I love rhythm games and I enjoy playing this game, however I can not in good conscience recommend it to anyone because of the insidious gacha element. I'm thankfully resistant to gambling impulses so I've never spent a dime on this or nearly any F2P game, but I don't view that as, like, a moral victory. Games like this are dangerous and should be regarded as such.

Having said all that, FIRE BIRD is one of the best songs ever and I don't limit that to subcategories of "In a rhythm game" or "from a J-Rock Girl Band".

I've spent so much time with this game holy shit.

I do honestly respect the work put into it, but I could say that about pretty much any game given the industries uh...quirks. It's just too weighed down by its grimy shitty format for any of the things I like to mean a whole lot overall.

Also, it just has too much content: the story is literally hundreds of hours of visual novel (and that's if you really speed through it) and there are something like 500 songs, and its not like this time is used ultra efficiently or anything, but if you want to have any kind of proper experience with the story you have to engage with all of it, and there's soon to be 45 separate main characters, cause gotta get them waifu bucks, amirite? Oh also, thousands of separate gacha cards. Sometimes you just have to stop.

Snarky cynical ass criticism aside, I've cried like several times at the stories, so I guess it did something right. I do think the character writing is good and genuinely earnest when it gets down to it, but it just...doesn't very often, and if the best I can say about a game is that it has some good elements in isolation, then it's not a good game. Whoops, got back into snarky cynic mode again.

Played this around 2018 or so at the recommendation of a friend who described it as "mobile Chunithm". Liked it much better than Bushiroad's previous game Love Live! School Idol Festival, due to having many standard rhythm game quality-of-life features like scroll speed adjustment. I also greatly appreciated that stamina was no longer strictly necessary to play songs, they're only to multiply rewards.

Tiering events still exist but at least the tiering rewards are now just cosmetics instead of one-time items. I still think tiering is a terrible concept but at least now it's no longer needed to maximize cards. Card-based scoring still exists, which makes me not take the game so seriously.

However I didn't stick with the game for too long because of this game being based around bands, and therefore featuring mainly rock and metal music. I appreciate the music for what it is, it's just not for me.