Yea I know you’re probably thinking “why are you starting another mobile game are you high” but hear me out: this one actually has some points worth trying out that make it stand out from other mobage!!!!!!! 😂 Even if you’ve never played a single Corda game in your life (aka me) you can still get into this thing. The story is about our heroine Asahina Yui who decides to revive the Starlight Orchestra because the sensei she knew from a long time ago basically ropes her and her childhood friend classmate into it and won’t take no for an answer. 😂😂

In order to revive the orchestra you basically need fans and so the core gameplay is just street performing, getting fans, and then performing a full concert for those fans. As usual being like any other mobile game, there’s a gacha card system and obviously the better cards you have, the higher chance you have of getting more fans etc. The whole thing can also be automated so you don’t have to care about picking the correct cards because honestly who has time for that? And also no this isn’t a music game, thank god, so yes you can basically progress-quest this  as long as you have the stamina. There’s even skip tickets that if you’re say farming some quest but you’ve already gotten SSS rank on it, the tickets just let you bypass all the animation and just immediately gives the rewards! Amazing!

Now here’s why this game stands out to me from the usual mobage like this:

The game is mostly fully voiced

While I’ve only finished chapters 1 and 2 story (which by the way are pretty long chapters with many performances involved) every single scene has been fully voiced. I’ve never seen a mobile game like this be fully voiced. Usually you have to pay extra money or get rare cards to get full voicing but not here. The whole thing is fully voiced except for the heroine and the card stories for some reason (which is kinda demotivating to grind them out lmao but they’re cute so it’s ok). It’s amazing, but it also takes up an amazing amount of space on your phone/tablet so prepare to have at least 3 gigs of room for this. 😂

The Heroine has a Personality

A mobage heroine with a personality!? What is this sorcery!? There’s various choices in all the story scenes the heroine can pick which range from stereotypical “good girl” answers to “we’re just gonna meme it up and make fun of everything” options. 😂😂 The best part is when you pick the meme choice, and it actually raises the guy’s affection and I’m sitting there howling with laughter. 😂😂😂 The only down side is the style is very Amnesia-like in a sense where the heroine doesn’t have dialogue other than the choices you pick, but it didn’t particularly bother me either since once the heroine regains her memory in Amnesia she still has funny dialogue and interactions with all the guys. Additionally they call out her last name (Asahina) if you leave it default which is really nice :D. I just wish there was more CGs with the heroine in them (maybe they unlock in the romance stories??) The one CG with her in it usually cuts off her face/eyes which is so weird since she has eyes in her sprite, cut in and anime lol.

There is ACTUAL ROMANCE scenario

Yea I know this is a long stretch for 女性向け games these days but amazingly there is hints of romance and as you perform with the guys and give them gifts, it raises their affection and unlocks a romantic scenario. During the regular story there isn’t much romance WITH the exception of Osakabe (the megane 生徒会長) who takes no break in making sure you know he’s on to you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)✨ I’ve never appreciated Ito Kentaro more than I do now ‘`,､ ‘`,､ (‘∀`) ‘`,､’`,､.

There’s actual animated cut scenes

Parts of the story involve actual ANIME cut scenes. This is amazing, I’ve never seen this in a mobile game for ladies (but I did see ads for some of the bishoujo ones with this in them so maybe it’s a new thing?) Anyway it’s pretty nice and you can always view them in the gallery along with CGs.

Gacha Rate is suspiciously good

I’ve rolled 50 times. I’ve gotten 4 SSRs guys. I don’t know if it’s just a higher than usual rate to get people to keep playing but that’s the highest SSR rate I’ve ever seen, way higher than Nier Reincarnation. (　ﾟдﾟ)

 

Other things of note are of course the beautiful artwork in the CGs and the randomly cute chibi charas (and the cute cat chibi chars wtf they are so cute xDDD).

Now here’s the things that I think suck about the game which may or may not be a deal breaker for some:

Stamina Balance Sucks

At level 19ish or so I only have like 48 stamina and by chapter 3 most story chapters take 15 stamina or more. So unless you use your daily stamina ticket or get some from some event or something you’re going to run out of stuff to do real fast between stories/item quests. But if you’re balancing multiple mobages, this may be good because you would only need to login once or twice a day and be done with your “dailies”.

Maeno Tomoaki’s Character

I’m sorry but this video just speaks for itself – THANKS I HATE IT KOEI

Koei keeps throwing “Buy shit” in your face and has a subscription system

Yea we know most mobile games are pay to win but they even have some crazy subscription where if you pay $10 a month or whatever you get all sorts of tickets/items for the game. It’s wild but I’m sure there are people who are all for this. Who knows, I’m playing for free 😂

You Need an Active Friends List

You basically get rewards if all the people on your friend list play the music game daily. If you have a bunch of ppl who ignore their accounts you don’t get rewards and I found that adding friends is weirdly difficult in this game. I’ve tried to send requests to randos within the game – and nobody ever accepts them (due to probably there being no decent notification for friend requests.) I’ve only managed to add friends by searching people’s twitters for friend code tweets. (;^ω^)

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Anyway I’ve decided to stick around with this game for now since due to its stamina system and not taking up too much of my day. I’m also fond of all my favorite ossan seiyuus in here (ItoKen, Taniyama, Hino, Kishio, NojiHiro, Morita and Blonde Tokiya Miyano.) We’ll see how long I can keep going by just playing for free but it’s nice with all the automated stuff that I can do it while working on other things. ☺ To be honest I kinda glazed through the tutorial and I don’t remember what the hell you’re supposed to do during the music game so I uh just let auto-mode do its thing for me while I match up the symbols of the guest character and hit おすすめ for my deck. 😂 As usual you will need QooApp on android or a Japanese itunes account on Apple and then you can use either a code to backup your data, or if you’re on android you can use Google Play games for easy transfer anytime.

Edit: After a week I decided to uninstall this game. I finished the main story in chapters 1-4 but once that was done I found myself bored out of my mind. As I mentioned the stamina ratio in this game is very crappy so you’d do like 1-2 concerts and then have nothing to do unless you had tickets (and you only get 1 per day once you finish all the newbie missions.) Also you need an active list of friends, and I mean active – actually doing performances daily. If you just had friends logging in that wasn’t enough to qualify for the daily rewards and making friends in the game was difficult since most people want whales for friends to be able to get the huge boost during performances (again rewarding pay to winners heavily.) Anyway I would have put up with all of this shit tbh if there was actual romance. I grinded out Sakuya’s card pretty far but all the stories were very Cero A implied stuff. It was nothing like yumecast (which is kinda what I expected) but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by Koei/Corda series. I guess my “otome” expectations were too high, and that’s kinda why I just couldn’t continue. If the game had no heroine or romance (like Nier Reincarnation) then I wouldn’t expect as much but the game implies that you can “romance” the guys but in the end it’s all just implied brief b/s that goes nowhere. So with that in mind, and overall the grind between new stories just not being fun I decided to uninstall. These otome mobage just don’t last for me….(´・ω・｀)