The trio that is bound to form.

Wow, this first episode was surprisingly great!  White Album 2 is a slice-of-life centering around three particular students who love music.  Now you may be worrying about the “2” part, but I assure you that this series is completely unrelated to the original White Album anime.  So the episode starts with the band of three students playing at a festival.  The main character, Haruki Kitihara (cv: Takahiro Mizushima), begins to worry about time before the other two members put him at ease.  We then go into Haruki’s short monologue with a montage of dramatic moments that are bound to come in the series.  While I find it strange that they directly show you some of the drama elements from the future, I suppose it’s to attract the audience’s attention.

The music is pretty awesome in this episode.

The episode then jumps to the time way before the festival, where Haruki is still helping the student committee with the planning.  While helping the committee and maintaining his position as a top-notch student, Haruki is dealing with his own problems of being the last member of the dying Light Music club.  Despite being alone in the music room, he is constantly driven to continue practicing thanks to a mysterious pianist next door, who seems to enjoy playing songs with him.  Haruki doesn’t really know who the pianist is due to the person being in a highly exclusive/elite room next door, but the audience should be able to guess who it is.  Upon returning to Haruki’s involvement with the student committee, we see that his friends are trying to deal with a problem in the school idol contest.  One of the main heroines, Setsuna Ogiso (cv: Madoka Yonezawa), is trying to withdraw from the contest, despite being the main attraction of it.  Haruki lectures Setsuna on how her attitude is disrespectful to her fans and supporters, but allows her to withdraw anyways.  On his way home, Haruki reflects on Setsuna’s attitude and ponders the possibility of her hiding her true personality.  The committee is tasked with moving various planks of wood the next day, and we see that Haruki is lagging behind the others.  Luckily, Setsuna appears and agrees to lend him a hand while having some small talk along the way.  The two get to know each other a little better before we move on to Haruki’s final practice session in the afternoon.  While he is trying to enjoy his last moments with the wonderful pianist next door, a mysterious voice is heard to be singing with them on the rooftop.  Haruki requests that the pianist play a little bit more, so that he can dash to the roof and find out the identity of the singer, who shockingly happens to be Setsuna.

Quite a unique encounter on the roof.

This first episode was quite enjoyable and gave us a pretty good idea of how the series is going to be.  It introduces our main protagonist and gives us a good impression of Setsuna, one of the main heroines.  Unfortunately, we did not get to see much of the second heroine, Kazusa Touma (cv: Hitomi Nabatame), but I’m sure the next episode will take care of that.  The presentation and visuals are fairly good, and I am really like the music so far.  While I am not too big of a fan of drama, I am actually looking forward to this series as it seems to be waiting to build up for it.  I am honestly surprised by how this series isn’t getting too much attention and I hope some more people give it a shot sometime.  Well, until next time!