The iDOLM@STER 2

I've been playing a ton of Idolmaster 2 over the past six months, and it's become one of my all-time favourite games. There's so much to love here. Whether you're a strategy fanatic playing to improve your CD sales records, or a fan of the characters playing for the story and cute interactions, or even just a fan of the music, Idolmaster 2 has it all.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a producer who has been hired by 765 Productions (pronounced Namco Pro), and tasked with leading an idol unit to fame. From a total of nine characters, you can select three of them to make up your unit, one of whom acts as leader and gets a unique story arc. While there are thirteen idols in 765 Pro, four of them cannot be produced. The members of Ryuuguu Komachi (Iori, Ami, Azusa, and their producer Ritsuko) are off-limits due to acting as a rival unit in the story. This is a pretty major complaint among fans of the series, especially fans of those characters. The PS3 version includes an extra episode where you can work with the members of Ryuuguu Komachi for a few weeks. The extra episode is shorter and more on-rails than the main game, but it's not bad for what it is, and is one of the reasons why the PS3 version is better than the 360 version. Even with 9 characters to choose from, there's a lot of replay value in trying different leaders and combinations of characters to make up your unit.

In order to make your unit successful, you'll need to schedule activities for them. The game is broken up into weekly sessions that add up to a year in total. Each week you'll have a chance to schedule activities for that week, then carry them out. Different activities take up different amounts of time: lessons and shopping are the shortest, extended lessons and promotional activities are longer, and performances are the longest. On a given week, there's usually a few dozen activities to choose from, spread out across 6 different regions of Japan. The regional division is important, since each region has a separate fan count and attention rate. By doing activities in one region, the fan count and attention rate in that region will improve. If you ignore a region, their attention rate will go down, which causes a percentage reduction in that region's fans each week, as well as lowering CD sales, but more on that later. Each activity has a different cost or income, and results in a different boost to fans and attention rate. For example, general promotional activities like tie-up jobs or voice acting are a great source of income, but don't get a lot of fans or attention. Paid promotional activities such as making a commercial will give a massive boost to attention rate, but is very expensive. Auditions for televised performances and live concerts are both modest sources of income and fan gain, and some television programs will even broadcast nation-wide, giving a chance to bump up all regions' attention rate at once. Festivals are high-risk, high-reward endeavours, as they are the most difficult performances to succeed in, but give great rewards, especially considering how early some of the more difficult festivals can be undertaken. In addition to scheduled activities, each week you'll also have a chance to communicate with the idols by doing morning greetings, and playing a short game like janken or guessing impersonations at night.

In order to succeed at stage performances, your unit will need to build up their stats. There are three general stats that are used in performances (Dance, Visual, and Vocal), as well as two secondary stats (Memories and Danketsu) with more unique function. Each character has initial Dance, Visual, and Vocal stats, which can be increased further by doing lessons. Lessons involve simple minigames associated with one of the three stats, with your performance in the minigame affecting how much the stat will increase. You can also get bonuses to these stats through outfits and accessories, which can bought with money you make from activities. Memories are increased by doing promotional activities. During promotional activities, you'll need to listen to your idols' concerns and help guide them by selecting dialogue options. Depending on how well you communicate with the character, their memory gauge will increase, eventually levelling up to give them more memory appeals. Danketsu is the most complex stat to increase. Every week the unit's Danketsu will increase by a certain amount depending on the current status of the unit. There are around a dozen different unit statuses (visible in the top-right of the screen) the unit can be in depending on how well you're communicating with them, how successful you've been at jobs lately, how fatigued they are from overwork, and what stats you're focusing on building. For example, there is a "fighting" status where two of the girls get in a fight and the third feels caught in the middle. There's a "showoff" status where one of the girls is super-enthusiastic while the others are annoyed at her. There's a "dancing" status where the unit wants to dance, which will boost the effects of dance lessons. Other statuses include "burned out", "enthusiastic", and more. Keeping your unit in a good status will increase the amount their Danketsu increases each week, but that's not the only way to raise Danketsu. You can also increase it by succeeding at cheers before a performance, releasing a new song, receiving fan mail (which has manipulable conditions), and more. All the specifics of increasing Danketsu are a little too in-depth for the scope of this review, but the important point is that trying to build it efficiently adds more strategy to the game. So what does Danketsu actually do? Well, let's talk about scoring.

To succeed at stage performances you must get a high enough score. For auditions and live concerts, the score threshold is fixed, while for festivals you need to get a higher score than your opponent (more on that later). Your score increases each time you press a button to the beat of the song in order to do an "appeal." There are separate appeals for Dance, Visual, and Vocal, each mapped to a different button. The score you get from an appeal depends on the unit's respective stat, the current multiplier for that appeal type, and the song's BPM (lower BPM songs give more score per appeal, since higher BPM songs have more beats to appeal on). Appeal multipliers change as you perform appeals; appealing with a particular stat will lower the multiplier for that appeal, while raising another. The decrease in one appeal's multiplier is greater than the amount it increases another, so if you do nothing but normal appeals, the multipliers will eventually degenerate to the point that any appeal gives negligible score. One way to reset the multipliers is by using "memory appeals", which are gained by levelling up Memory. Memory appeals act like a simultaneous appeal with all three stats, while also setting all three multipliers to 1.10. The other way to reset multipliers is with a "burst appeal," which can be performed upon filling the burst gauge. Each time you successfully do an appeal, the burst gauge will increase a little bit. As with score, the gauge fill rate is scaled inversely with the song's BPM. Memory appeals will boost the burst gauge by a large amount, and if you combo multiple memory appeals back-to-back with different characters, each successive memory appeal will increase the burst gauge by an even greater amount. When the burst gauge is full, you can press R1 to activate the burst appeal, which is a series of specific appeals you must perform in sequence. The sequence is different for each character; for example, Hibiki has a lot of dance appeals in her burst, while Chihaya has more vocal appeals. Unlike regular appeals, the score from burst appeals isn't derived from Dance, Visual, or Vocal stats, but instead is derived from the unit's Danketsu stat. The multipliers during a burst appeal are doubled from the state of the multipliers at the time of triggering it, and afterwards are set to a value based on the number of appeals of each type in the burst (so for Hibiki, who has many dance appeals in her burst, the dance appeal multiplier will be high after her burst is finished). In addition to the above scoring mechanics, there is a chain bonus awarded for getting perfect timing on appeals of any type in a row. The window for perfect timing is fairly generous, so getting high scores is less about being skilled at timed button presses, and more about how you've build your unit and how you manage the multipliers. Due to the different ways that stats are built and score can be derived, the general rule is that early game score comes largely from chain bonus and outfit/accessory stat boosts, mid-game score comes largely from Dance/Visual/Vocal stats built with lessons, and end-game score comes largely from Danketsu. When building your team, it's important to consider both short and long term goals for maximizing scoring.

Festivals have a somewhat different strategic approach than auditions or lives, because they are like a battle between your unit and an opposing unit. Whichever unit gets the highest score wins. What makes festivals interesting is that using memory and burst appeals will decrease the opponent's burst gauge, and opponents have access to these tools just as you do. What's more, while a burst appeal is active, the opposing unit cannot do any appeals, and has to wait it out. These rules make festivals a more aggressive affair than other performances, since you want to burst as much as possible, and prevent your opponent from getting chances to burst themselves. Slower BPM songs tend to be good choices for festivals, since their burst appeals will last longer and hold the opponent at bay, whereas faster BPM songs are generally better for auditions and lives due to their higher max chain potential. I already mentioned how outfits and accessories give stat bonuses, but there's one other piece of equipment I've left out until now: amulets. Amulets have no effect on stats, but have a wide variety of unique effects that are useful for stage performances. These include increasing the rate that the burst gauge fills, increasing score for certain types of appeals, decreasing the rate of multiplier degeneration, shielding your burst gauge from being attacked by a festival opponent, and many more. There are dozens of different amulets, each one purchasable in a different prefecture of Japan after doing a performance there. Different amulets will be useful depending on your build and the type of performance you're doing (audition, live, or festival).

Reporters are a neat feature that add another layer of strategy to the game. There are five different reporters you can meet, and they move around Japan each week. In the scheduling screen, you can see where they currently are, and if you do a performance in that area there will be a chance (around 50%) that the reporter will approach you and offer to report on your unit. Each reporter has a different effect, including affecting the stat gain from lessons, fan gain, monetary income, and the speed that the burst gauge increases. Whether the effect is positive or negative depends on whether you succeeded or failed at the performance just before you met them. A good performance results in a good report, and thus a positive effect, while a failed performance results in a bad report with negative effects. The reporter will stay with your group for four weeks until leaving, including the week you picked them up, although they'll leave you earlier if you pick up another reporter during that period, since you can only have one reporter at a time. The bonuses afforded by reporters are substantial, so it can be worth going out of your way to pick up a reporter when you think you'll need them for the next few weeks, like if you need to train your stats soon or want faster burst gauge to take on a difficult festival. Likewise, if you unintentionally picked up a reporter while doing work, you may want to rethink your plan for the next few weeks to take advantage of them.

The main goal you should be planning for throughout the game is maximizing CD sales. You can release a new single once every 8 weeks, up to 5 times total per playthrough. After selecting the song, there is a four week period before its release for you to promote the song, followed by a four week period of sales, after which you can select the next song. You can wait longer to release your next song if you like, and depending on the situation there can be merit to doing so. CD sales are determined by three main factors: fan count, fan attention rate, and high score during the song's promotional period. Sales are highest in the first week of release, and decrease in the following weeks. There's also a progressively higher sales multiplier given to each single you release, so each song is almost certain to sell more than the last. Finally, you can improve your sales even more by triggering special sales states. These states have effects like boosting a song's sales multiplier upon release, temporarily halting sales decay, and reviving sales of an old song. They can randomly be triggered when succeeding at a stage performance corresponding to a given sales state, and you can boost your chances by performing the favourite song of one of the characters in your unit, or with certain accessory setups. Ultimately, luck plays a big factor in triggering them. Sales number are important since they determine the position of your singles in the charts, a nation-wide ranking of all the idol units in Japan. As you land songs in higher chart positions, better job opportunities will become available for scheduling, yielding more income and greater fan growth. These jobs are also more difficult, with higher score thresholds needed to succeed in auditions and lives, and tougher festival opponents.

Ultimately, the goal of the game is to win awards at the Idol Academy Awards Ceremony at the end of the year. There are 6 awards, with requirements to win based on peak chart position, total fan count, and winning a "boss" festival in certain regions that becomes available when your fan count in that region surpasses a certain threshold. Depending on which awards you win, the game's ending will change, and is also different for each character chosen as leader. Beyond that, after the credits and ending you will receive an assessment from the president of 765 Pro, judging your performance on various factors like top chart position, high score, total sales, etc. Getting an S-rank assessment is even harder than winning all the awards in one playthrough, so this should be your ultimate goal. In fact, in the PS3 version you can only get an S-rank assessment on Hyper mode, a hard mode exclusive to the PS3 version which features more difficult stage performances, tougher festival opponents, and more competitive charts. Even after getting S-rank, you can continue to push further by trying to break your personal records for sales and fan count, which the game saves for you to see. Trying to max sales obsessively reaches an annoying breaking point due to special sales states being random, but it is a lot of fun to play without resets and see how well you can do. In general I would advise against resetting in this game, whether it's to re-roll for a random sales state or to correct a mistake. It really doesn't feel like the designers had that playstyle in mind when making the game, and you'll miss out on a lot of the fun of working through your mistakes. This is a game that's worth playing many times over, so rather than trying to go for a perfect playthrough, I think it's best to go with the flow and learn from your mistakes. There's a lot of replay value purely from refining your strategies and trying to break your personal records. It's worth noting that with each subsequent playthrough, you carry over any outfits, accessories, amulets, and money that you've gotten in previous playthroughs, but stats do not carry over.

Each character has their own story arc that you will see and participate in when they're chosen as leader of the unit, but the overarching structure of the game and certain story events are shared by all characters. The shared story focuses on beating two rival units, fellow 765 Pro unit Ryuuguu Komachi and 961 Pro unit Jupiter, on your way to the Idol Academy Award Ceremony. This involves a few required festival battles periodically throughout the year. While the structure and outcome of these events is always the same, the dialogue in some scenes is different depending on your unit's leader. It's neat to see how these scenes play out differently with different characters, and I found Yukiho's variations especially entertaining. However, it's the unique story arcs that really set each character apart. Every leader has unique events spaced throughout the year which occur at the end of certain weeks (so they won't interrupt your schedule). These events give a much closer look at the leader, adding depth to their backstory, personal life, and goals. The stories can be very different in tone and content. For instance, Makoto's story is very cute and funny, as it shows her training to become more cute and feminine, despite being a natural tomboy. Chihaya's is much more dramatic, focusing on her tragic backstory and its psychological effects on her. Takane's story is full of mystery and intrigue, as it becomes apparent that she's been secretly meeting with a record executive behind your back. My favourite story was Yukiho's, which is about her emotional journey to overcome her anxieties and gain self-confidence. It's beautifully done and made me cry at the end. I enjoyed playing through every character's story, though I couldn't help but feel some of them were phoned-in. For example, Hibiki and Yayoi are two of my favourite characters, but their stories are fairly lacklustre and unmemorable. The inconsistent quality of the stories is one of my biggest complaints about the game overall.

The dialogue throughout the game is great. With the exception of some dramatic events, it's mostly lighthearted, funny dialogue. Outside of story events, most of the interaction with characters occurs during promotional activities, in which you talk to the idols and give them advice during work. There are many different promotional activities, each with a completely unique event for each character, so even after 9 playthroughs it's unlikely you'll have seen them all. What's more, some of the "wrong" dialogue choices can lead to funny results, so there's a lot of variation if you don't mind not getting perfect communication. Like I mentioned earlier, I feel it's most fun to just go with the flow in this game even if it's not optimal. In addition to promotional activities, there are some events with characters in your unit which can randomly pop up at the end of the week during the early game (these are separate from the leader's story events). I love it when these pop up, since they're all very cute and funny, and include some of the most memorable scenes in the game. The voice acting for all the idols is top-notch. Even some of the minor characters like Kotori and Hokuto (my husbando) are exceptionally well-acted, adding a lot of flavour to their scenes. The only characters whom I don't like hearing are the 765 Pro president and Kuroi, since they're a little overacted. I'm pretty sure they're intended to be over the top, but it just doesn't work for me.

As one would expect of a game about the music industry, great effort was put into the music. The PS3 version has 20 songs to choose from for your unit, and every character can sing all of them. There's not a bad song in the bunch, and some of them are downright fantastic, like Do-Dai, Smoky Thrill, and Kiramekirari. The music team didn't skimp out on the background music either, which plays a huge role in setting the mood and making the overall experience so damn fun. The soundtrack does wonders for elevating the mood of each scene and transporting you into this wonderful world of pop music and idols.

Last but not least, I can't review this game without mentioning Stage For You, a mode separate from the main game in which you can freely put together a unit, or solo character, dress them up, select a song and stage, then watch them perform. In the main game, you can watch your unit perform encores after succeeding at a stage performance, but I usually skip them since I want to focus on the gameplay and my outfit/accessory setup is usually some unfashionable meta build. It's really awesome to have a separate mode for watching performances and dressing up the idols purely for fashion. You can also use the members of Ryuuguu Komachi in Stage For You after you unlock them, and can mix them together freely with the rest of 765 Pro. The selection of outfits and stages is initially limited, but these will expand as you unlock them in the main game. One of the things that makes this game so cool is the near limitless combinations of units you can make. You could spend hours in Stage For You playing around with different combinations of characters for each song, creating your personal ideal version. If you like fooling around, you can have characters perform songs that don't really fit their image, like having Ami sing the serious songs or Makoto sing the cute ones (sorry Makoto, I know the cute songs fit you deep down).

This has become my go-to casual game, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Even having completed the game 9 times (once with each character as leader) I still want to keep playing with different units, or just play around in Stage For You. It's become an obsession, and I find myself daydreaming about scenarios involving the characters. The worst thing I can say about it is that there are way too many DLC songs and outfits, and they're all absurdly expensive, but I've never bought any DLC and I'm very satisfied with the content on the disk. I recommend the PS3 version over the 360, since the PS3 version has more songs, more outfits, the extra episode, and a harder difficulty option.