LogFAQs > #963204774

4) Love Live! School Idol Festival ALL-STARS
Bushiroad International / Mynet Games
Android, iOS
Released February 25, 2020
Would make my top 100 list if re-written: Yes, 50s

The latest (at the time) Love Live game to be released outside of Japan was this mobile game, described as a "rhythm action RPG" by the developers.

This game's storyline depicts an alternate storyline to the anime series and other games by having all three of the school idol groups ('s, Aqours, and Nijigasaki) all being active at the same time period rather than years apart. The player character is a second-year at Nijigasaki that frequently corresponds with all three of the idol groups in the main story, bond episodes, and side stories throughout the game. I had always wanted to see 's and Aqours actually meeting at some point but the anime storyline made this impossible in a canon series, but this game does it perfectly.

The gameplay, true to the description above, is a hybrid of a rhythm game and a RPG. All cards in-game have three stats; appeal, which determines their score potential; stamina, which determines the health they provide to the party; and technique, which determines SP skill strength and chance to get a critical. When playing any song in-game, you bring along nine cards split between three strategies, and the current strategy's appeal and technique determines your score for each note. With every note played, your stamina decreases and some songs require healing or shielding cards to keep your play alive - even if you are heading for a full combo of the song! Each card has a set active skill that triggers at certain criteria, a passive stat booster for itself or other cards, a skill that is used when playing notes, and a number of insight skills (could be either active skills or passive ones) that are customizable and are obtained through training. There's also equipment to enhance statistics and the expert difficulty songs go really hard into trick notes and other crazy things - which may require a different card setup to even pass, and then get a S-rank.

The game, like most mobile games of this nature, runs events at regular intervals. Two of them are just typical mobile game events where you just play songs to get rewards, but the other two are based on the game's mechanics themselves. The SBL (SIFAS Big Live) places you with nine other players to pass a certain number of songs, and then ranks you based on certain criteria such as your score in the song or the number of skills used, for instance. The trick here is that all ten players are playing at the same time and will send and receive trick notes from each other - all helpful buffs, but they depend on what the other player sending the skill has in their main strategy. The second event, DLP (Dream Live Parade) tasks you with climbing a ladder that has a number of songs, with increasing score thresholds and difficulty as you progress up the ladder. The trick here is that once you use a card in one song, it's unusable for the rest of the ladder unless you use a consumable that you unlock by fulfilling certain tasks on the ladder, or by using the full restore you get each run around. Sadly the DLP towers haven't been updated in quite some time now, so this part of the game is very underutilized. It still gives rewards by pushing out a limited lower difficulty tower each time it is rerun, so there is still some reward to keep going through it.

Of course, no writeup of this game will be complete without at least talking about the gacha... and it's pretty fair, with the base UR rate (5%) for this game being much more generous than most mobile games that I've seen. I've gotten most of the main meta cards when they were released up to a point, so I've never felt it was that much of a problem. It also has the spark mechanic if you somehow get really unlucky with one card that just won't drop.

I still continue to play the game today and SBL ends in 50 minutes and I haven't done today's plays so BYE

Soundtrack Links
I'm Still...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ToW01yQ2bs

Kokoro Magic A to Z
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE_I45s7Fhw