iDOLM@STER 2 Official Guide Book

Keeping with the delayed reviews, next is THE iDOLM@STER 2 Official Guide Book, released in March.

Despite the overly nice picture in the cover, this guidebook is awful, and the worst of it is that is the "official" one. I expected a book like iDOLM@STER SP Producer's Guide, but this is lacking all the aspects of a guidebook and is mostly a very bad photobook of sorts.

The first part is centered in each of the nine playable girls:

Basic profile with the official art. The quality of the pictures included is pretty bad (especially the Master Artist 2 one in the top left) with visible compression artifact.

Probably the best part of the book are the interviews with the voice actress, along a nice photo of each. In the picture Hara Yumi (Takane).

The last part consists in some screenshots from the game, a chart of how characters call each others and a bunch of random outfits displayed (changes for each idol). The screenshots from the outfits are taken directly from the game, with awful quality and badly jagged edges.

Ritsuko gets a summarized version, with only two pages...

...but Ryuugu Komachi girls doesn't have as much luck and all three are covered in only two pages.

The outfit and accesory gallery is a complete joke, badly organized, incomplete and again with jagged edges and compression artifact.

The last part that explains the game mechanics is pretty much the same information that appears in the instruction booklet from the game, using even the same graphics.

Overall a guidebook to avoid because not only is useless as a guide but also fails as artbook, character reference and pretty much anything.