Monday, March 13, 2017

Love Live School Idol Festival After School Activity for arcade

As a rhythm game, it looks quite suited for me to play on like I treated it as an arcade game of some kind when playing on my Android tablet ever since its international release 3 years ago. Unfortunately, there have been problems with this kind of games on IOS and Android that altered players' behaviors negatively.
  • Microtransactions - A DLC-like item that can be spent in unlimited ways, allowing you to get premium currencies and other premium items you can't get normally. It can result in an unnecessary waste of money, putting buying a normal game to shame. You could have used thousands of dollars to buy something else.
  • Gatchas - A luck-based feature that draws random items including super and ultra rare items through premium Gatcha features using premium currencies. There are tons of ways to get premium currencies but that depends on the game.
  • Performance perfection - A torturous behavior coming from the player no matter how technically competent the device is.
  • Frustration factor
  • Grinding
The amount of grinding in the game is another torturous one as a way to gain access to additional chapters in the story as well as to unlock additional songs in the main section in the Music Select screen. I had already seen some players raising the player rank too high like I don't know if they have anything else to do besides playing the game. Even the in-game events are becoming worse that such grinding may require microtransactions and usage of premium currencies.
In the case of the arcade version, it has elements from the mobile version like drawing cards from the machine representing characters in different dresses, team set-up and other stuffs. During gameplay, there will be card effects although in different ways than in the mobile version and the arcade version uses physical controls and is more difficult in gameplay. Like other rhythm games on the arcades, you will need the Nesica card if you want to make the progress count. Also, the arcade version features in-game graphics for gameplay in a similar vein to Project Diva series. Certain songs in the arcade version have the new dance choreography you can't see elsewhere. The others already have their own via the animated music videos as well as the ones taken from the TV animated series and the animated movie.
Unfortunately, the information for the arcade version may be scarce when trying to use the keywords in English in the search engine as if there's no English speaking wiki for that version. But, from what I know is that there may be Challenge difficulty in addition to Expert difficulty and the notecharts are obviously superseding and different than the mobile version. The UI engine seems to be at the same level as Idolmaster Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage or something in which other idol-themed music games on mobile follow with the same kind of UI layout for gameplay. Like Beatstream and DJ Max Technika series, the arcade version of LLSIF has double screens and the one on top is for seeing the dance thing in action while the bottom one focuses on gameplay.
Lastly, if you want to know about the system specs of the machine the arcade version uses, you can look it up in Wikipedia or something. From what I saw on social media and video sharing sites, the arcade version uses dual graphics cards and the graphics card is different than the one the Taito Type X3 machine uses and it turns out that the game uses Taito Type X4. Like Taito Type X3, Type X4 has different spec options. Unfortunately, the amount of information about Taito Type X4 is kind of small not because things are so technical or something but it seems that ignorance about the arcade version's existence is a problem. If the arcade version makes it to the US via Round 1, it may solve that problem but it's not the same for other countries although it's already better for the arcade version to stay in Japan as there are already tons of idol-themed music game and animated franchises which are outnumbering everyone non-stop like hell. I think the over-popularity of Idolmaster and Love Live franchises is the reason for such existences of other franchises but it may seem that certain fans' behaviors had been altered so negatively that they did certain things in public that landed themselves in serious trouble. Examples included threats of stabbing, being a public nuisance via delusion, showing off too much fan-tribute accessories in their possession or even suicide attempts over disbandment or retirement of a group or something. Those are NOT how you become a fan of a particular idol group or individual you like.
The arcade version is more or less published by Square Enix and it may mean that it runs on a Taito-branded arcade system with the Nesica service, similar to other Square Enix games on the arcades that make use of it although one of them uses the Playstation 4 based arcade hardware instead of the Type-X series system.