So, Famitsu revealed over the last few days that the iM@S Hatsune Miku cross-over Bamco announced at TGS is more than just a costume for your idols. Rather, it’s something of a suspiciously cheap Miku megapack. Well, suspiciously cheap compared to vanilla iM@S costume DLC.

So, aside from the Miku costume for your idol unit, the pack will add Miku to your game… kind of. The main part of what it will do is add a Miku performance of World in Mine, based on the SEGA Project Diva routines, presumably, to the S4U (Stage for You) mode. This means you’ll be able to pop into that mode, watch Miku sing and dance, and presumably exert the same basic level of camera control over the performance as you can with other performances (though the fact that’s actually more limited than what was presented in iM@S1 and L4U was something of a matter of contention with the 360 release of the game – curious to see if it’ll have been tweaked for PS3). I’d imagine you’ll be able to choose the stage as well, I guess.

This is presumably the same thing that they’re doing by including Jupiter in the games S4U mode, as came out of the TGS PV. I guess this means that they’ve added functionality to allow unique character performances into S4U, most importantly via DLC. Most tellingly, the production staff mention that they’d like to get Macross Frontiers Ranka and Sheryl into the game somehow.

It’s interesting, though I do wonder how much scope beyond those Macross characters there actually is for cameos. I mean, iM@S, engine-wise, is geared up for idols, so the current go-tos for anime groups, like Hokago Tea-Time or Girls Dead Monster, are kind of ruled out with them actually being bands with instruments and all that. What’s that leave us with – Starish? Of course, part of the reason why Miku was easy to put in the game is because all the performance data actually already exists in digital form. From that point of view, the options become even more limited, though I guess a series of DreamClub cameos would be hilarious given how much that game riffed on the iM@S character designs.

Actually, Miku will be integrated into the main game as well, admittedly in a limited fashion. In the most limited sense, she’ll appear as a ranked artist in the weekly charts. In a less limited sense, one of the screenshots in the Famitsu article shows Miku doing a Burst Appeal against the player. This suggests that you’ll be able to go up against Miku at a Festival event at some point. In what sense, I’m not entirely clear – it could be an additional Miku-specific Festival added to the Scheduling screen (though that may be balance-breaking a little). I’d wager that it’s more likely that Miku will just randomly show up as an opponent as you are doing Performance events. As the game stands, the opponent units at non-special Festivals (as in, anything which isn’t versus Ryuuguu Komachi or Jupiter) will just appear as random 765 girls who you didn’t select. That’s kind of odd in it’s own sense, I guess, so having an additional pool of character models to pull from would be nice.

Overall, I’m just curious to see how far they choose to take this new cameo functionality. Though Rin/Len costuming would be amusing to a certain degree because of the Ami/Mami thing, it’d be nice to see this go beyond just Vocaloids, though not necessarily for my wallet at those current exchange rates…

(I really must endeavour to not become an iM@S news blog…)