I wish the animated portions of Aikatsu Planet were longer. While I've since gotten used to the 3D part and believe myself to be about as unbiased as I can be now, I still think the anime is better acted and overall funner. It's a little strange seeing accompanying anime sound effects, direction/cinematography, and convention used for and with entirely real women. Not only that, but the cast tends to voice act considerably better than they normally act. Mao, for example, is better as Hana than herself.
Compounding the issue is that acting is inherently limiting. I believe the director fully recognizes that it'd destroy the budget and be patently ridiculous for Mao to start swinging around axes, scaling mountains, riding ostriches, or any number of the crazy things they call Aikatsu training, and so shunts all of that to the animated bits. To say nothing of the capability of the actors themselves even doing any of that. It all lends itself to an incongruent feel between the two segments, which is probably a really bad thing since they're trying to sell the impression that Aikatsu Planet, both the place and the show, is not only like an extension of the real world the actors are in, but also serves as more of the same good ole franchise we know and love.
As the show goes on, I'm beginning to think, despite best efforts, they've failed at merging the two. It's not Aikatsu. It's nu-Aikatsu, and while I don't think it's bad by any means, it's still not what I originally signed up for. Perhaps it'll get better at selling this impression as it goes on, or perhaps the experiment will "fail" and we'll go back to normal Aikatsu for the next go about. Either way, all I can definitely say is that An is a shit actress both in character and animated (I also hate her character role.) She's so bad it infuriated me enough to go look up the actress, and to my utter disbelief I learned she was 14. I try to cut her some slack accordingly, but she's bad. Really bad.
Also please increase the upload limit so I can post bigger pictures and potentially webms.