YoshiKyon

8/10

Anilist: [link]

Before watching it, Vivy sat in a difficult spot for me. I loved the premise of it on paper, but I knew it was leaning into the music heavily and I can't stand most idol shows. I know people who absolutely loved it, but I also know some people who couldn't stand it.
An old friend of mine, Sage, recommended this as part of my 12 Anime in 12 Months, and it was already fairly prominently on my radar so expectations were reasonably high:

12 Anime in 12 Months:

These are listed in the order I thought I would enjoy them, from most likely to enjoy to least.

• Shinsekai yori
• Plastic Memories
• Vivy: Fluorite Eyes Song
• Kaiba
• Bloom Into You
• Princess Tutu
• Redline
• Monster
• Saint Onii-san
• Haikyu!!
• So I'm a Spider, So What
• In Another World With My Smartphone

I think it lived up to the expectations, honestly - it's definitely on the high end of 8s, nearly a 9. Mild spoilers below the cut.

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One thing I will always praise in games, anime, pretty much any media, is when they throw you straight into the action. Vivy pulls zero punches with its opening sequence - it does a fantastic job of setting the stage (haha) in terms of the world, the expectations, and the premise before shifting towards introducing Diva/Vivy, a main character who is nicely set up both as essentially a hero who doesn't want to be a hero, and as someone who is absolutely out of their depth in every possible way. Probably the only big complaint early on - and it is a complaint that endures throughout the series - is that one of the main characters, Matsumoto, is irritating as hell. It's intentional and the show digs at him several times for it, but that doesn't make him any less annoying.

Beyond that, though, the characters are almost all incredibly developed considering most get fairly low screen-time. Most of the series is essentially broken into tiny sub-stories, with the first used to introduce Vivy and Matsumoto, before moving into the more side-character-driven events. The Sunrise story is beautiful, both in the story it tells and the emotion it manages to get across, while the Metal Float story really ends up leaning into the darker parts of the setting that are alluded to earlier.

That is, for what it's worth, part of where Vivy trips up though. It goes heavily out its way early on to establish that this will be a dark story at times, but it rarely actually lives up to this - there's an early setup that makes it clear that it won't just be sunshine and rainbows, one major part of the Metal Float story, and then some of the finale, and that's about it for darker aspects. It isn't like it needs those to deliver the impact of the story - which it does deliver fantastically regardless - but it makes you question why it sets up that expectation so heavily if it doesn't intend to deliver on it. The finale itself leaves a little to be desired, but it's tough to figure out an alternative. In some ways, it's a story that writes itself into a corner that it struggles to get out of, and the resolution isn't bad, it just feels a little unsatisfying in places.

Outside of that, I'm not typically someone who cares that much about the animation or audio - it has to be extremely good or extremely bad for me to take notice, and Vivy ends up hitting both. Probably unsurprisingly for a show so heavily focused on music, Vivy's OST is spectacular - not just the vocal tracks, but so much of the background music is phenomenal. Meanwhile, the art and animation are typically good with some real standout moments (there's one particular shot of Vivy that instantly comes to mind), but the animation during the action sequences takes a real dive, with the fight aboard the Sunrise being particularly memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Overall, Vivy's a show that does a spectacular job of writing characters and stories in a way that elicits some heavy emotions, with a fantastic soundtrack and some incredible world-building. There are definitely some moments where it slips - and slips quite a lot, which can feel jarring with how embedded the show is in that world-building and character development - but for the most part, this is a captivating show that promises a lot from the start and then delivers accordingly.