Love Live! School Idol Festival
From the
pages of Dengeki G magazine to a hit anime series with two seasons and a
feature-length film and now, the girls from μ's are back on an iOS and Android
mobile game called School Idol Festival. Naturally, it’s a rhythm game
featuring the many songs produced throughout the five years since the Love Live
project was conceived.
But the game isn’t as simple as DJ Max or its many
clones out there. KLab and Bushiroad have added a whole host of features to the
free-to-play game to ensure that once you start, you probably won’t stop and if
you’re a Love Live fan, you may even end up setting alarms through the night
during special in-game events.
The actual
gameplay is easy enough to understand, think Tap Tap Revenge, with nine circles
instead of four or five. The aim is the same as with every other rhythm game.
Try to attain the highest score and longest combo chain possible in a song. Throwing
a wrench in your plans would be the girls themselves.
Each of the nine circles
are filled with an idol group member, be it the girls from μ's or any of the
original characters created by Bushiroad. For players who have watched the
anime, you may be glad to know that the members of A-RISE may eventually be
included in your team, with a playable song being introduced to the Japanese
version recently.
Love Live!
School Idol Festival requires players to have a strategic mind along with fast
fingers and a sense of rhythm. The former is arguably more important as you’ll
need to form the best teams with whatever cards (think group members) you have.
Each card has a main attribute, be it Smile (Red), Pure (Green) or Cool (Blue)
and that particular stat will be the highest among the three.
Even songs
have a main attribute. For example, Wonderful Rush is a Cool song, so you would
want a team filled with Cool members to tackle it in order to gain the highest
score possible. If this still sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry, actually
playing through the game will have you learning the ropes much faster. If you’re
a collector at heart, you’re in luck. New cards are released regularly and
depict the μ's members in various settings and outfits, be it from the various
live performances they held through the course of the anime or from the many
singles group has.
Like any
free-to-play game, there’s an incentive for players to spend actual money. You
need the game’s premium currency called love gems (loveca stones if you’re trawling
through various forums, the Reddit page or happen to be playing the Japanese
version) and it costs S$1.28 for 1 and S$38.98 for 50. They can be used to
expand the limit on how many team members you can have in total, to replenish
your energy (the game calls it Life Points), to continue playing a song after
you’ve failed it midway or to ‘scout’ for Rare, Super Rare and Ultra Rare cards.
A card’s
rarity isn’t solely for its aesthetic value, they serve a practical purpose too,
with most Ultra Rare cards having the best stats in the game. To sweeten the
deal, if you’re scouting for players in bulk by spending 50 love gems/loveca
stones, you gain an additional one other than the ten you’ll be getting
normally.
This encourages players to save up; as the game rewards you with love
gems/loveca stones for completing various tasks or to splash the cash. The
Japanese version introduces an easier way to gain the rarer cards in the game but
I’m getting ahead of myself at this point.
If you’re a
fan of rhythm games, Love Live or both, do try School Idol Festival out. Who
knows, you might just end up squealing over that Ultra Rare card you got and
bragging about it on the School Idol Festival subreddit.
Written by ET
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