason why I didn’t get this blog post up earlier.

It is a little awkward to find – I don’t have an Android device to look for it on, but in terms of finding it on iOS, you need to resist the seemingly obvious desire to search for Love Live and instead go for School Idol Festival if you actually want it to turn up.

In other English territory news, NISA finally solicited their release of the first series of Love Live, which is due to land in September. It’s the usual NISA release format, so it’s one for you guys who have space on their extra-large shelving units.

On another note, I’m probably going to be way late in getting to next weeks episode, if not the week afters as well. Try not to spoil them too hard for me, OK?

Also my OP and ED singles turned up in the mail this week, and I got Rin and Hanayo cards with them. I feel somewhat trolled!

Anyway, on with the show!
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It’s a little easy to be mean towards Rin – certainly, it’s something I’ve been guilty of myself, and it’d be a little over-easy to write this particular episode off as fulfilling a contractural obligation to give every character at least some kind of focus for merchandising reasons.

Whilst that would be enormously unfair, as a character, the show hasn’t really given us much of a reason to actually care about Rin, pretty much using her as a warm body to fill up space when necessary. Even when the trauma that this episode was based upon was brought up in the first series, back when she joined in with the school idol antics in the fourth episode, it was very much as a c-plot in a episode mostly centring around Hanayo getting over her anxiety issues and Maki her pride. Her joining Moo’s was never really sold beyond her going along with the flow when Hanayo and Maki joined.

Which is part of what this episode is attempting to address, I guess, though it feels like there’s a bunch of statements made here that haven’t really been given much grounding in the show.
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And what a Super Idol Nico is, right?

It’s probably not much of a surprise when I say that I really enjoyed this particular episode of Love Live, but, then, I’ve made no particular secret about Nico being my favourite character in the show. Ostensibly a Nico episode, this instalment did a pretty good job as to hitting why I like her – whilst she’s kind of a self-conceited jerk sometimes (well, frequently), and certainly a little over-proud, she’s ultimately rather sweet and well-intentioned about things.

Mostly.

Also, this episode is one of those ones where a whole bunch of things which don’t necessarily make sense, when you actually think about them, happen, and those are the best episodes of Love Live.

In other related news, Kadokawa, fresh from buying up From Software, released a new teaser for the upcoming Love Live Vita game(s) yesterday. It’s looking way less rough than it did last I saw of it – or at least less rough than I remember it looking, though I guess the only real difference is that they’ve shown the gameplay layer, as well as having all the members on stage at once during a performance. Some of the other visual compromises start to make more sense that way, once you cast aside the assumption that splitting the game into three separate releases was in order to reduce the number of idols they had to render at once as opposed to just the cash-grab it probably is.

In any case, the game is coming from Dingo, who have a background in the likes of Project Diva and the upcoming Persona dancing game, so I wouldn’t be too worried about it anyway. The games release was pushed back a couple of months from it’s previously announced release date, though honestly, I wonder if that’s as much to do with getting it out the way of One for All as it was about the game needing more work.

In solicitation news, the OST for the second season went up in the listings of most of the major Japanese online anime retailers today, scheduled for release in the back-end of August. My main point of interest in this relates whether or not the A-RISE song, Shocking Party, is going to be relegated to the OST much like Private Wars from the first series.

That said, we probably aren’t going to get a track listing for the OST until after the last episode of the show has aired – they like to keep the names of the mooo’s insert songs a somewhat-secret until they are actually used in the show, and because they usually stick TV-length versions of the songs on the OSTs, they can’t reveal the expected track listing in advance even though the realities of TV animation scheduling means that all the songs have probably been recorded already.

Anyway, on with the cartoon…
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