Chance Pop Session

Length: 13 Episodes
Episode Length: 22 minutes
Genre: Drama

Chance Pop Session is an anime following three young girls attempt to rise to pop fame. The series starts by introducing one of the young girls, and how much she loves music. You learn a short time in that she loves music by a singer named Reika. This young girls name is Akari. She spends most of her time helping her foster father around the house and with his work. One day a friend of hers shows up at the door. He has a surprise for Akari, he has tickets to see Reika live in concert. Akari is overjoyed and while her friend says that he is unfortunately unable to go with her, he gives her the tickets and she goes alone.

The next girl you meet is Nozomi. She comes from a wealthy family, and she is obsessed with Reika. Nozomi is much more simple than most at first. It seems that she is happy as long as she gets to listen to Reika, and now her father has bought her the best 2 seats for Reika's concert. The butler for the family is to take her and keep her from harm while she is there.

The last girl you meet is Yuki. This girl actually works with the people backstage in Reika's crew. Yuki couldn't afford to go to the concert, and has a love for music. So a friend of hers who works in the crew offered to let her help out with the concert setting things up, and then watch the show from the lighting and sound booth.

Each of these girls inadvertently meet each other, some in ways better than others, at the concert. Then during the show all three girls declare a wish that it could be them singing in front of thousands of people at some point. Thus begins the story of Akari, Yuki, and Nozomi and their attempts to become a famous Pop singer.

Grading Scale: 1 to 10

Visual: 8
Plot: 8
Sound: 7
Follow Through: 5

Visual:
Chance Pop Session is well done Visually. The style of drawing done for peoples expressions were different from what I was used to, but I have seen it before. Eventually this style grew on me, and is much more realistic than most anime character drawings. Also, when they showed cities and towns, you could tell that the people had put time into it, as it was not just repeating the same 1 or two slides over and over again all the time. The overall combination of styles here created a good mixture, until it came to the concerts or singing in general. While in many music videos around today there are videos where the lips of the singer do not match the lyrics, it usually doesn't happen too often during concerts or during practice sessions. The biggest problem with this anime's visuals were that during concerts the "lighting" on the singer was never quite fitting with how it lit them up, and that they never came up with different or interesting dance moves.

Plot:
The plot of this story would have normally got a 10, however, the main storyline seems to be more of a distraction from the underlying plot. While many animes are like this in the sense that they try and disguise a major plot twist in the anime, this anime seems to focus too much on the underlying plot twist, in which helped me figure out the whole thing before I had gotten half way through the series. Overall it was an interesting storyline, but not as well presented.

Sound:
This should probably be rated at a 9 or10, but I marked it down for a very similar reason for visual. Singing was something of a disappointment. The combination of sound and visuals were not the greatest I have seen during singing animes. I did judge this part harshly, but only because I think it could have been fixed easily by checking it over one or two more times.

Follow Through:
This really is the biggest flaw for this anime. The Plot line was well written, the styling was good, the voice actors were great, and then they tried to condense a series worth the time for 26 episodes into just 13. The series rushed through too many of the plot points, and while I know many people complain about filler in an anime, it is a good thing because it keeps people guessing on the big plot and keeps them intrigued. Chance Pop Session tries to skip all the unnecessary information, and in the process, opens all the doors for people to see right through to what they are trying to hide.

Overall this anime was good and I am very glad to have watched it. It was my kind of anime, and I must admit that also helped its Final overall Grade. This anime is something that I think all people would like and I highly suggest people to watch it.

Chance Pop Session gets a B-.