Gakuen Idolmaster Reveal Live Stream Summary March 5 2024 /学マス『アイドルマスター』シリーズ 「新ブランドアプリゲーム発表生配信」 英語まとめ

Solo idol raising simulation game. Comments from the producer and seiyuu. I wonder if this is getting an anime at some point and becoming an Aikatsu replacement

The live stream started with the reveal trailer in visibly low FPS. All of the gameplay videos shown through the live stream looked weird like that too. It had Viewtiful Joe-like slowmo and people were going “lol the FPS” in the chat. I even thought it kinda looked cool at times, and that the game was made this way on purpose as a visual effect.

Turns out the separate uploads of the trailers have no issues. So I assume something was wrong with the live stream’s settings, either the bitrate or the FPS settings? I’m an *Usagi I don’t know how to use a computer.jpg* person though so don’t quote me on this.

Gakumas Reveal Trailer

Trailer got uploaded separately once the live stream ended. The song feels like, very “2024” and not necessarily idol-like? Though I’m not sure what idol music is like nowadays. Maybe it is idol-like. Or maybe this sounds like Captain Taylor Swift stuff or K-pop stuff or similar other mainstream stuff, I dunno.

Title reveal as Gakuen Idolmaster. It’s an idol-raising simulation game where you increase their dancing, singing, etc stats. Concert scenes change depending on their stats. You focus on producing a single idol at a time. All concert scenes are solo only.

Trailer ends with “Spring 2024 release”, so the game should be out by June.

Gakuen Idolmaster producer Komino Hidefumi gets on stage. Says they plan to open pre-registration mid-stream, and wanted to do it right away but they’re going through final adjustements.

Gakuen Idolmaster Concept

Producer Komino Hidefumi went into a PR speech to introduce the brand and why they made it:

They wanted to make a new, easy-to-get-into Idolmaster brand for newcomers. That’s also why they went with a simple name, Gakuen Idolmaster. The official shortening is Gakumas.

That’s also why it’s set in school. It’s an easy-to-get environment everyone is familiar with. And they wanted to depict the idols’ growth so the school is perfect for that.

The game will have 9 idols at launch.

Hatsuboshi Gakuen. (Gives me a lot of Aikatsu S1 school vibes)

It’s a vocational school ​with a middle school, a high school, and a university section. The player character is a student who just passed the exam to enter the university section, which raises producers. They’re tasked with raising idols in the middle and high school sections.

Brand logo is two hummingbirds. It’s also the school’s symbol. It symbolizes producers and idols supporting each other to reach the stars.

Otsuka Akio voices the school director Jyuou Kunio. (He’s the narrator you hear in the reveal trailer).

Neo Asari, the player’s university teacher, voiced by Koga Aoi (woah she is everywhere nowadays. Def one of the biggest female seiyuu atm with Tanezaki Atsumi).

Introducing 3 of the characters/idols and their seiyuu

Each seiyuu got on stage and introduced their character with a short trailer. They were all visibly nervous. They’re pretty new seiyuu as usual with these types of projects. (As usual with these types of events and since what I call the “boom of the idol seiyuu industry in the late 2000s/early 2010s”, each seiyuu wore clothes with features and colors similar to their characters.)

Each trailer got uploaded separately once the stream ended so I included them below. Quickly summarized what each seiyuu said about their character. Didn’t translate the character profile themselves.

Iida Hikaru voicing Fujita Kotone (Yellow)

Iida Hikaru said Kotone is a cute and greedy type. The sole real reason she wants to become a huge idol is to get rich.
(This is the best unintentionally funny character setting I’ve seen in months. Maybe that would’ve been possible as a 70s, 80s idol? I love this era but I don’t know much about it. So I dunno if Yamaguchi Momoe rolled in money. Nowadays though it’s impossible. It’s like thinking you’ll be rich as a popular LN author or mangaka. You can’t be the new Takahashi Rumiko, Takeuchi Naoko, Toriyama Akira, Inoue Takehiko, etc. Today KadoRiver or whoever your publisher is definitely won’t fail in keeping all the money for themselves, even more so than back in the 80s. I doubt Fujimoto Tatsuki, Endou Tatsuya, etc are getting rich these days despite their manga generating millions.)

Ojika Nao voicing Tsukimura Temari (Blue)

Ojika Nao explained Temari is cool stoic and was the number 1 idol in the middle school section. Is particularly good at singing.

Nagatsuki Aoi voicing Hanami Saki (Red)

Nagatsuki Aoi explained Saki wants to be the number 1 idol in the world. She hates losing and is full of herself but with the skills and determination to back it up. Used to do sports as her main thing before joining the idol school, and has innate talent as an idol, so she’s good at everything. She loves her little sister, who also entered the idol school at the same time, so she always tries to show her best side to her.

(I guess Saki is the Gakumas poster girl? She’s the red one, and the reveal trailer focuses on her too.)

Talking about the auditions, the recordings, etc

The seiyuu were visibly nervous and weren’t used to live streams yet. Producer was pretty nervous too. From a quick search, in the past, he was the producer of Imas Million Live Theater Days. I dunno if he appeared much in live streams back then though. He seemed new at it.

Nagatsuki Aoi/red said she’s never been this nervous in her life.

Ojika Nao/blue said she was pretty confident during the live stream’s rehearsal, “lol this is gonna be easy”, and then when it started and they showed the trailer she almost started crying and thinking like “woah this is real we’re doing this” and her voice has been trembling since. “Live streams are scary lol”.

Fujita Kotone/Yellow said pretty much the same thing. Her nervousness gradually rose *gestures*.

Producer Komino Hidefumi said the auditions were back in 2022. He feels kinda bad the seiyuu and devs had to wait this long for the game to be publicly revealed.

Ojika Nao/Blue said it was kinda like an emotional rollercoaster. She was super excited to get the role 2 years ago. Then she realized it would still take a while for the game to release and her hype went down. And it kept getting back up and down. Starting with the first announcement of the 6th brand, on the imas 18th anniversary live stream in July 2023.
Be it the songs or the dialogues, it took a long time to record compared to her other roles. In particular, when the seiyuu voiced the first dialogue lines of the characters, they redid them tons and tons of time to refine them. So every single line is tied to a special memory from the recordings.

Fujita Kotone/Yellow thought the characters were super cute right when taking the first remote audition, so she really hoped to get a role. She was already satisfied enough to be called for the studio audition later on. And the day she got the role, she cried nonstop when she got back home as it suddenly hit her.

Fujita also specified that the seiyuu recorded together for scenes that feature their characters speaking to each other

(AFAIK this is pretty rare. Usually seiyuu record alone for sociage and Japanese games in general, unlike anime recording where they’re together in the studio.)

Story focuses on the characters’ problems (Kinda sounds like Aikatsu)

Producer Komino and the seiyuu explained the story focuses not only on the characters’ growth as idols but also as people.

Ojika Nao explained Temari/Blue was already the best at singing in the middle school section, so it’s not like there’s much room for growth there. However, her story focuses on the changes in her heart, how she grows as a person, etc.

Nagatsuki Aoi said that since Saki/Red joined from the high school section, there are parts of the story focusing on her mental blocks and how resolving those positively affects her singing etc. There’s also how some of the idols who attended the school from the beginning hate her for joining midway.

Iida Hikaru said Kotone/Yellow starts with low potential and isn’t good at singing. She had to sing kinda badly on purpose to show how her chara has no confidence, hasn’t been praised much in the past, but wants to get better etc. Depicting these feelings was pretty hard.

Talking about the game itself now

Producer Komino Hidefumi reconfirmed there will only be solo concerts and solo songs in Gakumas. The models are very detailed and made of 60,000 polygons, with over 20,000 just for the hair. They want to focus on making a single idol look as best as possible, instead of spreading their efforts among 5-6 idols. Having only one idol on screen also limits the game’s minimum spec requirements. That way people without high-end smartphones can play too.

The development team tried to focus on each char’s 3D model details. Like Yellow’s twintail braids, with the way they move and look, etc.

Producer Komino recalled that initially the game’s director asked to change Red’s hair because that kind of hairstyle with the kind of quality they aimed for would be “impossible”. But they managed to do it at the end.

Each of the characters‘ hairstyles and idol outfits also reflect their songs. They made everything in unison.

Gakumas developer Qualiarts

Qualiarts made Girlfriend Kari, one of the oldest still running sociage. It celebrated its 11th anniversary in October 2023.

Qualiarts is also the developer of Idoly Pride, released in June 2021. I’ve heard about it a lot but I still haven’t tried it out. However, it’s renowned for having really good graphics.

Game flow and concerts

KominoP explained they purposefully made it so you don’t see a concert right away when playing the game. You first have to walk together with your idol, raise her, go through the lessons, raise her parameters, etc. And only after all that you get to see the fruit of your efforts in a concert scene.

Depending on everything you do, you’ll visually see your idol improving, and the concert scenes changing.

KominoP specified that this isn’t a raising sim based on runs (In other words it’s not like UmaMusu)

Once you reach the concert scene, it’s not like your idol’s stats get reset. The stats, your relationship with the idol etc, get carried over in some way to the next time you produce her again. The idol won’t be like “woah nice to meet you” etc like the first time you picked her. We’ll get more details at a later date.

Introducing the staff

Scenario team

Fushimi Tsukasa, author of Oreimo and Eromanga sensei, handled the setting and story for the three idols introduced today.

The other two scenarists are: Shimizu Yuu, author of Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance. And Amamiya Kazuki.

I never heard of Amamiya Kazuki before, he seems pretty new as he won a newcomer award in 2020, and the two manga he’s writing for both started in 2023. He also wrote some novels/books. Gonna check out his stuff when I have the time.

Shimizu Yuu is the author of Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance. Never touched this series. The sole thing he did I’m familiar with is Houkago Bitchcraft. I never read it all but I remember thinking it was fun.

(So they picked one super popular late 2000s author, one popular early 2010s author, and a newcomer. It’s cool they’re giving a chance to someone new to become big. Oreimo is one of the rare super popular late 2000s series that I never got into. It’s not that I tried it out and didn’t like it, I just never felt like it. Never watched the anime, never read the novel. And I’m saying this just in case but it’s not because of the incest, I’m not filtered by such trivial matters, and I don’t need fictional media to learn that incest is bad. In a sense, it’s kinda like I read Oreimo anyway since everyone was talking about it in the bygone era of anime blogs. Kept seeing screenshots, discussions, etc about the LN even after the anime ended. So I know its importance overall.)

Comment from Fushimi

He really felt the pressure of working on a project as iconic as a new Imas series.

Character drafts

The Gakumas characters’ rough drafts were made by Minamino Aki and Hechima.

(I’m probably too anime boomer to be familiar with these artists so I don’t have personal comments to share. They seem pretty popular on social media though, and Hechima is the Mama of two VTubers part of the same group: Kohigashi Hitona and Hanamaru Hareru.)

Producer Komino said they’ll try to publicly reveal the character rough drafts in some way one day because they’re really cute.

Composers

Music Label is Bandai Namco owned Asobinotes

Bandai Namco Studio and Idolmaster series’ composer and lyricist Satou Takafumi acts as music producer for Gakumas

The seiyuu said he’s really nice during recordings but it’s kinda scary in a way he’s so nice and always smiling when telling them to redo something for the nth time till it’s perfect.

More stuff

There’s an ongoing Twitter campaign to win this shikishi with the seiyuu’s signatures.

Gakumas Twitter account will regularly publish a yonkoma manga starting March 6.

There’s going to be an official discord too. (People were shocked in the chat. It’s still pretty unusual to do this in Japan I think. Discord is extremely popular in Japan, especially among gamers but it’s still pretty unusual for a franchise to have its own Japanese official Discord server. Heaven Burns Red launched one a few months ago too.)

Future character reveals coming every Wednesday in March, April

The other characters will each get revealed via a live stream, once a week every Wednesday in March and April. (This is just like corpo VTubers debut streams.)

PR campaign in Akiba planned on march 16-17

PR campaign in Animate Ikebukuro

Stream entered its final segment after that. Producer Komino actually started getting a bit teary-eyed, happy they’re finally announcing the game. The three seiyuu shared some closing comments too but nothing noteworthy.

Random thoughts from yours truly

This looks pretty cool. Though it’s a shame it’s not meeting my unrealistic expectations. I was expecting something with a mix of boys and girls idols in the school, elements that feel more Aikatsu-like, and something a bit more original overall. Things will be different once I end white supremacy, take over Scamco, and make the ultimate idol trains mecha cards game franchise with tons of different characters, with an “everyone” target audience.

Though I guess doing solo idols only for a sociage is pretty original/risk-taking too. Wonder how the gacha system will work.

My guess now is that once the Shinymas season 2 anime ends, they’ll start airing a Gakumas anime in the same time slot, and this is really replacing Aikatsu.

Aikatsu also has a focus on solo concerts, though there are group concerts too. I have yet to watch Aikatsu Stars (though I love Sakuraba Roller and making Roller jokes), Aikatsu Friends (though I love Lilienne because she does Hokuto no Ken references), and Aikatsu Planet, so I dunno if Gakumas has a feel similar to them or not.

I follow imas since the first Xbox port, and Azusa is my hypothetical future wife but I don’t know that much about the franchise. Still never played any of the games (I started Starlit Season then never had the time to continue), never watched any of the anime adaptations. Need to get into the franchise one day.

I wish Bamco had the same enthusiasm for SideM stuff instead of always neglecting its fans due to higher-ups thinking a franchise with a majorly female target audience is disposable. I started writing something about this months ago when Growing Stars got its end-of-service notification. Maybe writing about Gakumas will help me finish this too.

I’ll cover each of the Gakumas reveal streams inchallah. Next one is March 13 1900 JST.

Thanks for reading. Would appreciate it if you subscribe and share my blog with your oomfies etc. Planning to do a lot of summaries like this.