The latest issue of Famitsu has an announcement for a new 360 iMAS game, Live for You. From what has been said, it’s sounding like an uber-stripped down version of iMAS – that is, it has the actual game part removed, leaving just the dress up and performance parts of the game. I’m guessing that DLC sales for the first iMAS game have slowed down to the point where they feel that it’s more profitable to make a whole new release out of a bunch of them.

Then sell some more download content for that one.

Given the popularity of the performance part of the game in Japan, I guess it’s not surprising that they’d do a full game out of just that part. It’ll be interesting to see what the remixed music it’s promising is – songs in the original iMAS have a strict time limitation due to the fact that they all have to run exactly the same length to facilitate the online auditions. Remove the auditions, and you remove that requirement. At this point I’m pretty much expecting the remixed music to be the “M@STER” versions of the songs from the Masterpiece and Masterwork CDs, though some new tracks would be nice as well. Some random iMAS themed mini-games would be cool, too, but that would be being overtly optimistic.

Whilst I’ll be buying it anyway, I have to admit that this isn’t quite the iMAS game I was hoping for. The game I was hoping for was a strict, arcade-rules iMAS game. The thing with the 360 version is that the game part is actually rather broken, which is probably why they’ve removed the game part and produced Live For You. There’s a few issues with the 360 version which ultimately makes getting a good score more about patience than anything else.

For those who haven’t played iMAS on the 360, the game is ultimately about getting the highest number of fans in the 52 weeks the game spans. The arcade version, from what I gather, is different in that the period isn’t fixed – it’ll kick you if you under perform – and you don’t have quite as much free scope for choosing your actions. The gain fans, you have to pass auditions for TV appearances against other groups of idols, and to improve your chances at auditioning you need to raise your statistics through lessons, choices of costumes and song selection. To be able to enter into the higher rated auditions for the most popular shows, you need to have met certain fan and level limits.

Basically, the idea is that you go from having no fans to working your way through the various levels of TV appearances to being a top idol, mixing different types of activities though each of the 52 turns out get. If you actually play it that way, it’s a pretty challenging game to get a good rating in.

The thing is, no-one does play it this way outside their first game or two. Once you’ve unlocked enough decent costume parts, which are unlocked randomly at the end of each week (or bought online), to get a reasonable boost from the offset, things become pretty pointless. If you are competing to get into the online ranking tables, there’s pretty much no option than to play in a broken fashion.

(I’d recommend not reading on unless you are really, really interested in iMAS game mechanics, or want to know how to get those table-topping scores some of the Japanese players have gained).

Ultimately, there’s only actually three real issues that actually break the 360 game, but for something which started life as an arcade game stressing its competitive, online play they are all kind of dumb, and from what I gather none of them affect the arcade version. In all three cases, I find it astonishing that they hadn’t realised the effect they would have on the game.

The first is the inclusion of one, specific audition type, called “Make Dog” – actually an online-only audition, which kind of makes it worse given it’s effect on the rankings. Make Dog is an audition which is intended as a leg-up to those who are performing badly at the game – you can only take it if your success rate at auditions is particularly low (as in below 20%), and you can only do it once (assuming you succeed). It sounds fine in theory, but the implementation doesn’t really work. The thing is, your success rate at the start of the game, before you take any other auditions, is at 0% – this means you meet the criteria for participating in that audition as soon as you start the game. The audition gives three of the five competing acts a TV appearance, making it fairly easy to win for even a starting group given a decent costume, and the value of the audition is actually rather high – it’ll jump you straight into the middle of E rank. You’ll get a stat boost from winning a “difficult” audition, since your opposition will likely all be a higher level than you (particularly true if you yank your network connection as soon as you join, meaning you’ll be competing only against CPU opponents). You’ll only need to clear one more audition from the online only section – most of which have fairly lax joining restrictions – to reach D rank, which will allow you access to the games highest-valued auditions, though you’d find them rather tougher to pass at a beginners level.

Not that this will concern you much, as getting such a significant chunk of fans off the bat simply has it’s advantages in the weekly automatic fan increase – you actually get an increase in your fanbase without doing anything, admittedly a small one. The more fans you already have, the larger this increase will actually be. Getting a good score off the bat means that, well, you’ll reap bigger benefits than you would have doing a comparable audition later in the game.

Now, having gotten off to a good start, you need to increase your stats to such a point you can compete in the harder auditions. This isn’t an issue thanks to the fact that there is no penalisation for doing nothing but lessons. I’m led to believe that one of the things that’ll kick you from the game in the arcade is not passing an audition within a certain number of weeks – first you’ll start seeing stat degradation, then the management decide the group is underperforming and disband them. There’s no such penalisation in the 360 version – you get stat degradation for keeping a single for too long (first at around 10-12 weeks), but nothing for doing nothing but lessons. Essentially, there’s nothing to stop you doing ten weeks of lessons off the trot. If you are sensible you’ll manage to keep your Tension (a gauge representing your relationship with your characters) high enough not to cause problems whilst using lessons effectively (PROTIP – you get the biggest stat boost for lessons for the characters whose level for that area is already high – i.e. Chihaya for Vocal lessons and Iori for Pose and Image ones). Ten weeks of lessons is enough to get you in a good position to pass pretty much anything with a bit of luck, so after that you can spend the rest of the game doing nothing but auditions. You’ll only need one more to reach D rank, which you’ll pass easily, then you can spend the rest of the time doing that one Idol Vision audition worth 75000 fans. You’ll get around 3million fans in the end, no problem – well, aside from having to wait for that audition to actually show in the list, but that’s just a matter of time. The difference between this score and those topping the leaderboards online is simply the knowledge of how to correctly use appeals during performances.

Failing auditions, coincidently, isn’t a problem due to the third issue with the game – there’s no significant reset penalisation (or penalisation at all). If something doesn’t go your way, you can just reset it and try as many times as you want. Really, this is the uber-gamebreaker. All they would have had to do was make the game autosave when you select audition or another activity for that week, then save again after it’s been performed. If you try and restart the game using a save from before completing the week, it should allow you to finish the game, but disqualify you from the online rankings. It’d probably annoy people on occasion due to accident resets or power cuts, but frankly it’d be better than breaking the entire online rankings. I mean, do badly at a lesson? Reset. Audition doesn’t go your way? Reset. Make bad choices during a dialogue? Reset. There isn’t even a server-side check to make you that online auditions you’ve just performed in haven’t been erased from your units record…

Totally breaks the game.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t any fun to be had with the game – I’ve probably played it more than anything else this year, after all. The dialogues are fun (even if some are a little on the creepy side), as is the music and the performances and playing the game fairly. There just isn’t much point in that when others don’t feel like playing along.

So to conclude, to fix the game they need to get around the reset problem, remove the Make Dog audition and give you serious stat-degradation or fan-loss for not winning auditions on a regular basis. Bandai Namco, if you ever release this game on another home format, please do the above. Thank you.