It's okay. I quite liked it. It's the weakest season of Love Live Superstar, but still far, far ahead of certain other Love Live instalments. The animation's still great and the characters are still capable of making me laugh. The show has charm... but this year's storyline lacks weight.

1. Love Live itself is missing. I don't mind this, personally, but it's an amusing thing to drop from a show called Love Live. They're not trying to win the competition any more. After all, they did that last year. Instead, they're building up to the graduation of the 3rd years and the question of where they'll take their futures. Music school in Vienna? Pursue dancing and singing professionally? Get on with their lives and forget about idols? This is a respectable topic for discussion and I like how the show addresses it in the final episode, but it's not exciting.

2. The Rivalry. We have two rival teams of school idols, albeit with inconsistent levels of animosity. Most of the girls love everyone (so-called rivals or otherwise) and just want to encourage and help. Tomari is robotically emotionless and just wants to prove a point, repeatedly disclaiming any interest in school idols. Margarete is cold and hostile, repeatedly calling our heroines the enemy and stonewalling any hint of (gasp!) friendship. This can be amusing, but we all know how it'll turn out. (This is a cute schoolgirl series, driven by the Power of Friendship and warm fuzzy feelings. There are semi-sentient slime moulds in outer space that can tell where Tomari and Margarete's story arcs are going.) Besides, nothing's at stake because there's no championship or tournament on the horizon.

3. Bilingual. Good grief, Chinese is everywhere. Were they being sponsored by bilibili? There's also some German (Margarete and Vienna) but that's not the main second language. Keke's from Shanghai and the girls visit her in ep.5, which is like a tourist guide and advertisement for the city. They even sing in Chinese. (Keke's voice actress is Chinese too, incidentally.)

I wouldn't call this season great, but I don't mind it. If I were doing a marathon Superstar!! rewatch, I wouldn't skip it (unlike, say, the abominations known as Show by Rock!! seasons 3-4). It can be amusing, e.g. the goal-focused sister in episode 25 who talks like an issue of The Economist. "For this concert, we will design and implement our own monetization system." I didn't buy the argument for putting a shy introvert centre-stage in episode 27, but it gives the animators an opportunity for interesting face acting. The remote-control bands in episode 31 are bollocks, though, and not funny. Anyway, this season certainly isn't a must-watch, but you could do worse.