Definitely not done with this game but done with the first playthrough so I might as well post a review. I've only played this and The Idolmaster SP however so keep that in mind.
Probably one of the most enjoyable things for me in games is building a group of characters and seeing how they interact. It's pretty difficult to have interesting character interactions when you don't know who the player is going to have together so not many games do it, (Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Suikoden to a degree,) so whenever it appears in a game I always cherish it.
Idolmaster 2 doesn't have a massive amount of unique interactions between the characters (or maybe I just got unlucky) but even without them the game has a very nice feeling of building a group and playing their strengths (and weaknesses) off of each other. Certainly enough of a sense to fill in the blanks with your own imagination (which this sort of system pretty much requires of the player anyway.)
I think it's able to do this because as with all the other Idolmaster games the character writing is consistently solid, keeping a really good balance between comedy and occasionally some drama - admittedly nowhere near as much drama as SP - but SP was a more story focused game to begin with.
Gameplay-wise there was enough depth and complexity here to keep the game enjoyable the whole way through without having it get bogged down in minutiae, which would likely destroy the character aspect of the game. A ton of replayability as well as is usually the case for these games.
Not much else to say, it was just a really good management experience!
Probably one of the most enjoyable things for me in games is building a group of characters and seeing how they interact. It's pretty difficult to have interesting character interactions when you don't know who the player is going to have together so not many games do it, (Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Suikoden to a degree,) so whenever it appears in a game I always cherish it.
Idolmaster 2 doesn't have a massive amount of unique interactions between the characters (or maybe I just got unlucky) but even without them the game has a very nice feeling of building a group and playing their strengths (and weaknesses) off of each other. Certainly enough of a sense to fill in the blanks with your own imagination (which this sort of system pretty much requires of the player anyway.)
I think it's able to do this because as with all the other Idolmaster games the character writing is consistently solid, keeping a really good balance between comedy and occasionally some drama - admittedly nowhere near as much drama as SP - but SP was a more story focused game to begin with.
Gameplay-wise there was enough depth and complexity here to keep the game enjoyable the whole way through without having it get bogged down in minutiae, which would likely destroy the character aspect of the game. A ton of replayability as well as is usually the case for these games.
Not much else to say, it was just a really good management experience!