Just finished Hidaka Ai’s route. Meh. Just glad it’s over, that’s all.

The Idolm@ster Dearly Stars disappointed me in nearly every aspect I could think of:

As a raising/life sim

There are only three stats to manage, plus tiredness. All of them are very easy to raise and keep high. You’d expect that as a teenaged idol you’d have to balance your school life with performances while finding time for training and taking care of your health and getting enough food and rest, that sort of thing, but there are no schedules to worry about or deadlines to meet in Dearly Stars. When you have an audition lined up, your rivals and the organizers will wait as many days and weeks as it takes for you to get your act together. There’s no tension at all.

As a music/rhythm game

Dearly Stars is a game about a musician, but it’s not really a music game, per se. What music there is is pretty bad and the songs your idol can sing are fixed, as are her dance and vocal performances for each one. The player’s involvement consists of picking out outfits, adding a few moves and helping her “memorize” lyrics and “learn” dances through minigames. After all that effort, though, your idol’s success in auditions still depends largely on luck. You might as well not even bother.

I’m not a fan of cutesy-poppy idol music in general, and Ai’s voice grated on me. The same songs sung by the other playable idols are slightly more bearable. Ryo has a soothing, boyish voice (being a trap and all) and Eri’s voice is high and sweet, but Ai is just loud, bordering on screechy. Quite a disappointing experience.

As a dress-up game

Idols are supposed to be cute and fashionable, right? Right, Namco? Oh, you didn’t get the memo? Ah, that explains why your idols only have three outfits with a few palette swaps, some ratty-looking accessories and no hairstyle changes at all. There’s no way to buy outfit or accessories either, you have to wait till Sunday and pray a fan sends you one. Just how poor is Studio 876 anyway?

As a minigame collection

The bulk of the “gameplay” consists of using the touchscreen and stylus to give Ai “lessons” through mini-games. To improve your Vocal skills, you have to fill in missing lyrics in hiragana as in the screenshot on the right. To raise Visual expression, you have to tap little smiley faces (I hate that game) and for Dance skills you have to tap out the correct steps when they reach a particular mark. It’s hard to explain.

I appreciated having something to do other than read long conversations and listen to bad music, and the games even grew on me after a while. It’s just that it’s the same three mini-games from beginning to end. No new games, no new levels, no added difficulty, no surprises. Plus Ai just won’t shut up during them, so you’re playing the same things, getting the same results and hearing the same loud comments throughout the game. And at the end of the day none of your hard work even matters, because the auditions are largely down to luck and probability. Waste of effort.

As a visual novel

The point of the Idolm@ster games, as far as I can tell, is to chronicle the rise of an idol from a nobody to a superstar. To make them more interesting, each girl (or trap) has her own story that plays out over the course of the game. Ai’s story is that her mother is a retired famous idol and so she grew up with a complex about it. As the game goes along, her mother returns to the entertainment world and challenges her, and they have a great showdown at the end of it all.

Good, that’s all well and nice. It’s a bit of a shame that I have to compete with her, because IMO her mom Mai is the greater star. We never get to see her perform, but from what I can see, Mai has better looks, a better sense of style, greater charisma, greater magnetism and just all-around greater “star power.” Ai’s just a loud noisy kid with everyday looks, a squeaky grating voice, average dancing skills and a large head. Hmm, then again apart from the large head part, I just described Japan’s reigning queen of pop Ayumi Hamasaki, so maybe Namco’s on to something here.

That’s just an aside, back to the story. Little things that make visual novels more comfortable to play, like quick saves, quick loading and text-skipping are missing. When you talk to someone and a choice comes up and you get it wrong, they don’t tell you what you did wrong so you can fix it next time. Then there’s the usual visual novel answer choices based purely on guesswork. E.g. “What were you doing?” A. Looking at the boats B. Looking at the sea C. Looking at the whales. Okay, you might guess that C is a little over the top, but why is B “correct” and A “wrong”? And why does it matter what I was looking at?

That’s all minor stuff though. Major problems, I had two. First one: the Stranger’s Family Reunion issue. This is where the game takes things that are new and foreign to the player for granted and doesn’t bother to explain them. Along the way, you’ll meet other idols like Haruka, Yukiho, Makoto, Ami and Azusa that Ai gushes over like they’re the greatest stars on the planet. These events mean nothing to me because I don’t know any of these people. Maybe they’re from previous games or the anime, but how should I know and why should I care?

So anyway, the game goes along, and Ai competes against some of them and gets down on herself on how they’re so much better than her in terms of looks, singing ability, energy etc. That’s easy to believe because Ai sucks so much but still, how should I know? That’s where the second problem comes in: Show, Don’t Tell. Show us their performances, let us hear them sing, let me decide for myself if they’re that awesome or not, don’t make up my mind for me.

Quite frankly, the construction of the game makes these “super-idols” look terrible anyway. If they’re so famous and fantastic, how can Ai stumble her way through the auditions and fall flat on her face several times while performing the same tired songs in the same tired clothes and still beat them handily every time? If I were a fan of those older idols, I’d be quite pissed.

What’s more, since it’s so hard to believe they’re any good at all, the parts of the story that focus on helping Ai work through her inferiority complex and beat these glamorous idols (i.e. the whole game) come across as false and disingenuous. It makes Ai seem like a fraud, like she’s being falsely modest and fishing for compliments when she puts herself down. I just can’t get into a story like that.

Of course, the one time when they did show something, it was completely unimpressive. They make a huge fuss about Hidaka Mai’s hit song “ALIVE” being the greatest song ever, and when you finally get to hear it, it’s a dull, droning Disney-type ballad. Poorly delivered by Ai’s voice actress to boot, like all the other songs before it. That one I could have done without.

Putting my doubts about the way the story was delivered to one side, I must also take issue with the story itself. Not with the ultimate goal of overcoming her mother’s legacy. That part is fine. It’s all the people she faces along the way I have a problem with. They’re not just talentless idols, they’re also lame characters. Why the heck are they so friendly and helpful to their rival? They’re all so eager to compete with her on an even level. They give her advice, they cheer her up when she’s down, they accept their losses like champs.

Damn it, how am I supposed to feel good about my progress when they’re all so kind and generous and my character is a no-talent loudmouth bobblehead? As a result of their cookie-cutter uniform niceness, the only person who did show a bit of personality, Hidaka Mai, became by far the most exciting person in the game. Instead of being all sugar and spice, she could be catty, boastful, playful, mean and crazy in turn. It’s sad when the “last boss” of the game is the one you’re most rooting for by the end.

Conclusion

Whew. I sure wrote a lot for a game I didn’t even enjoy all that much. This is where I add my usual “It wasn’t that bad” disclaimer, and it’s true, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that good either, and the longer it dragged on, the more “not that good” it got. An Idolm@ster with more things to do, better songs, a more likeable main character and a more colorful supporting staff might be a really good game.

I don’t know if the other Idolm@ster games where you play a producer instead of the idol themselves are better at resolving these issues, but I’m not in the mood to find out. I got to see for myself what Idolm@ster is all about, and I’ll have to be satisfied with that.

On to the next game!