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So, as someone being a big fan of the Bang Dream franchise who plays the game, likes the songs, and somewhat enjoys the characters, I should be the perfect target audience for this anime, should I? Turns out that this wasn't turning out to be true.

The story was all over the place and sometimes really dragged, which is surprising considering that this is only a 12-episode anime. You have six bands: Poppin' Party, Hello, Happy World!, Pastel*Palettes, Roselia, Afterglow and Raise A Suilen (RAS). This makes it 30 characters to be placed in a coherent story, which already sounds like a task destinied to fall ... flat. Sure, every band (except RAS) is introduced with a small gig at ep. 1 but you don't actually learn backstory about the charaters and the band respectively. It is assumed you play the game to learn all these things, which is just... lazy and cheap. The story proceeds with some feature episodes of the band and their drama, which sometimes really felt superficial and annoying to watch. After that the anime producers probably said to themselves "screw every band and made the second half of Bang Dream S2 about Poppin' Party drama (which again, felt superficial and painful to watch, especially when they all act angry at first but suddenly become friends to force story progress.) Overall the story was a 2/10 because some moments could be actually funny.

Truth be told, when it was first announced, the 2nd Season of Bang Dream! already looked weird to me because of the usage of mainly 3DCG. Now this for tiself wouldnt be an issue if they didn't decide to merge the main (3D-rendered) characters with classic 2D-animated side characters. At least for me it was very obnoxious and made me wish the anime actually was full 2D. The low framerate (probably to stick with classic animation speed) also kind of hurts the experience in my book. The only light was the fully 3D-rendered MV scenes which looked actually quite good. 4/10 for artstyle.

This leads me to the soundtrack. Now this is kind of a two-faced medal: On the one hand, the OST was forgettable. It was not particularly bad, but also didn't stand out at all. The full songs however are really really good, but also depend heavily on your taste as we are talking six bands with widely varying music genres. 6/10 for sound.

The characters... quite frankly, they don't even deserve this title in this anime. I'd much rather call them "walking tropes". We have a classic tsundere, the classic genki girl, the classic rival band, the classic shy girl. You could basically multiply it by six and you have the full cast of Bang Dream S2 with very little exceptions such as Ako, the classic chuunibyou. 1/10 for characters.

With that said: I don't hate Bang Dream as a franchise, even thoough this anime felt cheap, one-sided and like a extended advert for the mobile gacha game "Bang Dream! Girls Band Party!". But I am really disappointed on what they did with season 2 and since the third season will be from the same studio I don't have high expectations for the next season. If you want a working story and a less cluttered cast, but don't want to miss out on Bang Dream at all, I recommend watching Season 1 of the series. Otherwise, there are other moe-type idol/band shows like K-On, Love Live! or Idolm@ster which are at least slightly better than this anime.

My overall Rating is 3/10.


PS: This is my first review on MyAnimeList, and actually the first full review I've written in English, so please understand that there might be some typos in the text as my native language is not English. Thank you!