Onegai AiPri

Writing this review, I haven't watched the 2nd season of Aipri yet but because of Onegai being a spinoff and me not liking the first season of Aipri that much I decided to just skip to Onegai so I could join in on the fun weekly. While at the moment there's nothing particularly confusing to me (besides maybe the switch from the robot to priusa for the announcer character, but that's very minimal), there is a small chance of me missing context from season 2.

With all that being said, Onegai has improved on its counterpart in a few ways while still mainly maintaining the ... same flaws that made the og Aipri so mediocre. The first thing I think that has improved is the character design, they just look a lot more appealing to the eye and feel a lot more balanced in terms of color. Going off from characters, the baseline personalities of the girls are a lot more interesting to me. Inori is your typical idol protagonist, but she has enough charm and energy to make herself likeable anyways. Aoi and Gumi are both pretty fine, nothing offensive but they've yet to pique my interest. Now, the other 3 girls definitely pique my interest and are the main reason why I'm still watching. Olivia's complex about Aipri, The Ojou-sama girl having the potential to start actual conflict, and Ema being this really mysterious fortune telling girl. These all have the potential to make for great story moments and I'm hoping the writers know what they have with them. The final improvement I think they made over the og is that the premise of granting wishes is a lot more flexible compared to... secrets. Having the wish granting gang help people with their inner desires is a great way to teach kids lessons while also revealing more aspects about the characters themselves.

Before going into the negatives, I wanted to say that the songs are as great as ever. The og Aipri had banger music and Onegai continues the theme with already having 3 great songs. They seemed to have improved on the CGI too, nice!

As for the problems, I mainly take issue with how the team still seems so disinterested in writing an actual story. They start doing 2 songs per episode on top of the OP/ED and the amount of time it takes away from actually telling an engaging story upsets me. I wanted to spend more time learning about these characters but the show refuses to try at every turn. The animation budget also seems to be super low, extremely stiff and sometimes they completely give up on using animations in favor of using backgrounds. It just screams low quality.

Overall, Onegai Aipri has a ton of potential that I hope it eventually taps in too. But as of now it's only a slightly more enjoyable version of the original Himitsu no Aipri. if you're reading this at least listen to Inori's song on youtube cause rapapapapapapa has been stuck in my head all day.