Aikatsu Stars 86

To summarize this review in a few words: POOR Rola.

This was the episode that Rola was supposed to redeem herself. All the insecurity, motivation build up, training, support from friends especially Yume were supposed to make us root for her, it had done so very successfully. Rola really had extreme bad luck to be facing a final boss character Elza at this time, but the build up had actually given us some hope until THAT happened.

We all know that Rola still might lose even if Elza had given her normal performance, but the lost to Elza this time was really hammered into our mind. It’s all game over when we see Elza started with a new song and performance “The only Sun Light”  and literally exploded into her Sun Dress. It’s really that unfair to Rola. There’s just simply no chance. Everyone is totally surprised and I am really sad to see Rola being devastated. From now, I really want Aikatsu Stars to just give Rola some deserved wins against her opponents if possible in the rest of this season.

As for Elza, I won’t focus too much on her performance. The transformation effects into Sun Dress was really cool and I feel the flame effects was really fitting, but otherwise there were some weird camera angles which I don’t really understand. I feel like Elza really had descended to craziness in this episode though. She was depressed enough to be such an asshole towards Rei at the start of the episode, that she was actually losing reputation as a headmistress in Venus Ark. She was simply not doing her job. Would have expected her to return to her ordinary smug self after the Sun Dress, but apparently she had went into an evil kind of above all others craziness instead. This really makes me feel some disgust towards her character and want someone (probably Yume) to just beat up her up in her own thing.

I would say it is a very well written episode, really one of those that triggers a lot of emotions and feels unlike most episodes in Stars. It’ll be good if there’re more episodes like this.

Idoltime Pripara 37

Feels like it is a pointless team-building episode for the new unit this week as we already known they will go through that pretty easily. At least the process itself is pretty boring. My Dream (MyDre) itself sounds bland but is actually catchy enough. As expected, MyDre won over Shuuka and Falala finally has awakened for long enough (not sure if permanently though). Hope Falala will have actually enough time to do something though. Looks like the final arc will be a full-on conflict between Falala and Galala, and the idols trying to help both of them though. I am actually looking forward towards how they execute this.