Alternative title(s): AiPuri, AiPri, Secret AiPri
Game Adaptation by OLM and DongWoo A&E
Simulcast Pending

Premise

Himari joins Paradise Academy with her friend Mitsuki. She wants to get 10,000 friends, but also secretly wishes to follow in the famous Mii-chan’s footsteps in becoming an AiPri (Idol Princess). One day, she accidentally finds herself transported to the AiPri world, so maybe that dream can come true!

Peter’s verdict: Hello Pretty my old friend

A lot of people know me for my love of Aikatsu! and its subsequent iterations. However, a couple years into the original Aikatsu! series a new challenger entered the fray with PriPara, short for Prism Paradise. PriPara has a fairly similar concept to Aikatsu! but with an additional layer where the idol activities in PriPara were largely detached from the school life (an early plot point being that the school forbid going to PriPara in fact) and then once in the PriPara world there was an entire world there while in “idol mode” (my terminology) and then they did performances inside PriPara. However at the end of the day both Aikatsu and PriPara were anime made (at least initially) to promote the real life arcade games where you got cards of some variety to make an outfit up and perform with those.

I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with PriPara. The style of writing and the performance visuals were a bit too over-the-top all-the-time for me, and they had a very limited selection of songs they performed every week compared to Aikatsu which at this point tended to shake up the songs regularly, or at least have different singers. That being said, some episodes of PriPara were incredibly funny, as the writing style also leans much harder on comedy than Aikatsu ever did, but Aikatsu had a much more consistently good output. PriPara also had a male character who performs in the same dresses as everyone else without anyone making too much of a big deal about it, though they did have moments of being weird about gender too, it wasn’t perfect.

So where goes AiPri come in. Well, if you can’t tell by the title, it’s a follow-up to PriPara. Actually, it’s a follow-up to the follow-up to the follow-up to the follow-up to PriPara, which itself was a spin off of the Pretty Rhythm series, already three series deep by the time PriPara came along. Now, with the exception of episode one of Idol Time PriPara (the direct sequel to PriPara), I didn’t watch any of the others (even Waccha Primagi!).

Quick overview: AiPri is short for Idol Princess. Not clear where the princess bit comes in yet, but PriPara was Prism Paradise which didn’t really mean anything so I won’t read too much into it. You’ve got someone with pink hair (Himari) joining school, the school has some negative words to say about going to AiPri (stopping short of banning it), someone Himari is friends with (Mitsuki) is secretly doing idol things in AiPri under a nickname (Mii) to keep it secret (that’s the Himitsu in the title by the way) and Himari finds themselves accidentally ending up in AiPri world and gives a flawless peformance with seemingly zero preparation. Meanwhile, four people who are Definitely Not The School Council look over the performance that was so good they can’t believe it.

As I left episode 1, I felt like I was watching an episode of PriPara, just with a fresh late of characters. Very little has changed in structure and style, and even the performance looks like it would slot right in. One thing that actually is new is a heavy emphasis on influencer and idol livestream stuff (the ones where you pay to have an icon appear on screen sometimes with a superchat message). The show opens with Mii showing off various brands of cosmetics and you have the emoji and other icons flying across from people, and the same happens at the end of Himari’s performance with live emoji showing up from viewers presumably. This is a natural evolution of something that happened in both Aikatsu and PriPara where audiences watching live or online would have their hype levels measured somehow (Aikatsu had a headband that transmitted your feelings) but since livestreams have live reactions of floating emoji, it makes sense to just make it the thing in the real world.

The question now is, did I enjoy it? Honestly, yeah. It’s been a good few years since I did anything PriPara related, and this is a fresh start. The music is pretty decent, and I had a few chuckles as the episode went on, so I expect I’ll have an okay time with it. I am hoping the fact that they’re introducing a wider range of characters so early with the school council will mean I’m not having to put up with the same two or three songs for months, but I can always fast forward the songs unless they end up doing some proper bangers.

They did steal the forehead touching bit from Stardust Telepath though, which is unforgivable.