It's the third Love Live! instalment. Here's a history to date:

Seven years into an increasingly sprawling franchise, are they ripping themselves off again? Surprisingly, no. They're not. They're doing several new things. The experiment doesn't work, unfortunately, and it left me confidently expecting SUPERSTAR!! to return to the template, but it's not a disaster. I watched the episodes. I didn't dislike them. (Season 2 is a train wreck, admittedly, but this first season is nowhere near that bad.) Changes to the formula include:

(a) the school club's not a group. They don't form a single unit and they don't enter the Love Live tournament. They're solo idols who hang out together. They're "friends but rivals".

(b) the girls don't have a big collective goal, although they have minor ones (guest-star in a concert, put on a school event, etc.) They're not trying to save the school. There's a lesbian love story, but otherwise this is just 13 Days In The Life that rotate their way through giving everyone a spotlight episode. Sometimes, the show seems to be deliberately avoiding consequences. The Kasumi-Setsuna differences vanish after a quick reconciliation, even though those differences were fundamental. (Setsuna almost disappears, while Kasumi becomes comic relief.) The show also spends as little time as possible on the previously tough job of assembling club members, leaving us in the dark about some girls' views and motivations (Emma, Kanata, Shizuku).

(c) it's adapted from a rhythm game without a narrative that isn't even part of mainstream Love Live continuity. The game has the first three series casts going to school at the same time, although the anime backpedalled on that.

(d) the girls don't have a rival group. They're supposedly each other's rivals instead, but this doesn't work. They're not professional idols and they never will be. They're schoolgirls having a laugh. It's just another school club and they're not aiming for anything, so in what meaningful sense are they rivals in the first place?

There are too many characters. Giving everyone a spotlight episode might sound nice, but it's a stretch with thirteen-ish main characters and thirteen episodes. Even halving the cast's size would have been too many. Discarding the principle of a common goal has meant the show lost coherence, making it just a hodge-podge of girls who get one (1) chance to make an impact and otherwise are walking wallpaper.

Good characters include:

1. KASUMI = comedy egomaniac who divides the world into cute (herself) and not-cute (everyone else). She's funny and the best thing in this show.

2. RINA = shy and bad with emotions, so she'll start drawing emoji-like faces on a board instead of having a facial expression herself. Her hair looks like pink Post-It notes glued to her head.

3. SETSUNA YUKI = pretty much drops out of the show, but I liked her focus episode. She's got two personas, but she shut down one of them because her attitude broke up the school idol club.

4. AYUMU & YUU = the lesbian couple-to-be. Ayumu's pretty extreme in eps.10-11, crossing over into needy and weird as she shuts down her best friend's attempt to talk about a dream. Recommended for viewers who are tired of half-hearted lesbian subtext that's ambiguous and goes nowhere.

Theoretically, it's good to see a franchise not playing safe, but this experiment failed. It's likeable, happy and has strong bits, but you'll hardly remember any of it and it's a surprise looking back to see that I was even this positive. My hatred of Season 2 had swamped the good stuff in my memory. I'd struggle to remember that these episodes existed. Even their insert songs do nothing for me. Even if you've played the original game and so know the cast already, I can't imagine anyone thinking this was good... which doesn't explain Nijiyon and the movie trilogy, but hey. Avoid this, except possibly as a masochism hate-watch because you couldn't resist the badness of Season 2.