GO MY WAY!!
This game is so cool, the premise of the game that is.
Your goal: Raise a school girl into being an Idol under a time limit, sounds cool right? N-no? Well, I think it's cool! But unfortunately even with how cool or uncool that idea is, the game is poorly executed and overall a pretty frustrating mess that I truly wish was more fun to play and way, WAY less repeating.
The main gameplay loop turns around training your girls to raise her 3 skill stats, which are singing, dancing, and posing. Each of the 11 girls you can pick at the start are stronger at one skill but can be weaker at another, and by weaker I mean it's harder for her to learn them. These are predetermined for all characters so it's nothing random, and you'll be thanking the game for giving you that because the rest of the game is full of RNG bullshit.
So every time you do an action it spends an in-game "Week" and you only have 53 weeks to finish the game (I think the starting months can change the number of weeks available.) Though to make things easier just see these as days to keep things simple.
53 actions isn't a lot and especially if you aim for the best ending/rank, but with how frustrating this game is you'll want them to be over quickly.
The actions you can do in this game are either training, passing an audition, or going outside with the girl for some sort of free-time event thing. All of these are boring and are not fun to play, the training is made in a minigame collection (only 5) and god they are either luck-based or just really tough and frustrating, my favorite one was the camera/pose minigame.
So after training your girls you can do the auditions which is a minigame about gaining points based on the stats you trained for and it's really confusing I still don't understand how it fully works but lots of points = good and not enough points = bad. Finishing an audition gives said amount of fans to get a better idol rank, the issue is that this game is very greedy with fans and it takes a lot of auditions to get to rank A/S. I ended up finishing my playthrough at rank C.
The game ends with a final concert based on many stats that I cannot understand it makes no sense and the game said nothing about it so I guess I was just supposed to know they'd be throwing bullshit at me at the end of the game. And yes I failed the last concert.
The reason why nobody played this game is that it's Japanese only and stuck on the Xbox360, I'd say the language barrier isn't that much of a big deal, I used an MTL tool to translate the game at first but then I quickly realize 90% of the lines in this game are recycled and your character just says the same thing every day so I guess a translation would only help for menu managing.
Do I hate this game? Not really it's still playable but awfully boring and frustrating at times but I can see why people would enjoy playing it, though it seems that the "classic" type of idolm@ster games are dead.
Will this game live rent-free inside my head for decades? Most likely
Does this game have soul? Yes.
And is Miki number one? She is!!
This game is so cool, the premise of the game that is.
Your goal: Raise a school girl into being an Idol under a time limit, sounds cool right? N-no? Well, I think it's cool! But unfortunately even with how cool or uncool that idea is, the game is poorly executed and overall a pretty frustrating mess that I truly wish was more fun to play and way, WAY less repeating.
The main gameplay loop turns around training your girls to raise her 3 skill stats, which are singing, dancing, and posing. Each of the 11 girls you can pick at the start are stronger at one skill but can be weaker at another, and by weaker I mean it's harder for her to learn them. These are predetermined for all characters so it's nothing random, and you'll be thanking the game for giving you that because the rest of the game is full of RNG bullshit.
So every time you do an action it spends an in-game "Week" and you only have 53 weeks to finish the game (I think the starting months can change the number of weeks available.) Though to make things easier just see these as days to keep things simple.
53 actions isn't a lot and especially if you aim for the best ending/rank, but with how frustrating this game is you'll want them to be over quickly.
The actions you can do in this game are either training, passing an audition, or going outside with the girl for some sort of free-time event thing. All of these are boring and are not fun to play, the training is made in a minigame collection (only 5) and god they are either luck-based or just really tough and frustrating, my favorite one was the camera/pose minigame.
So after training your girls you can do the auditions which is a minigame about gaining points based on the stats you trained for and it's really confusing I still don't understand how it fully works but lots of points = good and not enough points = bad. Finishing an audition gives said amount of fans to get a better idol rank, the issue is that this game is very greedy with fans and it takes a lot of auditions to get to rank A/S. I ended up finishing my playthrough at rank C.
The game ends with a final concert based on many stats that I cannot understand it makes no sense and the game said nothing about it so I guess I was just supposed to know they'd be throwing bullshit at me at the end of the game. And yes I failed the last concert.
The reason why nobody played this game is that it's Japanese only and stuck on the Xbox360, I'd say the language barrier isn't that much of a big deal, I used an MTL tool to translate the game at first but then I quickly realize 90% of the lines in this game are recycled and your character just says the same thing every day so I guess a translation would only help for menu managing.
Do I hate this game? Not really it's still playable but awfully boring and frustrating at times but I can see why people would enjoy playing it, though it seems that the "classic" type of idolm@ster games are dead.
Will this game live rent-free inside my head for decades? Most likely
Does this game have soul? Yes.
And is Miki number one? She is!!