Kiniro Mosaic getting a sequel was a bit of a surprise. Sure it was a fun series, but I doubt it would be as fondly remembered were it not for that glorious finale – most of my memories are of it being a bit hit-and-miss, a little too slow, and good-not-great. But thanks to that finale it saw an immediate surge of popularity and sales and now here we are with Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic!
Good news! If you liked the first entry of everyone’s favourite cute-blonde-British-girls-doing-cute-things-in-Japan anime, you’ll undoubtedly love Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic. It is definitely more of the same, but so much funnier and more consistent this time around. The humour is on point for the entire series with every episode being stronger than just about any episode from the first series, and where that amazing finale was needed to make up for some of the shortcomings, Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic is so good that a scene like that would barely stand out.
There’s not a huge amount to talk about as a result. If you liked the first season, you’ll love this one. If you weren’t sold on it but watched it to completion anyway, I’d give this sequel a chance – it might just win you over. Didn’t like Kiniro Mosaic? You’re not going to get much out of this. It really is just more of the same, but with a level of quality, consistency and confidence the first season didn’t quite have. I don’t think you can ask for much more in a sequel from this genre!
That said, there are a few changes from the first season worth discussing, such as the new characters! We now have Kuzehashi, a fairly fresh teacher, and Honoka, classmate of Karen. They’re fun enough by themselves – Kuzehashi is quite strict, but loves cute things and wants her students to like her like they like Karasuma, and Honoka is another lover of all things blonde, albeit more reserved and quiet than Shino, with a bit of an obsession with Karen – but what makes them shine is how they round out and balance the relationships. Alice and Shino have each other, as do Aya and Yoko, but that left Karen a little off to the side. Both Honoka and Kuzehashi provide something for Karen, with the former giving love and respect and the latter discipline, making Karen feel a lot more central and important. Kuzehashi also gives Karasuma someone to play off of, making the ‘veteran’ teacher a more relevant. It may only be two characters, and they’re certainly not main characters, but in retrospect they really do help fill in a gap that I wasn’t even aware was there.
On the topic of characters, there were some slight changes to the characterisation of existing characters: Shino, Alice and Aya all feel like they’ve been exaggerated somewhat. Shino’s obsession with blonde hair takes on some slightly creepy overtones at times, Alice’s devotion to Shino becomes a bit more single-minded, and Aya’s crush on Yoko is somehow even less subtle than it was before. It’s all minor stuff, given that those are their defining traits and it only makes sense that they’d push them further to get more comedy out of them (and to be fair, it is pretty damn funny as a result), but it does bring ‘Flanderization’ to mind. That’s not what this is, but it feels like it could be en route so to speak. Not that I imagine many people would particularly mind; Kiniro Mosaic is hardly a bastion of subtle, nuanced, complex personalities anyway.
An actual point of criticism I have is that Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic does get noticeably fanservicey a couple of times. The two instances I remember are a scene where Aya is at Yoko’s house, they get on the topic of clothes, and Aya ends up grappling with a Yoko who has been reduced to her underwear, and a beach episode that gets pretty pervy about their bodies. Aside from being stuff I’m just not fond of generally, it also felt remarkably out of place. The first season never really indulged in this kind of stuff, and the tone it created always felt too ‘innocent’ for lack of a better word to allow for the sexualisation of the cast. As a result, these few moments of fanservice are quite discordant. They aren’t common, and they are relatively brief, so it hardly impacts my overall enjoyment of the show, but they are also the only blemishes it has.
Like I said at the start – if you liked Kiniro Mosaic you’ll love Hello!! Kiniro Mosaic. It’s fundamentally more of the same, but they’ve tightened it up and rounded it out and created a far better series than I was anticipating. Each episode was an absolute delight, and I’m surprised by how impressed I was by the end of it! This really is how a sequel should be done, and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.
8/10
And because it’s what you’re really here for, another bonus gallery of Karen is Best Girl DESS!
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