Anyways. I watched the first 3 episodes of RWBY Ice Queendom with its special 3-episode advance premiere. I neglected to mention my thoughts earlier.
The animation feels a little jarring. I think it's functional, but it just seems too...basic? And perhaps too colorful. Everything is filled in with almost no shading to the visuals. There's no more character silhouettes, but in return, there's not a lot of idle background events going on either. Some pretty visual effects, like some shimmering water in episode 3, but then you get long periods of still shots, still shots with one character's mouth barely moving, or panning shots.
There's a new OP. It's definitely not Red like Roses.
Also, since it's only available in JP voice acting for now, I find some of the voice acting rather less desirable. Sayori Hayami's voice acting as Ruby seems a little too 'childish' in inflection, or just too high-pitched, maybe? A sore difference from how she voices Yor Briar in Spy x Family. I definitely prefer Lindsay Jones' Ruby here.
The first episode mostly adapts the Red, White, and Black trailers, along with volume 1 chapter 1, skipping the Yellow Trailer entirely for some reason. It doesn't quite follow shot-for-shot, as Taiyang, Klein, Whitley, Winter and Jacques all get speaking appearances already with a few extra scenes, but it very closely follows most of the beats otherwise. Also, for some reason they unintentionally made Whitley capable of warping by having him be behind Weiss in one shot and then five seconds later is on the complete other end of a big-ass arena from her.
The second episode follows the Emerald Forest test, and they introduce some new priest-witch-huntress character Shion in a couple of brief 'ah, she's so mysterious' scenes.
Episode 3 adapts basically the rest of Volume 1, including introducing everyone's best girl Penny. However, it skips Forever Fall, and adapts it out to bring in the new plot element of Ice Queendom, the Nightmare Grimm that can infect a person and take over his or her dreams. In this case, it takes over Jaune, and said above priest-witch-huntress Shion uses a spell to help the rest of Team JNPR defeat it. Of course, it's basically flat-out shown Weiss is also being taken over by a Nightmare.
Numerous call-forwards to stuff that happens in later seasons. Like Nora talking about being queen of the castle.