It's a waste of oxygen. I struggled to finish it. It's not the kind of horrible that makes you tear your eyes out, but it's pointless.

Technically, it's a Love Live! show... but they've ditched the Love Live competition, schoolgirl idols and indeed the real world. (They even have male actors in named roles, which is a Love Live! first.) Instead, it features an alternate fantasy Japan that's approximately the modern world, except with magic, fairies, talking animals, etc. (They even have human cannonballs. Long distance mail is delivered by shooting a courier from a cannon on the post office's roof, having provided a glider backpack and booster shoes for safe landing.)

It stars alternate versions of the Love Live! Sunshine!! cast. I like that show's Season 1, don't mind Season 2 and should avoid mentioning the 2019 movie. This alternative show's problems are:

(a) it's unclear what the show wants to be. There's important character development for its two protagonists, Yohane and Lailaps, and a magical threat that turns deer into red-eyed demons... but the show's mostly slice-of-life bollocks where nothing matters. I didn't care about the supporting cast. A season synopsis would mostly be "girls do unimportant stuff".

(b) the main character is Yohane... and I hated her. This is deliberate at first. She's a brat with attitude who's failed at her chosen life goal but still has an ego the size of Everest and is uninterested in other people (and even in her home town, which she thinks is a dump). Also, she's a stupid, dishonest fraud. She sets up as a fortune teller and charges people money, even though her fortune telling is ludicrously inaccurate when we see it in ep.2. (I wouldn't have minded in a realistic show, but this is a fantasy world where magic is real. Claiming falsely to have magic powers makes you a con artist.)

She says things like, "I've done so much fortune telling that I'm exhausted." (No, Yohane, you've done none at all. Piss off.)

When children ask for assistance in finding something, she's too stupid to realise that being friendly and helping your neighbours is basic good sense if you're starting a new service business. No, she just tells them to bog off. (This is corrected later in the episode, but that doesn't make her initial response any less annoying.)

As I said, this is deliberate. Yohane grows as a person. She thaws and gets nicer. She'll end up choosing the hometown she'd earlier been sneering at. She doesn't ditch the fortune telling, though, and she'll remain capable of lying in bed and wallowing in self-pity.

There's the impending disaster. It's a "Calamity", so presumably it's bad... probably, I guess. Even after finishing the show, I'm vague on what it was. It doesn't, though, change anyone's actions or motivations. Imagine an Enid Blyton book about a world-ending natural disaster... in which it's mostly just Noddy and Big Ears goofing around as usual, leading you almost to forget that something bad was supposed to happen. Bingo. Welcome to this show.

There's some singing, as you'd expect from Love Live!, but it's far less prominent than in the main franchise. Don't watch this show. There's no point. It's empty and sometimes stupid, e.g. ep.9's stalking, or in ep.8 no one thinking for ages to ask Yohane where she last saw the staff everyone's searching for. It's not scene-by-scene painful, admittedly. Everyone except Yohane is lovely. The show has good bits, so I quite liked Riko and Mari, while of course the Yohane-Lailaps relationship is at the heart of most episodes. Even if you're fast-forwarding through most of it, you'll probably stop and watch those scenes. (Lailaps is a talking wolf almost the size of cattle. They've been best friends since childhood, but their friendship was broken when Yohane flounced off to the big city and they're still a bit strained and delicate together.)

When I heard about this show, I was intrigued. Love Live! without idols sounded worth trying. Unfortunately, idol competitions give Love Live! its narrative spine (except Nijigasaki, which doesn't have one) and this show ignored the challenge of finding something to replace that.