The iDOLM@STER ONE FOR ALL

I have mixed feelings about OFA. At first glance, the game looks very similar to Idolmaster 2, but it focuses on such different things that the two games are not even the same genre in my opinion. Most of the simulation and strategy systems have been simplified or removed entirely. You don't have to worry about your idols' stress levels because they don't exist. Danketsu also doesn't exist, which was a core stat in im@s2 tying together the simulation mechanics with the scoring system. The game is endless, so time management is almost irrelevant. CD sales and chart rankings have been removed, making scoring only matter for clearing stages without any further implications or motive to exceed your scores. You no longer have to juggle the attention of fans in multiple regions, as there are no regions or attention rate. Picking up reporters is simplified in such a way that you have no freedom to pick up a reporter of your choice. OFA dumbs down so much of what made im@s2 fun and replayable that it was pretty jarring for me. It's a heavily casualized experience with a very different appeal, but some players may find OFA more enjoyable depending on what they're looking for in an Idolmaster game.

OFA allows you to produce all 13 idols in 765 Pro endlessly. At the beginning of the game you can select three characters to get started, and you'll unlock the rest as your Producer Rank rises. The game is divided into 12 week long seasons. At the beginning of each season, the president of 765 Pro will give you an objective, such as making a certain amount of money, clearing a number of festivals, scoring above a given value, and so forth. Complete the objective by the end of the season and your Producer Rank will rise. If you surpass the objective by a certain amount, it will clear a bonus goal which results in a cash bonus. To reach producer rank 20 and above, you'll need to clear these bonus goals to qualify for the rank up. Ultimately the season objectives are very easy to meet, and at most will only take up half the season. Some of them, like the score goals, can even be beaten in one week. Along with the endless nature of the game, this makes time management pretty much irrelevant, and you can play stress-free.

At the start of each week you can select which idol you'd like to use as leader, and can choose which other idols you'd like to take with you on a job from the scheduling screen. The jobs available for your idols are promotions, auditions, lives, and festivals. All jobs take up the full week, and give differing amounts of fans, money, and experience. Lessons still exist, but they don't take up any time and can only be done once per week. Rather than increasing your stats permanently, lessons now provide a temporary stat bonus for a handful of weeks. Jobs for your idols have a rank associated with them, indicating their relative difficulty level. The lowest rank is E3, and increases to E2,E1,D3...A1. There are also some S3 rank jobs in the vanilla game, but most S Rank content is exclusive to DLC. Your idols have ranks themselves, and the main goal of the game is to increase their rank by clearing rank-up festivals. In order to qualify for a rank-up fes, the idol must have a requisite number of fans, which you'll accumulate by doing various jobs. Once an idol reaches rank A, they'll be able to attempt the Idol Extreme fes. Win that, and you'll have cleared that idol's story. At the end of the summer and winter seasons, there will be an All-Star Live which all 13 idols can participate in. It's essentially a three song set in which you shoot for a combined total score. After clearing the All-Star Live, you can watch a pre-rendered encore video with all 13 characters on stage performing a song. Due to the lack of time management or strategy mechanics, the game quickly boils down to a long grind of gathering fans and ranking up your idols. There are too many characters to rank them all up evenly without it taking extremely long, so I recommend focusing on 3-5 of your favourites until you've beaten the game, then going back for the others.

Communication elements have been toned down quite a bit. Not only are they simplified in respect to managing your unit's intimacy and status (since those no longer exist), but communication events themselves are shorter and have fewer dialogue choices. Many events don't even have any interactivity and simply award you an automatic perfect communication after watching the scene. The main purpose of communication is to increase each idol's memory level. An idol will gain a small amount of experience towards memory level for any job they participate in, but communication events give much more experience. OFA introduces "contact" events (ふれあい), which can optionally be selected from a menu at the start of each week. These make up the bulk of the game's communication. As your idols rank up and your affection with them increases, new contact events will become available. What surprised me most about contact events is how they largely have nothing to do with work or idol industry-related activities. Most of them are just casually hanging out with the characters in and around the office, talking about everyday things. It's often easy to forget that you're playing as an idol producer and not just hanging out with the girls. In previous im@s games, communication largely occurred at work, with discussion related to the job at hand. The characters might ask for advice about what to discuss on a talk show, express concerns about the difficulty of acting in front of a green screen, and so forth. These events contributed a lot to making it feel like you were involved in the industry. OFA does have scenes that occur at promotional work, but these are very short, few in number, and don't have any interactivity. The contact events are enjoyable for what they are, but I feel like they move the game away from the franchise's identity of being about the idol industry, and more towards generic waifu bait. Some players may appreciate the more intimate nature of these events, but I personally miss the work-related communication.

Each time an idol advances rank to a new letter (like from E to D), there will be a short story scene. These are extremely thin, and are all less developed than even the most phoned-in stories from im@s2. I never felt engaged in any character's story in OFA, and found their resolutions lacked sufficient buildup. At this point in the franchise's history, I think the writers may have been running out of ideas for what to do with these characters. Between the previous games and other adaptations, they've gone through enough scenarios that it must be hard to come up with new ideas. There's not much of an overarching narrative, either. There is a rival character, Leon, who shows up a couple times to exchange a few lines with Producer, and acts as an optional post-game boss, but these events are so short and isolated that it almost feels like they were tacked on last-minute. Leon never even interacts with the idols. OFA was the first game in the series to have story DLC, which makes the disappointing vanilla story content all the more suspicious. I haven't played the DLC and don't intend to, so I can't comment on its quality, but its existence alone is enough to feel scammed out of a good story in the vanilla content.

Improving your idols' capabilities works differently than previous games. Idols can increase their level by accumulating experience points, which increases their Dance, Visual, and Vocal stats. They also gain skill points (SP) upon levelling up, which can be spent to acquire skills. You also gain SP from clearing rank-up festivals, which is where the vast majority of your SP will come from. You only gain 1 SP per level until around level 25, while rank-up fests give you a lot more points, and I beat the Idol Extreme for the first time with character levels in the low 20s. Each character has a skill board where you can spend your SP to acquire skill panels on the board. To unlock new skill panels, you must have acquired an adjacent panel and meet a minimum rank requirement. Each character's skill board is arranged differently, so some characters are able to get certain skills at lower ranks than others. The simplest skills are stat bonuses and percentage score bonuses for certain appeals, but the rest can only be explained alongside the score mechanics.

Stage performance gameplay in OFA looks like a repeat of im@s2 at first glance, but there's a lot that has changed mechanically, and it's the one area where I feel OFA improves over its predecessor. Like in im@s2, you press the face buttons on the controller to the beat of the music to do Dance, Visual, and Vocal appeals. Each appeal has a score multiplier associated with it, which will decrease each time you appeal with that stat, while the multiplier of the appeal to the right will increase. In im@s2, multipliers would decay and increase by fixed amounts regardless of their current value, and had a net negative change. There was also a hard cap of 1.50 for multipliers (3.00 during burst appeal). OFA utilizes scaling for multiplier adjustment, such that a lower multiplier will increase by a larger amount than a higher one, and a higher multiplier will decrease by a larger amount than a lower one. This has the effect of introducing a "soft cap" on multipliers at 2.50, though this soft cap can be raised by boosting the rate of multiplier gain via skills on the skill board, and with Mami's unique burst skill. Memory appeals still function as a simultaneous appeal with all three stats, but instead of resetting multipliers to 1.10 they now increase all three multipliers by a fixed number of points, ignoring the usual scaling and allowing you to exceed the soft cap. This makes strategic timing of memory appeals very different than in im@s2; rather than being good for bringing a low multiplier back up to par, they're now ideal for raising a high multiplier even higher, which is especially useful right before a burst. Additionally, memory appeals have a shorter cooldown than they did previously. You have a voltage gauge that increases by a small amount with each regular appeal, and a larger amount with memory appeals. When the gauge is full, you can activate a burst appeal, which is a set of 10 specific appeals with multipliers doubled. Burst appeal score is now derived from your Dance, Visual, and Vocal stats, since Danketsu no longer exists. Each character has a unique burst skill that either activates during or after a burst appeal. A lot of them simply raise the multiplier for a certain appeal type, but some have more interesting effects. For example, Azusa has a random chance to recover a memory appeal with each successful appeal during her burst, and Mami increases the multiplier gain rate of appeals for the remainder of the song's duration. Memory appeals can still be chained together with multiple characters, as in im@s2, but this is now a skill that must be unlocked. The effect of memory appeals and burst appeals can also be boosted with certain skills, similar to the effects of some amulets in im@s2. A new feature in OFA is "burst charge", which allows you to activate the burst skills of multiple characters simultaneously during a burst appeal. After unlocking burst charge skills, the player can use a memory appeal after the voltage gauge has been filled to "charge" the burst for a second character, and again for a third.

Festival battles are similar to im@s2, with the goal being to get a higher score than your opponent while using memory and burst appeals to attack each other's voltage gauges. Festival opponents now have unique burst skills of their own that you'll need to watch out for. In a new twist, burst appeals no longer prevent the opponent from doing appeals while they're active, and it's now possible to counter an opponent's burst by activating a burst yourself while theirs is still active. This has the effect of ending their burst appeal early, and can be used to prevent them from activating skills that are triggered at the end of a burst. Of course, you need to unlock the burst counter skill for an active character in order to actually use it. A small but important change from im@s2 is that memory appeals can no longer decrease the opponent's voltage if their gauge is already full, though burst appeals still can. This seems to be intended to make charging your burst safer than it otherwise would be if opponents could cancel your charge with memory appeals. Rank-up festivals are uniquely played in a best-of-three format, with the option to change songs and swap out supporting characters between rounds.

Between these new skills and changes to mechanics, scoring and festival battles are a lot more interesting in OFA. The mid-game is particularly fun, since by that point you'll have made some decisions on the skill boards to specialize your characters and fit them together in a unit that compliments one another. I enjoy all the number crunching that goes into preparing a unit and deciding upon a good strategy for appeals in a stage performance. Unfortunately, as you start filling out more of the skill board by the endgame, characters start looking more like clones of one another, with only their unique burst skills differentiating them. I wish that there was something that forced you to specialize your characters even in the endgame, whether that's by making more skills exclusive to certain characters, limiting the number of skills they can equip at a time, reducing the available SP so that you can't fill out the whole skill board, or even having a time limit on the game so that you don't have enough time to gain all that SP. As much as I like the skill board and the scoring mechanics in OFA, it's only good in isolation, and doesn't weave together with the rest of the game. While im@s2 had more primitive scoring mechanics, it was deeply interwoven with all the other systems, such as time management, CD sales, and Danketsu. It's disappointing that OFA's scoring system is wasted on a game that otherwise isn't very interesting, and I long for a game that combines OFA's scoring and skill board with im@s2's overall game system. It would add a lot of replay value to trying out different combinations of characters and builds. As it stands, OFA's gameplay is really only interesting in the mid-game, before it devolves into a long, repetitive, and easy grind.

How much you enjoy OFA will depend largely on whether or not you want strategy and simulation systems in an Idolmaster game. If you don't care about those things, and just want a relaxing experience, this is a game for you. Otherwise, you may find it shallow and boring. No matter what, OFA can be enjoyed by anyone who likes the music, characters, and Stage For You mode. I appreciate the details that were put into the 765 Pro office, like how the girls will write messages on the whiteboard for each other's birthdays and put up seasonal decorations. It's also nice that you can rewatch story scenes from the Album section accessed through the main menu, which is very convenient if you don't want to replay the entire game to view them again. I enjoyed the game enough to finish all 13 characters' stories, but my motivation to play more at this point is pretty low, especially compared to my motivation to replay im@s2 or even Dearly Stars. I have some interest in trying a single-character challenge, but outside of that I don't see what value a repeat playthrough would hold.