iDOLM@STER 2 clear

Just finished my first play-through of THE iDOLM@STER 2.

My unit after winning the IA Grand Prix.

The story sections are way too few. There are only 5 story related events with your group leader, only two festivals against Ryuugu Komachi team and Jupiter rival unit doesn't appear until very late in game, completely centered in Touma and forgetting the other two.

The event parts barely develops the characters. In the first game you need to do several communications to get enough memories to do the memory appeal in the auditions. This time it was completely changed; now the events raises the overall number of appeals you can do in the auditions, and those are automatically refilled. This makes the events less necessary and since the the gameplay is now focused in the auditions, the story part is now secondary and actually worse than the first game.

Takane's story was a bit disappointing, mostly being Takane being flirted by a rich middle aged man. Her personality was changed a bit, too. She is unable to understand casual speak or foreign words, and easily gets offended due to this. I got the good ending but it wasn't as heartwarming as I expected... I hope the other girls have better stories.

Lovely swimsuit Takane.

Since until now I played the PSP version, I find the visuals incredible, and there are a pretty nice added things, like the girls able to send you pictures via the mobile phone.

Chihaya send me only 5 e-mails, and 3 of them had pictures attached (Takane send 37, and only 2 with pictures).

There's also the nice effect that now the girls wears winter and summer clothing, and changes the outfits pretty often for the events.

Takane in kimono! This sure is a future DLC.

And my status post game:

I managed to get the first position in the sales chart, but my hi-score was rather low and I ended with a B rank.

Now I'll begin my second play-through with Yukiho as the leader. Her new voice by Asakura Azumi is very similar to Hase Yurina's one, and only sounds weird in certain songs, like "Kosmos, Cosmos"

And for those curious, this is my Xbox gamertag: