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TL;DR: Love Live Season 1 is the weakest of the Love Live seasons; everything about it is simple and not really that outstanding, but thanks to the more realistic parts of the show it becomes enjoyable enough to be worthwhile, that is, if you don't care about the obvious moe marketing goals behind it and if the show doesn't break your suspension of disbelief with its quirks and settings.


First of all, yes, it is all a huge marketing-scheme-ball-of-melodramatic-moe-bullshit. If you are the kind of stuck up intelectual snob that hates this kind of thing; yeah, just run away and never look back.

With that out ... of the way, is any part of this show actually amazing? Not really. There is definitely a lot of effort and production value to the whole show and nothing is outright bad, but few things stand out and the ones that fail to be as high quality can really hurt the show at times.

Like the CG. The show looks pretty for the most part, but the CG especially is weak, which sucks because it is used on the performances, you know, the idol performances that should be the main appeal of the show. Studio Sunrise worked on this so maybe that fact the CG is used on people rather than mechs made it so it lacks a bit.

The songs are nice if you like that kind of thing, but high pitched anime idol voices is something very specific to like so I don't expect many people to enjoy them. Like many japanese pop songs though, they are well written and have interesting elements here and there. Also, the fact that there's 9 voices a lot of the time is impressive I guess. Sound design is fine, nothing to say about it.

The story hits some very real themes at times, but it does it in a very unrealistic way and setting. The whole thing is really unbelievable if you think about it even a little, but if you can look past it, the show explores different things about friendship, teamwork, stardom, and effort. It's not too deep, but if you have ever been in a band or other artistic group seriously you can find some interesting things.

Also the fact that there are no male characters even in the background for most of the scenes can be a bit weird at times. A nitpick, but a justified one I think.

The characters are tropey but work pretty well with each other. I like how everyone seems to have 1 or 2 people they are specially close with over the rest of the main 9 girls. Overall, the group grows more than its members and that's fine.

Due to what this season does for the whole story, the pacing is really predictable for the most part, and can feel a bit rushed. A couple more episodes in length could have helped. This first season works for setting the bases of the second one, which is better, so it is not a big deal.

In conclusion, no part of this show is really outstanding in a good or bad way, but if you give it a go and you don't hate it, it works fine as a hook into the second one, and can even hit some very relatable points depending on who you are. Cannot fault people for disliking it fast though, it is moe, unrealistic and I can definitely see it being annoying or infuriating to some.

I guess it did have the goal of catching people over its moe net since the beginning, and it worked on me so, congrats Love Live. Even after writing this I still don't know why I enjoy it as much as I do. F***

Digimon Adventure is the first show from my childhood that I've given the time and effort to rewatch and has dissappointed me massively.
While a lot of this dissappointment might come from the fact that I watched the Latin American dub of the show (which is not how I usually watch other shows, and is really badly produced), I still can't imagine how anybody over the age of 15 could seriously enjoy this show as a whole, unlike other "childhood anime" like Dragon Ball, Yu-gi-Oh, or Pokemon. Let me explain:

Back when I was a kid, I remember liking Digimon. I watched the first 4 seasons ... after school everyday and then I grew out of it, but my memories of the show were pretty much nonexistent, unlike other shows I watched back then.

I remembered the little bat hamster becoming an angel and thinking it was ridiculous but also really cool. I remembered Tai and Matt(Yamato) being sort of the main guys because their Digimons had more evolutions. I remembered the cat Digimon. I remembered lots of little details like these, but when thinking about the big picture, my mind was blank.

This didn't happen with any other similar animes from my childhood, so when I saw 2019 was the 20 year anniversary of the franchise I thought "cool, a great excuse to watch it today". So I did, and so, I found why I didn't remember anything.

The story is completely forgettable unless you rewatch it countless times. It doesn't get any more complicated than "Bad Digimon wants to destroy the world, because they are evil, and we have to fight it, because we are good", then just repeat that like 4 times with increasing scales of power but no change in motivation for either side.

It is also 54 episodes but somehow manages to have an extremely rushed pacing, making every battle (which pretty much every episode has one) follow the same order of events: Bad Digimon appears, one or all of the good Digimon fight it and they either win in one attack or Digivolve through the Power of Crying or Shouting or Friendship or whatever you wanna call it, then attack once again and win. And when I mean once, I really do mean once.

Well, it is a show for children, right, I shouldn't expect anything more.
The thing is that would be fine if the art was any good.

Digimon Adventure is what I think when somebody mentions Toei in a bad way. While I'm not familiar with the quality of Toei shows of the time, Digimon has to be up there in the reuse of animations. Some are nice (Digievolutions) but most are just not that good and they all get old really fast. I really can't think of any episode in the whole show where there wasn't something lazy or ugly other than maybe the episode where Tai goes back to Japan for a day before going back to the Digimon World. To make the comparison everyone makes, Pokemon looks better than Digimon, not by much but still.

And because there has to be a battle every single episode, the characters never quite get realized in a satisfactory manner. Yes, Izzy(Koushirou) is adopted and has a complex about it, but it just ends in him telling his parents he knows and they cry for like 2 seconds. Yes, Joe feels uncertain about studying what his parents want him to but it never gets explored and he just "finds his own path". Yes, Matt(Yamato) feels he isn't that good of brother to TK(Takeru) but he just has a revelation and basically talks himself out of his insecurity for no reason.

This is, in my opinion, the biggest dissappointment of the series. A show for children can have things that appeal to adults without losing its "for kids" focus. Digimon Adventure isn't that, and hurts itself for trying to be that.

I could go on but you get the point.

Overall, don't watch this show, not worth it at all. There is nothing here for an adult, and I personally wouldn't want a kid of my own to see it, with or without me. There's better kid shows out there that just want to be dumb kid shows and sell toys, and there's better kid shows out there that have some appeal for adults too.
Soundtrack is great though.