So the rest of the season was wholly unremarkable, to be honest. Just the rest of the units forming up, then the big prep for the Idol Fest before the Fest itself. Nothing special, but nothing wrong with it, either. Still, the vast majority of the anime was defined by this averageness, but it had its good bits to spice it up, so it gets a straight 7/10 from me. But, of course, I'm playing the waiting game with this. That's where the second season comes in. I've got my hopes up for that, and if it's a lot better than the first, then I'll put it down as a success.
Characters will help out a lot with that, of course. I still don't fully know what happens, or indeed what most of the characters are really going to act like in season two. We only saw a glimpse of Karen and Nao, neither of whom I've been sold on from first impressions. But I know a few more of the characters coming in...but not exactly how they'll act. The tension is palpable. They were talking at the end about how they realised this wasn't a dream. Hopefully reality bites back hard enough for my taste in S2... Talking of which, I've come to appreciate iM@s being a lot more real than I gave it credit for. I don't like the actual reality it's trying to represent, but it's got enough fantasy about it to be fine. It pulls that off well. It's not like Love Live, which is much more fanatical and is better off for it. But I'm a bit more comfortable now with how iM@s is more down-to-earth.
Back to the characters. Specifically, just the characters the Cinderella Project gave us. They've been alright on the whole. Mio is clearly the best of the bunch, and pretty much the central character, which probably explains why she seems to be in the most 'Cinderella Girl'-ish position, at least from what I was gathering from the ending scene. I'd have her fall for me, too. Rin was alright at first but if anything was too quiet, especially for a supposed 'main' character. Still, as long as she wasn't drawing attention to herself, she was probably better off than the rest. Anya is a great character too and she's right in there with Minami, which is great. Minami is pretty good, too. She did herself well in the last two episodes. Rika is another good character. Kirari was a much better person than I expected. Kanako was sweet as always. From there it's all a bit cloudy. Anzu at least tried to do a bit more than earlier, but she's still meh. Riina is still pretty good, but she forever seems to be saying that
something is so rockin' which got wearisome. Chieri was alright from time to time, but apologising for everything just seemed silly. Ranko was just mental for the first half, but all credit to her; she definitely made herself a lot better in the second half. Miria was fine, but only because she was mostly utterly average. But Uzuki and Miku are the two bad eggs. A reminder that Uzuki is supposedly the mainest of all the main characters, yet all she was good for was to pop up and say "Ganbarimasu" at whatever time. That's not a main character, that's just annoying. Mind you, it makes
this comic even more meta than I thought it was. Finally, Miku is comfortably the worst of the bunch and she's a shouty whiner who needs to shut the hell up, basically all the time. Still, that unit with Riina is funny, at least.
Mind you, it's not a great sign that the best idol isn't even in the main group. That's because Mika is still a really, really good idol. Hope she sticks around for more in S2. Maybe even as a more central character, this time.
Finally, I'll say it again, even louder than last time - Idolmaster has some really,
really good music. I was going into this expecting bog standard J-pop, but the variation in it all has been a great surprise. I suppose going off Love Live for most of your ideas of what the music sounds like does that to you. I don't want to compare the two constantly, but it must be done here. Idolmaster's music has made me realise just how samey all of LL's stuff is. It also goes to show that having nine idols sing
all your songs is not always the way to go. Not only does all of LL's music sound very samey (except for its best songs), there's no variation in the voices. Idolmaster's stuff is mostly one, two, three idols at a time and the difference in musical variation, and indeed quality, is astonishing. Even when it takes all the idols together, it still comes up with something better. And I'm still nowhere near done yet with all the music... Put it this way, I think I might enjoy Starlight Stage very much indeed.
But I'm not playing that until I finish the second season. So I'll leave it to that to come up with more goodness. So...yeah. Moving on to S2, now. Let's see how that brings all this crashing down.
Now the only thing I want is to see an LMP or any prototype race cars with itasha livery. For real... 
