English Dub Review: Love Live Sunshine “Sea of Light”

It’s time.

Overview:

The day before the competition, all of the girls reflect on how far they’ve come.

Our Take:

This episode is largely the inevitable everybody-reflects-and-reconnects-before-the-big-match episode. It largely serves as a parallel for their first time officially competing, which came with their first huge failure. They stay at the same inn, make similar wishes, and wish for victory once again.

While Aqours has a lot of support from their families and classmates, the episode makes it clear that they aren’t alone. When they visit the shrine to wish for victory, they spot all the ema, wooden plaques, lined up. Many idol groups wish for the same thing, but there’s only one position at first place.

All of the girls revisit some of their old hideouts before they decided to become idols. It’s more symbolic on that end, to show that participating in Aqours has in some ways, changed them for the better. Sometimes, like Ruby, it keys back into specific changes that we’ve seen over the course of the season, but other times it’s more general. Either way, they have all become different people from interacting with each other and pushing the boundaries of their comfort zones. Chika is left wondering why she wants to win Love Live and quite honestly, the episode doesn’t really answer that. All of the other girls give their answers, except for Chika. However, Chika does want to perform with all of them and win. It’s still unclear what Chika’s ‘radiance’ is, but one form of it does come to her in the form of the stadium audience.

In the end, they give a good performance, and the episode finishes with the audience cheering. Of course, that’s not enough of an indicator to show that they’ve won, but it’s clear that Aqours did a good enough job to get the audience excited.