Category Archives: Idolmaster

October 9, 2014

The Idolm@ster Movie Is a Million Live Advertisement

By omo

Hey guys, I don’t know if you don’t know, but most anime are some form of advertisement. So why are you complaining about that Mlilion Live is being advertised in the Idolm@ster Movie (Moviem@s henceforth)?

As someone who has been enabled by Moviem@s (and many other things) and started playing Million Live after my trip to Japan this past February, I enjoy my Scamco-driven animated promotional material. Speaking as both a customer and a victim in this sense, the fact that they have to charge money in order to let us watch this stuff is probably way, way, waaaaaaay more obnoxious of an arrangement in this process than the mere audacity for the sprawling Idolm@ster franchise to introduce its next generation of money shakers and movers through advertising. It would be weird if they didn’t try to advertise their games.

On the other hand, buy the Blu-ray, one says. Well yeah I was a hair’s breadth away from buying my second copy after pictures of the Aniplex+ edition flooded twitter a day or two ago. It’s so pimp. But I already put in an order from HMV, which ships with a bonus wallscroll featuring, guess what, the Million Live girls. Isn’t that infinitely more insane? I’m spending hundreds of $ on advertisements. [And shipping.]

Imagine if you are watching TV and all the ads are paid content? But wait, what if the ads were better than the TV program you were watching? I mean, it sounds silly, but the scenario isn’t that far-fetched. In some ways that’s what is happening. If having the Million Stars in Moviem@s jarred you from the fantasy world you were living in, congratulations, Scamco whiffed and couldn’t bring some full-body characterization to the seven girls (Minako, Anna, Serika, Shiho, Kana, Nao, and Yuriko) and thus enable you. Good for you.

But to me, I see it a courtesy. They’re telling you what’s going on, and in some ways focusing the movie away on the ML girls and on the 765Pros is what everyone wanted. It’s just there are some issues to the movie given all these arrangements, and to some degree the results may disappoint some people. If you look at Moviem@s as some kind of as-is, commercially available, hourly-fungible disposable entertainment, you’re missing the point. Moviem@s, for Producers, is IM@S’s totem that embodies the past and future of the franchise, of the idols, of our emotions all together. It’s our M@sterpiece. Of course, it’s perfectly okay to miss the point, but don’t expect any sympathy from us if you stopped yourself from having a good time.

What I recommend, actually, is just watch Moviem@s a bunch of times. This stuff actually has a lot of rewatch value, and you wouldn’t even know it.

PS. By the way I’m just glad Matsuri and Fuka make appearances in this thing after all, as these two are my top ML idols today. There’s a weird time-wrap effect going on when you revisit the thing that enabled you, and you have a different appreciation all together. What’s funny is that the content is even “new” because, well, it’s not some telescoping introspection for years past. It’s barely 8 months!

PPS. The CG concern is real and I understand it, but it is, in the larger scope of things, trivial.

1 comment | posted in Idolmaster, Modern Visual Culture

July 20, 2014

IM@S Still Cleans Me Up

By omo

There’s not much else to say on my part. Words probably could describe how I feel today and how I felt back when in February, but this means so much to so many and it was executed so well that it says all that I wanted to say.

Oh, I guess at least I can attribute.

For those who are new, let’s just say that back in Feb there was a great IM@S live event and I was able to attend. In many ways it was possibly one of the most moving attempt at mix media marketing ever, and one of the best anime/game event ever. It was also a great concert on its own. Now we can relive it on Blu-ray comes October 22nd. There was a live stream earlier today that I clipped and put on the ‘tubes and you can look at the samples above.

Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster

July 19, 2014

Housekeeping: IM@S SSA Cleanup

By omo

Lots of stuff to talk about but mainly I just want to publicly point out that all the people who contributed money to our SSA flower and book deal should’ve gotten their stuff in the mail by now or already received them (months ago for most of you). Maybe better put I am kind of putting it to rest now that the last thing I had to mail out is in the mail.

A big thank you to all who helped us through the whole thing. A big thank you to those who helped me through the whole thing!

In other news, IM@S 9th is in a couple weeks and things are ramping up. Friday brings a surprise announcement that they don’t want fans to send flowers to the Tokyo and Nagoya venues. Probably because they are like “wait we’ll get too many flowers and there won’t be any room for people” or some such. We are planning to do something flower-based so it’s a curveball to our plans that we’ll have to work around.

Today also is the day that Tenso (popular Japanese proxy) received my IM@S Movie pop stand. The shipping was about what I expected; the boxes are like 97cm in length and 80cm some in width, so it’s quite large. Some Ps ordering multiple are paying hundreds in shipping, so hopefully when we get the stuff in time for some photo OP!

Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster

June 25, 2014

Franchise Positioning: LL And IM@S

By omo

Happy Birthday Hidaka Ai!

I’m just thinking about how to approach that material for my hypothetical panel, which is now rejected from Otakon programming. I find myself approaching this mainly from a business model point of view. It’s hard to say what is special about … this thing. What is this thing anyway? Cartoons? Or cartoons with idols in it? Or cartoons with idols being the main schtik? Invariably you have to talk about the media mix-ed-ness of it all, so naturally it becomes a discussion on the business.

One approach I was thinking about is comparing different well-known “idol anime” situations and see if we can gleam something. To jump to the point, one key difference between Love Live and IM@S is the sort of businesses they are. One is a video game franchise with stuff spun off it. The other is pretty much that idol concept from the first iteration.

I also want to highlight and examine what makes Love Live, seemingly, a franchise more friendly to women. That begins with first ascertaining the premise–which, really, all I have is that more women attend the live events than most other 2.5D idol events featuring an all-female cast. I wonder how that compares to the female Oukokumins out there. It also begs the question about how does live attendance factor in, which can be explained but only with so many words, unfit as a sentence’s clause. It’s also another angle where IM@S stands in stark contrast as a video game franchise born under the shadow of the declining arcade scene. I recently watched the bonus Blu-rays that came with the UNMEI Live CD singles and when Pyonkichi took an informal poll, the hands went up were about 10%, at most. Which is probably roughly the same as SSA in Feb as I remembered, maybe a little worse for those 2013 live shows, given how much of a maniac you had to be to get in to the smaller event.

But that’s kind of how far I could go. I can make an argument about how Love Live does a pretty okay job channeling that “utahime” feeling, a modern polish on the “I want to grow up to be an idol” idea with more Niconama streaming and less Fancy Lala. But that’s just interpreting the text. It doesn’t mean much in that I can see how these narratives can connect to both men and women, as IM@S has its fair share of similar stories to tell. Times like this I wish I can read doujinshi from circles that have done these kinds of analysis.

There are other low hanging fruits in this comparisons, of course. I think the depth and extracurricular context around IM@S, partly as a result of its age, also adds something that both encourages certain behaviors characteristic of its fandom, but also deters. It’s the kind of unintended walls with maniac behavior that happens with fandom, although in these cases it is more about intimidation than inaccessibility. For example, it’s easy for me to make no mention of how it feels to be in a crowd of grown men jumping around to the rhythm, but that can be intimidating even to someone who is simply new to the situation, let alone others who might have other causes for concern. Love Live started from scratch a few years ago and nothing other than the status quo of wota culture was in the way.

[By the way, that live 2-BD set is so good if you want a preview of next generation powerhouses…namely her, Koroazu, Machico, Yuiton and Mocho (happy birthday!). Also, we gave Tenchan a new nick: 10ch. Who are these people? Use this list.]

2 comments | posted in Idolmaster, Love Live, Seiyuu, Idol, Pop

June 13, 2014

On Attention Management, Whining about No Time to Do Stuff

By omo

This blog post is brought to you by having LLSIF crammed down one ear and OFA down the other. My weakness, apparently, is video games, not anime.

Few things say "Summer" harder than this crossover

I live in a bizarre world where j1m0ne watches and blogs more about anime than I do. Probably because I just don’t have the time to watch crap. I’m like 3 behind Daimidaler and Soul Eater Not (Soul Eater Not is kind of hard to watch, admittedly). I barely can keep up with No Game No Life, Love Live, Nanana, Diamond Ace and Ping Pong. I still would love to catch up on Brynhildr and Kawaisou, and I just caught up with Chaika. [BTW Ping Pong is far and away the best anime this season. There might be a tad of the “Asian” factor but still.]

Why is this?

  1. I go to too many cons. It’s okay that I give up my weekend time traveling to fun places (Toronto! Chicago! Seattle! Boston! And then there’s “scenic” Somerset, NJ …) but this means it’s really hard to watch anime. The funny thing is this is just an excuse in that I know other people who went to the same cons I did and are caught up. For me the time is second to how going to cons just drains me of attention-focusing juices so when I get home after work I’m prone to do not much.
  2. I have too much extracurricular things. I’ve been taking the past week easy but I do write for JTOR and have other stuff to do. Like this blog. I also went to see that FUNI-attempt at Ghost in the Shell in theaters thing couple weeks ago. I met up with famous Dutch blogger Psgels earlier this week. Lots of stuff to do. It’s summer in the city and it’s all fun stuff. I guess this is the kind of thing that separates people who sit at home and watches everything and those who don’t.
  3. I have too much non-extracurricular things. Like real-life obligations that are related to the cons I go to, pushed back by the cons I go to, and just in general.
  4. I have a job that just takes a lot of time and mental wherewithal.
  5. I haven’t been sleeping as much as I’d like, because of above things, and it makes watching slower and contemplative stuff more difficult (See: Soul Eater Not).
  6. One For All. I’m about two thirds the way through my first run and it feels just kind of like a streamlined version of IM@S2. The main difference here is that the story isn’t so much settled on just one character that you pick, but you actually do have to raise everyone, so it feels a lot more game-y. The story does come in chunks as you pass specific ranking goals. The new appeals mechanics are interesting but I haven’t really had the time to explore them because I’m too focused on making money and gaining EXP. Times like this make me appreciate the English-language scene for the various IM@S games, as when I started on IM@S2, there was a lot of text written for it so it’s easy for me to just research. Now I have to play it the “hard” way.
  7. I’ve been playing the English version of Love Live School Idol Festival mobile game. It’s fun in a way where IM@S is fun in that I want to jab my ears until they go deaf. I have to say, the music is actually better in LLSIF than, say, Shiny Festa, except the singing take a step back so a balance is achieved. I think the main difference is that in this event/microtransaction driven game the pressure is on to grind, versus in Shiny Festa the fun is in the gameplay and the videos. TL;DR, one is a job, the other is a hoobies. Unfortunately I already have too many jobs.
  8. Last but not least, Million Live. Because having four jobs is not enough. I can go on, but this mobage takes the opposite spectrum–if you want to rank, it still takes good amount of play time. If you want to rank without paying, then it’s like four times the play time.

It’s like this strange concoction of sleep deprivation and fake idols [like Jumbo Shrimp] that swims in my mind. It’s like knowing I want to watch Puchim@s, I want to watch it on FUNi and “support” whatever, but it’s such a PITA to do 3-minute episodes on a site that is a pain in the rear to search through hundreds of episodes. I’m too lazy to torrent. Too lazy to search a xdcc bot on the web and input like 50 GETs. I guess I’ll just wait for the director cut version in a few months/year.

It’s not easy being cheesed out of your time and money.

PS. Is it me or the Snow Halation episode kind of underwhelming? Is this how people feel about M@STERPIECE?

PPS. My idle mind is full of idols lately. Maybe that is not a coincidence, at least I feel that way.

PPPS. Speaking of which, I started doing some slides for that panel I wanted to put together, just because why not.

7 comments | posted in Bishoujo Gaming, Idolmaster, Love Live, Modern Visual Culture