Yes, I’ve heard the news that iDOLM@STER is coming to PSP by the end of the year – or more accurately, coming to PSP three times by the end of the year. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that they are doing three separate releases due to the amount of audio data in the game – aside from all the spoken dialogue, there’s obviously all the song data, stored multiple times for each character. Hopefully we’ll get the 360 and Live For You songs as a trade off for the missing characters, but there’s not been anything said about the song selection yet.

Anyway, in a move that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone reading, I’m presently planning to buy all three versions. For those who haven’t been following the news, or hasn’t heard everything yet, I’ll sum up what I presently know about these releases…

Three Versions
As I’ve already mentioned, they’ve split this release into three versions, each with different characters. The character split looks to have largely been made with character-type in mind, perhaps reducing the need for duplicate purchases (like most fans aren’t going to buy them all anyway…).

Wandering Star is the Loli edition, featuring the twins, Yukiho and the atypical Rie Kugimiya character Iori. I am kind of surprised it isn’t Yayoi rather than Yukiho.

Whilst Chihayas age may imply differently, her personality pretty much cements Missing Moon as the Mature edition, pairing her with Ritsuko and Azusa.

Perfect Sun has the left overs – Haruka, Yayoi and Makoto.

If you only buy one, I’d probably recommend Missing Moon as having my favourite line-up between Ritsuko and Chihaya – it’s just a shame that Azusa is my least favourite character. Wandering Stars Iori is quite tempting, but Perfect Suns line-up is comparatively a little blah. That might explain why Yayoi is on that edition, actually – it makes it marginally less skippable as a release.

No Miki
Miki Hoshii, the new character added for the 360 version of the game, is curiously missing from the line-up. They do mention the matter in the news article floating around – apparently her fate is a secret, and something we’ll hear about later. I guess that probably means she’ll be available via DLC or similar at some point in the future. I suppose including her in one of the disk releases would have resulted in one of the titles having four characters, promoting sales of one particular edition above the others. It might have made Perfect Sun a little more interesting, though.

No Groups
The PSP version is going to be limited to having only Solo units. I can’t really say it’s a surprise – the audio mixing would probably be a headache, it not technically impossible at a decent quality. I’m kind of suspecting that they are going store the music tracks fully mixed with the vocals (i.e. storing three versions of each track on the disk with different vocals) rather than storing the music as a backing track and overlaying the vocals over them line-by-line as appropriate as in the other versions of the game. A result of memory issues, I suspect.

It’s not the 360 version…
In terms of gameflow, I mean. They are changing things up a little, presumably because they realise that they might actually have to have a game for the PSP version, rather than relying on the Japanese obsession with concert videos that keeps the otherwise broken 360 version afloat. They are introducing a different fanmail system to the 360 version, and have replaced the 360 versions one-week, one-task scheduling system with a system that allows you to perform up to three tasks in one day! Wooo! It’s likely to open up a few new play options when developing your idol, such as the player being able to choose to split things between having multiple lessons in different subjects in one day, or longer lessons in the one subject with higher gains. It should, at least, promote a move away from the fixed time-usage patterns that most 360 players have worked out can achieve them the maximum score.

Arcade-style Expression Lessons
Mentioned solely because, unlike the 360 versions maze-affair, this one actually requires some Japanese knowledge ^^;

Anyway, more news when I hear something I hear something worth mentioning, else when I have the actual game in my mitts later in the year.