Gakuen IDOLM@STER 1st Period Harmony Star Impressions

I attended the Gakumas 1st concerts this weekend. It’s called “1st Period” but it’s actually not the first concert for the media-mix mobile game franchise. It’s just the first show (or 4 shows, spanning 2 weekends) that features the full cast, after the roughly-dated anniversary of the game’s live service a year ago. Since the game (and really before the game was released, including all the lead-up marketing) became available it has done well in the rankings and players generally have good things to say about the latest entry in the IDOLM@STER series. A lot was on the shoulders of the staff and cast to make this hotly-anticipated show a success.

There was a set of tours where 3 cast members form a team and tour Japan’s 3 largest cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya), each team doing 3 stops within a month, in almost back-to-back months. One of the stops was postponed by a typhoon, while the last set of 3 had a gap until February of this year. The appropriately called “Hajime” Tour needs to be mentioned because this is the cast’s actual first live stage experience, except one member. The tour definitely gave the stage experience to many of the newbies in the Gakumas cast, and more importantly it gave the fans a glimpse of what fresh grasshoppers were like close to a year ago.

The importance (or however little it is) put on seeing the growth of the idols is a core tenant in the design of the game, which various interviews have listed. This is just another aspect I suppose, but I appreciate how they made the live performance aspect parallel to its digital version. Or rather, I appreciate them knowing what it ought to be like on the receiving end.

As a Million P for many years, it feels tortured, it basically feels the opposite of it–things we would love and be hyped about often don’t happen when they ought to, or happens at all. Some things are delayed by over 10 years. Maybe delay is the wrong word, but at some point it just became sort of this deep barrel or well where we are glad to have anything being pulled out of, even though we know the contents can make for something much more.

Anyways, for a good example, when Our Chant dropped on Day Two of Harmony Star, we know (since the SSR) there would be a flag just like how Chiisana Yabou, Wonder Scale and Clumsy Trick all had their props. So Gakumas surprised and delighted us by adding Saki to the picture when she walks in with the flag. In fact, after seeing the Hajime Tour version of Wonder Scale and Chiisana Yabou we already think there would be props, just like how the game versions did. For even more foreshadowing, Harmony Star featured a duet (or trio in one case) of cast members joining in another idol’s solo song (and for this weekend it was limited to the B-side solos) so by the point on the second day when Our Chant happened, it felt like a perfect match when you stick the right jigsaw puzzle piece in the right slot.

For details, here are the links to the official site posts for the show, for posterity, and the usual imas-db links. Onward with the rest.

Okay, first of all, there’s no way I can talk about Gaku 1st without putting it in context of my own personal journey to this point. I got in imas around 2011-2012, which just made it feasible to pull out all the stops on 2014-2015 to match MOIW2014 and 2015 respectively. During that time I was also falling into the Million Live hole, which is by design kind of the next phase of 765Pro concept. I didn’t get hooked on the Million until some point in 2014, after Million 1st was already a done thing. Fast forward to 2025, I’ve more or less been keeping tabs with a lot of the Deremas (which peaked for me at CG 4th SSA), Shiny Colors (which I still follow loosely at festivals and watched almost all the streams, but I’ve only been to SC 1st as a solo act), and now Gakumas. I attended a few Hajime Tour stop, and comfortably identify myself as a Ume P (after Makoto and Matsuri). I am also more likely to hakooshi and have a kamiooshi than to do the usual stick to one. Since I’m kinda cut from the AllStars cloth, so I kind of care about all the kouhai acts (sorry SideM I only know you a little).

I watched Gakumas 1st Solitary Star with both envy and with some pause. On one hand, I am assuming and recognizing the situation at hand–it’s a hot act, Ps know what to expect, and in the end we have a venue that seats about 2500 people. Even four times that gets us just 10000, which I think Gakumas can probably sell out even today. For a 1-year old media mix stage show focused on music acts, a venue like Tachikawa Stage Garden is the right size. For a ticket like Gakumas, we are maybe half as big as it needs to be to meet demand. Of course, the game’s popularity can’t be predicted so far in advance. Even if the management knew since at least August last year that Gakumas live concerts is a hot ticket, they may already had committed to the venue for May 2025 at that time. Also, the performers are still largely greenhorns.

On the other hand, Solitary Star sure was a concert with just a lot of solo songs and a couple all-member songs to wrap it up. It was great they gave 2 unit songs as a teaser to connect Solitary Star to Harmony Star, but it felt off for a “1st” live. Others had echoed similar sentiments online. Maybe they added the two shows by spinning off the solos to help meet demand.

Which is also my first big impression that makes Gakumas different. The effort and *hand waving* budget went into the solo songs. In typical idol mishmash that is the swamps of the JP anime/game otaku mindscape, it’s about the attached work and the songs in the work that are important. Character songs (ie., idol solos or “image songs” as they were) are kind of in the back seat if they’re not part of the “main” story or whatever. This definitely is more so the case in 765Pro (AS and ML). In CG this was less so because some idols literally have just a single solo and a few unit/group songs, so their identity becomes more important regarding their solos.

Gakumas mashed the two concepts together. The idol main solos are where the big budgets and named brands went. I can’t say enough about how they went to Giga (Fighting My Way), Minami (Luna Say Maybe) and Honeyworks (Sekaiichi Kawaii) for the headliners. Gakumas wants to win with character solos. Sure, people like Tabuchi (Campus Mode) are no slouch either, but this is more love and care than I’m used to for character songs. The solo songs are the soul of this series so splitting them into its own showcase (SS vs HS) works, just that it doesn’t give fans what they really want with SS alone.

What we really want is for the full cast to do the, you know, IDOLM@STER thing. We love MOIW. We love our Old Ladies (come see them at Never End Idol August 2-3!). You can’t do the full Yakisoba experience alone! We enjoy the hijinks between different members. We love covers. Some people even ship them. Harmony Star showcases this part exactly. And it does so by giving us new songs that we don’t know (which is another way that Gakumas continues to surprise and delight, just like how it showed us new songs during the Hajime Tour), many of them are duos tracked for uh, the ships. The collab solos adds also that dimension, not to mention making some of them super lit (such as the dance battle between the two “senior” seiyuu in the cast, or Our Chant above).

It is just the first year! We already have a show that took Million Live 2-3 years to reach this status. I think that shows the main thing about Gakumas–they have a plan on how it should turn out, and went to execute it. There were still a lot of things I can nitpick. One is the Asobi Tickets problem detailed here. I don’t have a horse in this game other than I hope people can get to see them. At least everything is streamed these days. The other is the sound tech kinda flubbed. Maybe Bandai Namco Music Live, the concert production arm of BN’s music label, had their A team with Hasunosora this weekend in Kobe and Gakumas got the B team, I am just speculating here. Maybe Gakumas’s musicality ran too wide of a range to easily mix and level. It could be a number of things. This is all on top of Ayane Matsuda’s (CV of Ume) hiatus and her return, that there was enough time to appear for the show.

My own specula here is that Begrazia (the unit with Ume, Misuzu and Sena) would have had secondary outfits if Matsuda came back early enough. She wasn’t back early enough to make it into the pamphlet, which would have been way after the outfits were ordered. Matched up against Re:Iris’s unit outfit it did feel oddish. Ume was able to show her new song Guu Suu Pii (Goose Pee? w) at SS and HS, which is her B-side single. All of her solos are call heavy so it took Producers a while to latch on to Guu Suu Pii (and I was never sure if we did) to all the calls. She was not part of any collab and it was likely due to her missing out on all the practice and experience from the Hajime Tour part that she skipped, not to mention only being back about a month plus before the show. In fact this is why ENDLESS DANCE has Saki and not Ume, because Saki was the pinch batter during Ume’s absence on the Hajime Tour. At least she managed to join some unit songs! On that note, we are just glad to see her back and seemingly healthy.

At the HS concerts, the crowd seems to fall into two types: First timers, and people who went to the tour/IM@S Expo shows. We are all pretty lit up when the older unit songs came on, like The Most Popular Halloween Song ever (this is another place where Gakumas run against the grain) and Kimi to Semi-Blue, because they were old enough to be prominently featured in the first 3 sets of Hajime Tour. The crowd got into the calls and all that. This also applied to Hajime and Campus Mode, naturally. I enjoyed fooling around with those songs. Hajime itself feels like a proper “core” idol tune for any idol group, and it sounds extremely IM@S. In a similar way we also felt that (and maybe this is why it was at the end of the show) about Mirakuru Na Nau and Kamurogiku.

[Oh, I also got to see Gakumas in the form of Temari (CV Nao Ojika) at Lisani Live 2025, where she performed with the Lisani band to do Luna Say Maybe, Ivy and Kamurogiku. That Kamurogiku was the only time Gakumas has had backup dancers thus far, and that production surpasses a bit the one from HS day1. Of course, the Harmony Star version has the original members so it’s special on its own.]

In terms of production, Gakumas HS seems to stick to 2.5D stage play basics. The earlier-mentioned Baton, Prop Sword, Flag, and uhh, Mannequin with a selfie camera? I guess we couldn’t have idols throw chocolate at us during Happy Millefeuille or shoot us with water guns during Kimi to Semi-Blue, but that would be nice. On that note, the stage is almost all static and same across all 4 shows. There is a center entrance that opens up with the center stairs that opens like a convenience store door…

What’s more to say? Let me just run through the set and pull out some points before I forget.

• Sekaiichi Kawaii gets the crowd going every time, but the more emotional The Cute was saved only for SS.
• Hakusen actually works the same when the crowd is sufficiently elated. It’s alot more cyclone…friendly? BTW that is banned at Gakumas (and most other IM@S events now).
• Feel Jewel Dream dance battle oh yeah baby inject that into my vein.
• When Sena stepped on stage during Ivy we know we are in for a good time
• I actually like Sugar Flavor, the new Mao x Rinami duet.
• We got Flourite every show and this is always a banger. (And I sing to myself, “Flouride ??????”)
• We did get Superlative on day 2 of HS and wow, do I get BPM15Q vibes from this or what. It would be pretty cool to mash those two concepts together (or maybe Tokyo Dennou feat. Hataya Misuzu)
• Boom Boom Pow with Sumika and Contrast with Lilja are two performances that seem just plain additive on paper, but they were synergetic when performed at HS. Those were also examples of songs that Gakumas surprised and delighted me. I missed Mekurume and Cosmetic at SS, but these kind of things made up for it.
• Aochan called out to us to do the “Ram pam pam para pum pum pa” with her and it felt just as good as it was during Hajime Tour. I don’t know why we don’t do it automatically but maybe it’s better this way.
• Again, IVY -> Our Chant.
• Yes, we know the new song for Lilja and Sumika will be here after HS day1, and the penlights are from the pre-release instagram post. I didn’t feel it, but I get it.
• Yukidokeni was great with the hand fans. Mugi was dancing a higher level difficulty furi lol, she did a jumpspin during the last chorus. Great performance from our spirited performers anyway. Mao Itou’s left-hand practice paid off.
  • On that note, man, Million Live waited how long for a hand fan song again? This is just Gaku 1st!
• Actually, Mashipi said the same thing when she went too hard at HS day2 Chiisana Yabou, and did also an extra forward spin just because.
• Howling Over the World was a hype song revealed during Hajime Tour so we were excited to see it roll in as the current banner. The visuals and promo video makes it look like a Straylight knock off (China as Fuyuko, Lilja as Asahi, Rinami as Mei), of course we are just kidding but the similarity is there.
• The announcements for each show was different? That’s new. Well, some overlaps still existed.
• Aaya’s slack arms during HS day2 final MC is charming in its own way.
• Happy Birthday to Mugi, and she cracked finally during the final MC. She and Nonchan are likely the oldest of the cast members and probably have been through the most. Like Aochan said this has been a dream year for them given Gakumas’s popularity, so it might hit harder the older you are, and more time you spent struggling?
• Mashipi is consistently charming. She has the stuff that matches the stage makeup, at least all on the outside. I mention this because unlike Miya or Suu-chan, it feels like there’s more to her than there seems to be and I feel it will be an interesting story.

Watching HS makes me realize one thing. Not just that embracing cringe can be freeing, but that it can actually make something more attractive. Case in point is Mao Itou, or China. In a way she kind of channels something in between a Chizuru and Yayoi. Kanako Nomura (CV of Chizuru) is not cringe, and I wouldn’t say Mayachan is cringe either, but if you go back and watch some of Mayachan’s older performances it’s quite something. And it only works because Mayako Nigo embraced it full-heartedly. Part of that is just an era, a flow of time thing, but also Gakumas wants to create something along the same lines. You have in AS someone who is “poverty” and then you have someone who is “fake rich” in ML, and then you have someone who is an actual nepo baby in Gakumas but is really the same character concept. That this was acted through the way Maochan expressed herself during HS is just mind blowing. How? It’s by embracing that Cringe, even if she might not be herself.

If you dig around Twitter you can find other little things that connect the characters, cast members, song lyrics and other things about Gakumas 1st. It’s quite dangerous and amazing.

Anyways, I should stop. It’s just 2 shows out of 4 and I’m already tired of writing all that could be. It’s a great concert, let alone a “1st” monikered show. The only real draw back is how will they be able to top this? Anyways, it’s not my job. I am looking forward to being surprised and delighted again in year 2 of Gakuen IDOLM@STER, and I have the luxury to throw money at them when they do.