Love Live! is back! Having saved their school and stopped Kotori from traveling overseas last season, things have finally settled down for Honoka and the others. But of course, it wouldn't be a school idol show without dramatic conflict, so the team is swiftly thrust into preparations for a second Love Live! event. The competition is fierce this time, and to make matters worse, u's are stuck in the same preliminaries district as A-RISE - meaning that if they even want to compete on the main stage, they'll first have to defeat the reigning champions in vicious heads-up idol combat. And above all this hangs the looming specter of the third years' graduation. Will u's be able to move on without Nozomi, Eli, and Nico, and would they even want to?

That sounds like a whole bunch of stress and conflict, but fortunately, for most of this season, Love Live! revels in what it's clearly best at - having a whole lot of silly fun. Seemingly having learned from the failures of the Great Kotori Drama in season one, season two generally cuts its conflicts into bite-sized episodic portions, allowing individual dramas and problems like “we need to work on a song together” or “seriously, what is up with Nico” drive small adventures while giving each cast member a little time to shine.

It's a little difficult to describe what makes Love Live! work, since just saying “it's fun” isn't a particularly meaningful description. But it's true - at its best moments, the show has a sense of humor, energy, and overall fun that few other shows can match. This partially comes down to what a holistic production Love Live! tends to be. Its written sense of humor is elevated by energetic direction and quirky sound design, making most moments feel like cohesive jokes as fully embraced as any Looney Tunes sketch. Even in comparison to the first season, the show rarely takes itself too seriously - this episode opens with a silly musical number as Honoka dances through the school while singing the plot of the first season, and the second episode features Nico and Hanayo running after a squirrel and falling off a cliff. Dramatic moments are hammed up with thunderous horns and silly expressions, and most early scenes offer both a central running gag and a bunch of incidental humor brought about through background details, faces, and little asides between the very affectionate characters.

In contrast to the “getting the band together” narrative that gave the first season a strong internal structure, season two is much looser in its construction. There's the overall conflict of the Love Live! competition and concerns about graduation, but instead of playing up the drama, much of this season is dedicated to small stories that let the show embrace what it's best at. With strong friendships already established between the core nine, the show experiments in breaking up the cast into new trios, and goes deeper into the personal circumstances of characters like Nico and Nozomi. Whenever things threaten to get too serious, the show undercuts its drama with some self-aware gags, and some episodes seemingly exist only to justify great comedic thought experiments. One episode in particular, where the team is trying to figure out to develop more “impact,” was clearly designed because the staff wanted to put the team in silly costumes and have them imitate each other's mannerisms.

That's not to say this season is all silliness, though. The Nico and Nozomi episodes mentioned previously actually do have some emotional punch, as they draw on established characters traits without overstaying their welcome. And the girls' rivalry with A-RISE adds some welcome tension to the show, as well. This new flair for drama peaks in the ninth episode, when the girls perform “Snow Halation” for the preliminary finals - a standout sequence that features the show's best idol song, best choreography, and best direction. Buoyed by focus on the show's overall spirit of camaraderie, episode nine represents an unprecedented dramatic peak for Love Live!.

Unfortunately, in the wake of that highlight, season two falls into a third-act slump frustratingly evocative of the first season. With the preliminaries finished, Love Live! begins to focus on the consequences of Eli, Nozomi, and Nico graduating out of the group, leading to a long sequence of goodbye episodes that lack all the energy and appeal of the early material. There's certainly some poignancy to be found in the idea of the senior members leaving u's, but Love Live! attempts to stretch this sense of nostalgia and melancholy out across four entire episodes. Love Live! is at its best when it's having fun and not taking itself seriously, and having a sequence of episodes focused on “what will we do when the seniors leave” followed by “this is our very last performance” followed by Honoka literally waving goodbye to the ghosts of her Idol Memories makes for a tedious and far too self-indulgent final act.

Love Live!'s aesthetics remain largely unchanged in this season. The direction is lively and purposeful, often directly contributing to core gags, while the character designs remain crisp, if a little same-faced. The character animation is generally very strong, though the idol performances are forced to rely on some unfortunate CG models. The backgrounds are typically more functional than beautiful, but the show has strong color work, and the lighting works hard to set appropriately upbeat or nostalgic tones throughout. The music is a definite highlight - I'm not even really a fan of idol music, but the incidental music used throughout the non-performance sequences is wonderful. Songs are set to match the tenor and timing of jokes at all times, with a diverse array of genres ably setting the many moods the show requires. The songs can get a little saccharine in the last act, but that's more the fault of the material they're trying to elevate than any failure of the score.

NISA's standard edition comes on two discs, and features the clean opening and ending, but no other extras. The real key addition here is the new dub, which is a bit hit or miss. The script itself is well-chosen - it's a mix of loyalty to the original and dorky slang (“working hard or hardly working?” asks Nozomi), which generally fit the spirit of the show. Love Live! is a show that lives or dies by its success as a breezy comedy, so making changes for the sake of conversational smoothness is a smart call. It's more the voice choices that are mixed - while some actresses perfectly hit the tone of the originals (Kotori, Hanayo), others are somewhat awkwardly shifted (Nozomi, Rin). These are changes that may not actually matter if the dub is your first experience with these characters, but it did feel like the tones just didn't quite match the existing personas at times. Other than that, Love Live! also has the classic musical dub issue of transitioning right back to the Japanese voices for any songs, making for a jarring shift. It's an unavoidable but always relevant issue when it comes to shows like this.

Overall, the last third is certainly a weight on the show, but Love Live!'s strengths definitely outpace its weaknesses. The characters are fairly simple (some more than others - Honoka and Nico have some substance, while Maki is a strict tsundere) but have an endearing rapport, and the show is consistently inventive in its gags. Love Live! won't change your life, but it's not trying to - it's a lighthearted and endearing show with a whole ton of polish. Sometimes fun things are just fun.