Depending on where you reside in the world, the iDOLM@STER Secret Event happened earlier today (or yesterday), and the Bandai Channel re-stream of it wrapped up about half an hour before I started typing this. This isn’t to say that I actually watched it myself – I fear that messing around with proxy and VPN settings feels like one of those slippery slopes, starting with just wanting to watch one or two idol concerts, and climaxing ultimately with getting intensely frustrated with Kantai Collection registration lotteries. I’ve too much consuming my time already without having to worry about another bunch of time sinks.

I digress, however – what even I saw out of the event were the new PVs for both the iM@S Movie and the new game, One for All. Post event chatter has been somewhat dominated by the movie trailer, rather than that of the game. It’s perhaps not too astonishing, given that’s where the real bombshell was dropped – the movie is going to feature a number of characters from Million Live.
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Not that this isn’t something that should be entirely obvious.

I’ve posted about it previously, pre-release, but to recap, iM@S Channel is the new PS3 application that came out on Wednesday of this week, and is a central repository for forthcoming PS3 iDOLM@STER game content. Omo already posted most of the pertinent details that I hadn’t discussed earlier, so go read that – though I will say that I’m actually finding the timing a bit easier, rather than harder, in ShinyTV than I did for Shiny Festa. I’m pretty sure that Omo played Festa predominantly on iOS, whereas I mostly played it on PSP (well, PS Vita), so that may factor in the difference in impression in regards to that.
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OK, so apparently Namco Bandai have been outed as registering the 3rd VISION trademark. The potential significance of this is likely obvious to at least a few of those reading this – all the iDOLM@STER works span-off from iDOLM@STER2 were tagged as 2nd VISION, so it follows that this is likely to be advance notice of a third core installment to the franchise coming up in the near future.

Its probably make a lot of sense that this is something that’s potentially coming up shortly. Aside from the fact that there are new hardware platforms coming in the near future for them to exploit, and the otaku market are probably easier to sucker into being early adopters than most, there is also the forthcoming iM@S feature film. Bundling the movie’s eventual home release with a new iteration of the game makes an awful lot of sense, particularly considering how well the iM@S2 plus TV anime bundle sold when released on PS3.

Aside from that, though, they’ve pretty much milked iM@S2 as much as they can without bringing in some kind of shake-up at this point – even discounting the mobage, they’ve more-or-less exploited it as much as they managed to with works derived from original iM@S. They’ve had their TV anime (though the A1 Pictures effort was obviously a lot more “core” iM@S than Xenoglossia!) and their three PSP games – this time combined with their rhythm-game-bundled-with-OAV title. DLC for iM@S2 has naturally run it’s course by this point to.

All told, it’s probably about time they did something to revitalize interest in the core franchise, especially now that they are actually facing some degree of competition in the idol game market – I mean, there’s Aikatsu, and there’s an upcoming Love Live Vita game forthcoming, and who even knows what the heck SEGAs Project575 is. Attention is divided.

But, hey, it’s obviously early days right now, so who knows what this actually is, or what they’re going to do with the game. I do have my own suggestions, however…
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Calling me a Neptunia fan might be swinging a touch on the strong side. Not to say that I’ve not played the Neptunia games, or at least some of them. I’ve finished the first, which, honestly, was a badly designed mess of a game. I’ve finished Neptunia mk2 as well, after having suffered a great deal of hassle trying to track down a UK copy of it (it’s been re-issued over here in the mean time, thankfully, so it’s now pretty cheap), and that was much better experience all-around. I have started on the third game in the series, Victory, as well at this point, but whilst that seems polished further again, that’s kind-of been sidelined by other things. I really must get back to that.

Anyway, they released a new Neptunia game for the Vita in Japan this week, and whilst I was going to ignore it, I did discover I was only about 900 yen short of buying it on my Japanese PSN account, and I did have getting drugs pumped right next to my sciatic nerve to recover from, so I figured what the heck.

Particularly given it’s an idol game. My bailiwick and all that.
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Not that I’ve been able to play it, since BaNam haven’t seen fit to grace these good shores with it’s availability – some joke referencing “The World Is All One” and telling them to stuff their “Unity Mind” would likely be appropriate here, were I feeling up to the necessary level of witticism. I’d be curious to know if there’s any specific reason for it’s lack of local availability, but I wouldn’t like to speculate on that specific point.

Anyway, the Internet exploded with a whole load of annoyed shouting and a whole boatload of misinformation when the games surfaced in the US AppStore yesterday. This, mostly, comes down to the fact that it’s three games priced at $55 a piece, which even I admit is a little on the steep side.
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