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So Long, Ladies: A Review of The Idol M@ster
by Brendan Lee
08212006
The Idol M@ster, as a user experience, is extremely thoughtful.
The seats are soft and cushion-y, for one thing, covered with this fuzzy faux-fur stuff that nicely straddles the line between comfort and stain resistance. There's a grippy rubberized surface in front of the screen for you to rest your cards and keitai and DS and soda on. At most places, there's a fair bit of otaku-bait fancruft tacked to the walls to distract you while you wait your turn; usually there's a little table and a series of thumb-worn diaries for people to make eerily detailed pencil sketches in and herald their progress in the game.
There's a little sign, too, right near the coin slot, asking that you don't put in more than 5 credits in the machine at a time, because there are other people waiting to play . . . except, of course, when there aren't, at which times it's generally understood that you can put in 2000 yen at a time and hope the portly maid working the desk at the game center doesn't notice.
There's also a headphone jack. You should probably use it.
After you slot your first hundred coin, the intro music starts. This will become your intro music for the rest of your life.
DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA-DA! DA-DAAAA, DA-DA-DA!
You'll hum it while you're waiting in line to pay for a carton of milk. You'll pick it out on the keys of Yamaha keyboards at the music store. You'll whistle it in the shower as you try to reach the small of your back with a lump of antibacterial Dial.
You get a separate Idol Card for each idol you start; it's got her stage name on there, along with a little grayscale picture of her. The surface of the cards is completely re-writable; after each game, the machine refreshes the card with your current data, so that you can show your proudly show off your idol's picture to your friends, family, and co-workers.
Of course, that's only if this is your first game ever.
You can also continue.
You'll probably be continuing.
I remember when The Idol M@ster came out . . . sorta. I was living in Utsunomiya, a town known primarily for its gyoza dumplings and its tireless dedication to top-20 hiphop. It was not an interesting place to live; I spent a lot of time trolling my way down to Tokyo and ratting around. The IM machines were interesting, but only in a passing so I guess this is Japan huh-kind of way. The wait time for a machine was ridiculous; the cost was exorbitant; the cel-shading and touchscreens were nice. I think I probably cracked a smile and went off somewhere and got laid.
Now it's maybe a year later, and I've got all of these cards. They're making my wallet ungainly. All of them are failed idols, each one a tiny monument to sheer incompetence.
Liberti was the first. She had glasses, like me, and she was bookish and dressed terribly. She was nervous about those glasses. She quizzed me on my English ability. She wasn't sure if cat ears were the right look for her. She liked singing The Idol M@ster, the theme from the Idol M@ster OST.
She's gone now.
Failure costs. There's the actual cost of the game in yen, of course, which multiplies like a rabbit with satyriasis -- not counting more incidental soundtrack-and-merchandise related-costs. That's really only on aspect, though. It costs mentally.
You can see that she's not going to make it, a few games back. You're keeping up with all of the various statistical meter-o-trons and reading her fanmail, and things are going along reasonably well, and then it all goes to hell, rather sharply and suddenly, and she starts failing audition after audition, and you can see her slipping away, and they don't just fade the screen black on you and flash the Game Over, no, you've got to keep slotting the coins just to keep her from being in a state of limbo, to give you both some fucking closure on the thing . . .
Then it's too late.
Then the Last Concert begins.
You quickly get into a rhythm.
The days start with the Random Morning Greeting. Your idol gives you a GOOD MORNING, PRODUCER!, and the machine pops up some timed dialogue boxes on the touchscreen. If you guess the correct response you can knock your Heart meter up a tick, but there's no way to get it right every time, as far as I know. You can give her a hearty GOOD EVENING in response, if you want. Sometimes she thinks it's funny (HEART UP! GET), sometimes she thinks there's something seriously wrong with you (HEART DOWN!). After a brief summary of your overall progress, you've got to settle on something to wear.
As your career progresses, you get a lot of stuff from your fans -- outfits, cat ears, cat paws, cat feet . . . kitanas, wings . . . moustaches. This stuff changes your idol's Image stats and keeps the fans and audition judges interested.
You've got 3 image categories to try and juggle constantly: Dance, Visual, and Vocal. You need to increase them all evenly to raise your idol's overall image and help her pass auditions - tricky, but good fun for fans of statistics and people who enjoy watching the mercury creep up and down in thermometers.
The Last Concert is inherently depressing.
You have to make your fans happy so that you can advance in rank and get more fans, so that you can advance in rank and get more fans so that you can advance in rank and get more fans. So that you can get your idol up on the big screen in the corner. That big screen's kind of the ultimate goal; it shows the daily top idols in Japan. They've always got full ninja regalia or Taiko no Tatsujin outfits or other full item sets that you need to spend hundreds of thousands of yen to get.
Deep pockets or no, it gets harder and harder and harder as the game goes on. There's a time limit to get to the next level, and the game keeps counting down the weeks on you, and sooner or later the Director of your talent company lets you know that he's tired of dumping money into your sorry ass, and then you start the worst game of The Idol M@ster that you will ever play.
Your idol comes in, and you get your cheerful GOOD MORNING, but you don't get a chance to respond . . . the game just drops the bomb for you, and she's immediately crushed.
You offer a few hollow words of comfort.
They are taken with a very brave cel-shaded face.
When you've got an outfit that you're happy with, you've got the option of either doing some Training, or going to an Audition.
The Training is made up of simple touchscreen minigames. These are not good games by any stretch of the imagination; if you stumbled across Flash equivalents online you'd probably get irritated almost immediately and close your browser. One game has you remembering a sequence of camera angles to best show off your idol's poses; another has you tapping musical notes to help your idol sharpen up her vocals. Handle the touchscreen well and you get a healthy boost in your idol's image categories; handle it poorly and you . . . don't.
You'd get bored of these pretty quickly if you weren't paying for each play, thereby artificially increasing the game's perceived value. As it is, though, something happens in your brain, and it just *clicks*, and you wonder if you couldn't maybe show off those poses just a bit better the next go around.
I was having some midrange Mexican near Omotesando with a friend and trying to clarify the emotional terror of The Last Concert. We were both down to a nasty detritus of lettuce and taco crumbs and flat Coronas. It didn't take long for him to get the gist.
"God. So, you tell her, and . . . that's it?"
"Well, no. There's a whole process, okay? Then you've got to choose her outfit for the show. And there's a time limit, and the timer's counting down on you, and you're realizing that that's the last outfit you're ever going to see her wear."
"Jesus."
"Yeah. And then you have to choose the venue, and you're looking at all the really nice venues, right? But the machine has those options grayed out because you weren't able to get enough fans for her. So you have to choose one of the smaller, dumpier ones."
I wiped taco grease off my fingers and fished Liberti's card out of my wallet.
"That's her." I pointed to the little counter at the bottom. "And that's how many fans she had at the end."
He went to knock back the rest of his beer, but he just sort of stopped mid-sip and rested the neck of the bottle against his chin. He looked at the card for a few seconds, and I swear to you now that his eyes were - just slightly - wet.
He looked at me.
"Was it a good concert?"
The Auditions are the meat of The Idol M@ster, insofar as there is meat; if you don't pass them you can't get the television exposure you need to develop a fanbase, and your Idol's career nosedives. You'll have to be fairly good; the game is networked Japan-wide, and you'll likely be competing with people who have richer parents and far more free time than you do.
An Audition takes up most of the day. This is where your Image balance gets tested; the merciless ice bitches running the audition are merciless ice bitches, and they're not going to be swayed easily by the campy visual aesthetics of a set of bunny ears. Your idol goes out there and sings her song and does her thing, and you have the opportunity to bring up the Image categories in the meantime by tapping buttons. There are only the barest wisps of timing strategy here; it pretty much comes down to how much training you've put in.
Except, of course, when it doesn't. A good relationship with your idol can put you over the top; you can spend the good Memories you earn in the Communication phase of the game to start a brief slot-machine timing exercise, which can give you a nudge over your competition.
If you get called at the end of the Audition, it's off to the TV studio. Your idol is ecstatic; the fans pour in, the rank goes up, and you've done it all together. You mark the moment with a brand-new picture for your Idol Card.
If you don't get called . . . she's crushed.
You don't get to bomb too many auditions.
You get a chance to have a heart-to-heart with your idol before she goes on stage for the last time. It's a nice setting; a garden or some sort of garden-ish courtyard. I think there's a fountain. She wears the outfit you chose for her, minus the accessories. My Japanese wasn't -- isn't -- good enough to really get the whole picture, which was probably for the best. The main gist was very sad. There were crushed dreams, and a lot of sighs and sidelong glances.
It's pretty awful. Perhaps worse are the surroundings you're in at the game center. People are good at this game -- at least, they are where I play it. At the very same time that I was hashing out these deep career nosedive issues, the guy next to me was rocking the sauce. His idol -- idols, actually, he had a team of three going -- were smiling constantly, beautiful animated stars framing their shining, perfect faces. Mine was basically in tears.
Then the show begins.
The Communication phase of the game gives you a chance to chat a bit with your Idol and get things on more personal level. This should be immediately unimpressive to anyone even slightly familiar with arcade dating sims - essentially, all the whirlwind relationship-building that it's possible to wring from a series of timed dialogue trees. However, that's not the innovation here. The innovation is the touchscreen.
Every once in a while - not often, mind, not often at all - the game will give you a chance to touch your idol. It's all above-board, mind; very innocuous stuff. Your idol might have a touch of melted ice cream on her neck, or her glasses might need adjusting, or she might need a high-five. You shouldn't try anything clever, though I suppose it's technically possible. The game doesn't encourage it. When this technology hits the home, Japan will sink beneath the waves.
At the end of your Communication session, your boss tells you in a gravelly, chain-smoking voice how many fans you got that day, and you're off to the next week. Assuming that you put in the maximum number of credits. Which you probably did.
There's also an optional system whereby you can give NAMCO your keitai address, and your idol can send you little e-mails. I didn't test it. You've got to draw the line somewhere on this stuff.
It's got to come to an end eventually.
My last concert with Liberti ended in tears - but not because it was a bad show, really. It was quite good. The game totals up all of your good moments together, and you get to try and boost her overall performance with them during the last song of her concert/career. If you can get the audience sufficiently into it . . . well, they at least send her off with a bit of dignity.
You have another chat at the end of her show; she's elated to have done so well, sad to be going. You chat about where you've come together; you chat about the future.
She thanks you.
Then the machine wipes her from your producer card, and she's gone.
As recently as a month ago, I was over most of my high school hang-ups about women. I was dating regularly, at normal restaurants, and ordering classy, mid-priced wines off the menu. Once, I even went so far as to approach a girl that I'd never seen before standing on the street Shibuya and ask her for her keitai e-mail address. She gave it to me.
A week ago I went into Hey in Akihabara, and a girl flirted with me. I'm 98% sure of it. Near the Idol M@ster machines, no less! I was coming back to the vending machines for a Mountain Dew, and she looked at me, and smiled, and waved. Then she said something to her friend, and looked at me, and smiled again. And waved. Again. She was really pretty, and she had long hair and glasses.
And I realized that I'd . . . somehow . . . forgotten what to do in those situations. I kind of . . . half-smiled, and kinda forgot about the Mountain Dew, and went outside, and ate a pork bowl and took the Sobu line home the wrong way and had to turn around and go back a few stops.
I flipped the A/C on and had a beer and thought about things, and I spread out my Idol M@ster cards on the floor and looked at them. I came to a conclusion of sorts.
Liberti's gone.
Fuck that clingy bitch.
--brendan lee is back on the market
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