Or merely Ar Tonelico 3 as it was known in Japan. I’m not really sure what NISA thought they were achieving by making such a nerdy game even more unfriendly looking for newbies by including a Hymnos word in the title. Hymnos is the games in-universe language – Qoga, as it happens, means something to the effect of “Final” – so it’s kind of like if they named the Star Trek movies in Klingon.

Except kind of not, since Ar Tonelico isn’t exactly an English name in the first place. Oh, well, I suppose the whole stripping mechanic to the battles is off-putting enough for most anyway.

To get back to the point, though, that Mikan Box is in the Bistro in Eternus Shaft.

For those who failed to notice, Bamco posted the second iM@S2 promo video on Youtube yesterday. I have to stress that there’s nothing particularly new to this – it’s not only still the same song as the first promo (and given how often Go My Way was used in the lead-up to the 360 games release, you’d better get used to it), but I’m actually pretty sure that this is just the video that they played on the second day of last months iDOLM@STER event. Certainly, I’d seen off-screen camera shots of what appears to be the content of this video on a couple of Japanese gaming news sites a month ago.

Still, it does show off the games five-member units. I notice that, should you discount the extra couple of people, there’s still a few differences in the dance that the three remaining girls would be performing when compared to the first promo. Based upon that, it looks like the dances may scale to the member count better than they did in the first game, and given there looks to be contact and more dancing around each-other this time around, that can only be a good thing.

Hey, it’s certainly been a big news weekend this week, and no news has been bigger than the announcements from the big show.

By which, of course, I mean iDOLM@STER 2. This is, of course, not surprising to anyone, given that they essentially announced last year that they’d be announcing details of it this year, but it’s still kind of cool to see. Less cool is that my NTSC-J 360 is still somewhat on the broken side. Guess I’ll have to get that replaced at some point.
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It looks like Bandai Namco are gearing up to announce a new iDOLM@STER game next week.

Well, I say that, but that page does seem to confirm that an actual sequel, rather than yet another rehash of the same materials, is in production, but they may not release many details on that until the fifth anniversary next summer. Bummer.

Which kind of makes this non-news, really. I do wonder if the “Next Game Project” mentioned towards the bottom of the page will actually turn out to be something different to the sequel, though – it seems like kind of a long period for them not to be doing anything in the game-space release wise for the series, and it seems to me that they haven’t milked SPs new characters for all they’re worth yet. I wouldn’t be astonished if they actually announced a PS3 version of the game or something.

Or, of course, I could just be completely misreading the page – it’s not like I actually read moonspeak to any degree of competency.

Yes, I did buy all three versions. At least I’m not crazy like that crazy Japanese fan who bought 39 copies of the game (Sankaku, so possibly NSFW) in order to get all the different stores pre-order bonuses. Instead, I just got three sets of the alternative sleeves for the game. Sourcing import PSP games in the UK is actually a bit of a pain, as a few of the more popular retailers won’t ship PSP or PS3 releases over due to Sony winning a court case against Lik-Sang for selling import PSPs before the UK release. As such, my copies are the marginally more expensive Japanese release of the game. It’s nothing to do with being snobby (though I’m aware a few import gamers are a little anal about the fact), but rather it was easiest version to source back when I pre-ordered. Apparently the marginally cheaper Asian release not only comes with everything pictured above, but also a no-doubt useful English instruction manual, so it probably a better purchase if you can find it.
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