Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror – Collector’s Edition Review
While you may have thought that Love Live! Sunshine!! was done and dusted after its movie outing in Over the Rainbow, more casual viewers may not realise that it has kept on trucking ever since, with a ton of entertainment and merch that includes a variety of manga spin-offs appearing in the Love Live! Days magazine.
Yohane the Parhelion is one of those spin-offs, first starting out as a series of illustrations before jumping over to manga form with Yohane the Parhelion: Unpolarized Reflexion, and then being spun out into this anime series, first teased as an April fool joke but then revealed to be a full new TV anime outing.
Set in an alternate fantasy universe away from the main Love Live! franchise, the series focuses on Yohane, a teenage girl who has moved to the bustling metropolis of Tokai to become a famous singer. After seeing no success and failing every audition, she receives a call from her mother telling her to come home and reconnect with her roots in the quaint seaside town of Numazu. Reluctantly, Yohane catches a train back home, now tasked with looking after her parents’ shop while they are away for the summer. While Yohane initially struggles to fit in, she is pushed by her pet wolf, Lailaps (whose speech Yohane can understand), to speak to her old friends and revisit her old childhood haunts. When she does so, Yohane finds herself being pulled by destiny into a series of mysterious events that are plaguing the town. A dark miasma is spreading that causes animals to go berserk and threatens to drive the residents of the town apart. Awakening magical abilities within herself, Yohane must now use the power of song to re-unite the town and restore it to its former glory.
In the run-up to the show’s first episode, there was a lot of hype around the return of characters that a lot of fans had grown to love as this part of the franchise had matured, while the trailers created certain expectations around what the show would be like. Yet when it finally aired, a lot of fans bounced off the show completely as it wasn’t the “Love Live! does isekai and magical girls” show that I think a lot of people wanted. Instead, Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is Bandai Namco’s attempt at telling a fairy tale using Love Live! Sunshine!!’s lovable cast of characters, giving us a loose story focusing on the theme of protecting the natural world wrapped up in cosy slice-of-life trimmings and idol music.
While this still sounds interesting and there are evidently some good ideas in here, it really struggles to pull them off and ends up executing them in a very fuzzy and non-committal way. The writing never feels strong enough to properly convey the story it wants to tell, where it’s sort of implied that all the bad things that are happening are down to the discord between the town’s residents and the conflict in Yohane’s own heart. Maybe having some kind of fairy tale villain like the Precure series does would have made this easier to understand, but there’s no such thing here.
It also isn’t helped by the fact it is very slow to start, and it certainly didn’t grab me straight away. The first episode is a bit of a slog to get through, and it doesn’t really start to pick itself up until Episode 3. Even after that though, the pacing is really inconsistent, and it peaks and troughs wildly. At times it can be quite driven and exciting, but at others there’s this complete lack of urgency or direction in moving the plot forward, as it struggles to balance handling the main mystery with the need to develop its characters over the course of the series.
This makes it feel like the show has an identity crisis, where it’s not sure what type of show it wants to be, and it ends up not really excelling at either. That said, both sides do have their moments. Seeing Yohane slowly integrate herself into the town and forge new friendships is very heart-warming and honestly kind of fun as you see them get up to a bunch of different adventures, whether that’s rebuilding a swing for the town’s younger kids, planning and hosting a party, or goofing off at a festival.
There are some more tender moments mixed in with this too that focus on either the group coming together as friends, or Yohane’s sometimes rocky relationship with Lailaps. The latter I was a bit more mixed on due to how Lailaps comes across – she’s stiff and hard to read, which makes her difficult to empathise with, and I felt this reduced the impact of one of the big moments of the series’ final few episodes.
When you look at the rest of the main cast though, I love what they’ve done as they’re still true to who they are in Sunshine!! but they’ve all been given unique twists. Chika and her family are now crime-fighting vigilantes, Kanan is an inventor, You is a delivery girl, Dia is the head of the town’s administrative board, Hanamaru is a baker, Riko is a zoologist, and in the two most incredible transformations, Ruby is a cute little fairy (although clearly riffing off Tinkerbell) and Mari is a demon lord and looks after all the magical sea creatures on Warshimer Island. Sadly, there’s no real Saint Snow presence here beyond a very brief cameo, but You’s cousin Tsuki returns from Over the Rainbow, while there are two new characters: Kouhaku, who is Dia’s assistant, and Tonosama who is a giant robotic frog that Kanan built which goes around helping her in her work.
There’s not quite as much time to really develop all of them compared to the original series, but fans familiar with them will love seeing these familiar faces in new ways and some segments where they come together are actually pretty great. This is where I kind of think the slice-of-life stuff is better constructed than a lot of the dark and dangerous mystery stuff that’s peppered throughout the show, as that really doesn’t come into its fore until the final few episodes.
I’ve seen fans divided on these, but I do like them in how they bring a more focused end to this little fairy tale. The resolution isn’t anything new and feels like a lighter version of some Precure finales, but it does the job in rounding things out.
The animation is once again helmed by Sunrise and while it’s not quite as good looking as maybe Superstar!! is and can seem simplistic at times, it can still look pretty. Eschewing realism for a more fantastical feel gives it a living anime RPG sort of vibe, with the town of Numazu now painted in bright and bold colours. The core of the real location is still there, but it’s cool seeing it in a new light with plenty of new details. The animated song sequences will feel a step up for anyone who hasn’t kept up with the franchise since Sunshine!! finished, and they strike a nice line between being more story-based insert sequences and the music video type that Nijigasaki uses. As always with this sort of show some may find the jump to CG a little jarring, but I personally had no problems with it.
It’s the character designs where the series feels the strongest though, where just like in the characterisations, each of our characters are visually recognisable, but have some great twists with their costumes. Lailaps also takes the stage here and is very distinctive, always dominating the screen every time she appears. All the main cast are really expressive too!
The series’ score is composed by regular series composer Tatsuya Kato, and honestly apart from a few key themes and leitmotifs it’s a bit underwhelming. The more slow-paced moments in the show either have no music at all or just light notes as backing tracks, which certainly doesn’t help the series move things along. The mystery and more actiony parts fare better, but it still doesn’t compare to some of the catchy tunes from the original series.
The songs however are fantastic. With this being a series focused on Yohane, it gives Aika Kobayashi her time to shine and she really goes all out. Songs like “Far Far Away” and “Forever U & I” are proper emotional hits, while the rest of the cast get their moments too in the grab your glowsticks and go crazy “Be as one!!!” or the sweet and sentimental “Hey, dear my friends”.
The Japanese voice cast perform generally well throughout, singing or not, and you can clearly tell they’ve got a full grasp of these roles that they have been dedicated to for nearly 10 years. Their regular appearances as these characters may be coming to an end, but thankfully they do not disappoint.
Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror is brought to us by Anime Limited as both a standard edition Blu-ray and a nice-looking collector’s edition which comes in a box featuring the art from the Volume 1 Japanese release, along with a 36-page booklet. On the discs you’ll find Episodes 1 to 13 in Japanese with English subtitles, along with clean opening and ending animations, clean songs, trailers, and the bonus One Scene Log shorts. Sadly, none of the bonus content is subtitled which means that if you don’t understand Japanese there’s not a lot you can get out of them, particularly with the One Scene Log shorts being more like radio plays with drawn backgrounds. This feels like a glaring omission that should have been caught in the QA process and something I hope is rectified for further prints.
Overall, as a fan of the franchise and the Aqours girls in particular, I absolutely love the concept and what they have tried to do to bring these characters into a fantasy world, where getting to spend more time with them is an absolute joy. Yet, I can’t ignore the fact that this is a heavily flawed series that needed stronger storytelling and more depth to really make it shine. The movie version may give it an opportunity to fix some of its problems with its pacing, but fundamentally this feels like a first draft that plays better in goofy slice-of-life mode rather than taking itself too seriously.
