I started playing SIF during one of the worst periods of my life, and quite honestly it made it worse. Love Live School Idol Festival is filled with lots of things. Good songs, good characters, good art (sometimes), memorable story moments, and quite honestly, great gameplay. However, SIF by it’s nature of being a free to play gacha games has a lot of nasty components, and it took me a long time to be level headed and mature enough to handle them.

The game is designed so that people who feel lonely, depressed, or want some semblance of control in their lives are reeled in day after day to feel validation . There’s the daily log in goals, that usually offer a pittance in gold or friend points will net you 1 love gem or even a scouting ticket if you just keep up the log in streak every day (psst ignore how many of these made up currencies that you’ll need to even pull an 11 scout in with less than 3% chances of even getting a UR). Theres how the events are set up, and how you’ll need a beefed up team to even hope of getting into the tier you want or the game gets so tedious you set up an AFK team to just play maps so you can get the event rewards without wasting your time. There’s the fake currency itself, with love gems being awarded every few days, for completing a song on expert/master for the first time, or FC’ing on expert or higher but the way that the boxes are set up is that you’ll have to be stockpiling for months until you get what you want. Then there’s the cards themselves, with a good chunk of them focusing on sexualizing these teen girls or putting them in uncomfortable poses. There’s the fatphobia in the main story and how characters who aren’t European/American/Japanese are treated weirdly. There’s the fact that there’s even a function in the game that has the girls say lines if you tap on them that makes it really creepy. There’s the whole fan culture that behaves as if sacrificing your mental health, physical health, and financial stability over jpegs is good and healthy actually, and lord help you if you have actual criticisms or don’t like certain characters or groups!

And yet, I still got back into playing SIF during it’s last month of existence. Granted, I’m a much mentally healthier and mature person now. I took breaks when I got annoyed and limited my play time. I have other games and hobbies to focus my time now and my self worth isn’t based on how many FC’s I got or my UR count.

I enjoyed playing SIF during it’s last moments. I played new songs as well as old ones that I missed as a teen, and the way that SIF sets up it’s beat map is unique to it and quite engaging. A majority of the maps are charted really well and the difficulty curve is handled pretty well. I had friends who never played SIF jump in and work their way up from normal to Master in less than a month, and quite honestly I think that the care that’s put into the charting should be taken note of and applied to other franchises.

My favorite experience of all was playing with my friends though. Back when I played it, I don’t think there was an option to play co-op or set up rooms and even if there was I didn’t really have friends to play it with. But in those last few weeks of SIF, me and my friends set up near daily rooms to have fun, choose silly songs, cheer if someone FC’d, complain about the poor servers, spam stamps to make an auditory hellscape, and share what we scouted with our event rewards. Those conversations were the highlight of my SIF experience and I wonder if SIF2 will have that same feeling.

TL:DR SIF is a great rhythm game, especially with friends, it just has the baggage of being a gacha and a love live game.