So because recently there was an announcement for an Idolish 7 anime, I decided to step foot into mobile idol game black hole. 😂 Unfortunately the I7 music game made me nauseated and none of the character interactions really drew me in. Someone on twitter suggested I try out Yumeiro Cast which has individual romance scenarios with all the guys + heroine and a more simplified music game. I was drawn in by the music game, the romance scenarios and the artwork courtesey of Fifs, the artist who worked on Prince of Stride!

The game features live 2D during all the scenarios (not counting the artwork for gacha cards.) There’s a main scenario with all the guys that unlocks as you level up, and then there’s the romance scenario with each individual guy. As you play songs, and visit the break room, you raise affection with whatever guy you want. Please note only the “main” guy of each of your “cast” is the one that’s gonna be getting the affection.

Speaking of cast, the reason its called cast is in fact because the setting of the whole thing is “broadway musical”. So as you play the music game, you pick a “cast” of boys to help you increase your score. There’s 3 types of “affiliations” with each song: Music, Dance and Story. Each song has its own affiliation so you want to match up the right card with the song’s “status” to get that bar at the top filled up as much as you can. This means that even if you are awful at the music game, you can still get S rank thanks to your cards.

Also there’s sometimes outfit bonuses for certain songs which will indicate a little “hat” icon on the cast member as you can see above. There’s an ICHU cross collaboration event going on and I have 3 of the cards from there giving me an event point up bonus. It takes a bit of time to get used to the music game but at first, just playing all versions of the song in Normal & Easy should be good enough to get you started.

Let’s face it though, like 99% of all Japanese mobile games it’s all about the cards. Having better cards allows you to clear songs with more points, get event items faster etc. If you have 2 of the same card you can “merge” them to increase the card’s potency. Additionally you want to “feed” shitty N cards to your SRs and URs in order to make them more powerful during your games.

Then there’s of course the lovely Cgs and full voiced scenarios during main drama and romance drama.

All the cards have their own mini scenarios but they’re not fully voiced and they’re just more for a visual than anything else.

There’s also a room feature where you collect points by flicking stars off the chibi sprite heads. You can then use those stars to buy furniture and if you get a “set” you can have the guy of your choice show up more often in the break room. In the break room you give your guy random items to increase his affection level. You can use the yumeiro cast Japanese wiki to help you pick the right items that give the most to each guy.

There’s also a DC thing where you play songs, receive silver/bronze coins and you can use them to unlock special voices, mini scenarios or bonus snapshots like this one:

Now here are some disadvantages of this:

• Events can get really grindy. I had to reach 10000 points to get a special event UR card which almost made me go numb from playing the same song on hard mode 30 times (as it was the only song I could efficiently get a lot of points in.)
• You are limited by AP. AP is a bar that allows you to play x amount of songs at a time. For example at level 23 I have 42 AP. Each song requires a certain amount. An easy mode song requires maybe 4-6 while a hard/expert requires 18-24. If you mess up and try to start over mid song, you still lose your AP so it’s worth just playing through even if you’re missing your combos and not doing well.
• You can fail. A lot of people who play Idolish 7 like the fact that you can play like shit and never fail the music game. I find that kind boring especially since I didn’t really like the music game there to begin with. That said, during events, “Master” level songs are nearly impossible unless you have a good amount of cards to bring your “toughness” back up when it goes down from pressing the wrong keys. (Toughness is like your health basically and if it goes to 0 you will fail and have to lose your AP/ start over.)
• If you do want to spend money it’s obscenely expensive. You are better off earning jewels via logins/events/playing songs in S rank for the first time/reading drama scenarios.
• You’re limited to how many friends you can have and friends around your level really matter when you need “help” to clear a song….so you don’t wanna have friends who haven’t logged into their account for weeks when you need help doing events 💦

My tip is, just pick 1 guy you really like and make him your main and work on raising his affection to see his scenarios. The gacha may not always give you the best luck but as long as he’s the main in your cast you can put other non-him good cards for your other cast members. Otherwise it’s a fun game you can play casually when your AP refills. I also enjoy the music game because it feels like I’m playing a piano sometimes (●´ω｀●).

For anyone interested in joining feel free to use my friend code and you can get a free gacha ticket. Just go to this link from your mobile browser once you’ve installed the app. (You may need to use QOOAPP to get it via google play due to gaijin block.)