Eh, idol anime is just sports anime for girls.
Season 2 MAL Link here
After low stake / mundane slice of life anime i watched, i think i will go to my root to watch the usual moe / slice of life anime, which i picked with music. I made a terrible mistake, because this is 4th Love Live entry which i skipped 3rd one. Since this are 2 season back to back, i will separate between paragraph.
If you are a fan of this franchise, you pretty much know what to expect from the anime. But lets just i say that season 1 is pretty good since it just focused on 5 characters and story started pretty good with challenges for starting a club, struggle to find member, and practicing for competition. As small team, there are alot of emphasize on character development, especially the main girl which struggled to sing in crowd. As episodes goes, it fun & happy with some drama thrown in once a while.
Season 2 started with story that they failed to get number 1 in preliminary tournament to represent tokyo, thus they need to scout more girls which increased whole team to 9 peoples total. Again as usual, there are challenges scouting new people and now there are even more girls with quirks and weird habits. This story focus more on the side characters with 1 key rival which are lacking in first season. Throughout the season, the girl bonding more with each others toward final competition.
I will be honest to say that i didnt much expectation from this anime since the beginning, since I aware of Im getting into when I started to binge this series. Season 1 is pretty good, although you need to understand that nowadays most of idol anime will use 3D animation for the dance / singing concert so it can feel jarring to look. Since usually the concert song are only partial of full song, so you will ended up with only 2 or 3 minutes scene without much hyped moment.
However, season 2 is what i considered as "too much side quest" compared to first season 1 main quest. Most of the time are spent with activities with characters without much focus on competition other than last couple of episodes. If season 1 is more serious, i felt season 2 is more goofy especially characters with quirky can get annoying. 9 characters are pretty much hard to juggle for character development, thus why it felt weaker although the rival existent is good.
Im not sure if you want to give this anime a try if you are not fan of idol anime. Season 1 is super excellent but season 2 is just above average to me. Worse part, there are upcoming season 3 that i didnt realized. Maybe better for you to wait and binge all 3 seasons (first time in this franchise to get 3rd season)