Love Live! Sunshine!! Season 1 (Collector’s Edition Blu-ray) Unboxing Redux

Back in June 2018, I pre-ordered the first season of Aqours’ idol anime series and it eventually sold out with only 500 units in print. Here’s an unboxing redux look at Anime Limited’s now out of print collector’s edition release of Love Live! Sunshine!!.

Love Live! Sunshine!! is a 2016 television anime series from studio Sunrise, published by Bandai Visual and directed by Kazuo Sakai. The original anime series is a continuation of the Love Live! School Idol Project anime series by the same animation studio.

Love Live! School Idol Project focused on μ’s, but Love Live! Sunshine focuses on a different idol group with new singers called Aqours. The members of Aqours are Chika Takami, Riko Sakurauchi, Kanan Matsuura, Dia Kurosawa, You Watanabe, Yoshiko Tsushima, Hanamaru Kunikida, Mari Ohara, and Ruby Kurosawa. Each character shares the spotlight throughout the Sunshine franchise.

In terms of anime licensing, NIS America and MVM Entertainment tackled the Love Live! School Idol Project franchise (though the film never made it to the UK on home video). For Love Live! Sunshine, the license is now with Funimation (but only US & Canadian rights) while Anime Limited stepped in for the UK & Ireland (going so far as to even offer legal streaming through Crunchyroll).

Due to poor sales of Love Live! School Idol Project for UK home video, Anime Limited decided to limit the units for the collector’s edition release of Love Live! Sunshine!! to 500 units and surprisingly it sold out pretty quickly. At the time of this writeup, they do have the rights to the second season but have yet to give an exact release date.

Love Live! Sunshine!! from Anime Limited contains episodes 1-13 across 2 Blu-ray discs using the Funimation master in this collector’s edition set. The audio options include both the Funimation English dub and the original Japanese with English subtitles. The disc is region locked to B and the white subtitles are locked during playback.

The collector’s edition Blu-ray is out of print, but a standard edition Blu-ray release is available to order through Amazon UK.

Blu-ray Specs:

Languages: English, Japanese
Audio: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1, Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0
Video: 1080p High Definition Native format with 16:9 ratio
Region: B
Subtitles: English
Locked Subtitles: Yes
Discs: 2

Plot Synopsis (via Anime Limited):

“Uranohoshi Girls’ High School, a private school in the seaside neighbourhood of Uchiura at Numazu city, Shizuoka prefecture. A small high school in a corner of Suruga Bay, it is home to nine teens, led by second-year student Chika Takami, driven by one seriously big dream: to become the net generation of bright, sparkling “school idols”! As long as we don’t give up, any dream can come true… All we have to do now is keep pushing hard for glory!

Now their “School Idol Project” begins to make their dreams come true!”