Wait, Passionate Idol Activities and Tangerine Boxes in the same cartoon? What kind of crazy paradise have I stumbled into here?!?

I’m not quite sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last couple of months, Aikatsu, a goofy pop idol show produced by Sunrise to promote a goofy pop idol collectors card video arcade game, seems to have firmly embedded itself as the unlikely favourite amongst those on my twitter timeline. It’s maybe hard to discern a particular reason for this in terms of determining a ratio between how much of it is steadily increasing quality, Stockholm syndrome and it continuing through a Spring season which was dominated by a small handful of shows which were mostly more impactful than they necessarily were good.

Well, OK, Stockholm Syndrome is actually grossly unfair a statement – it’s not like the show hasn’t proven itself to be constantly at the very least entertaining, but sometimes it’s more satisfying to watch a show which maintains a certain level of consistency over a long period than it is to watch something that hit’s incredible highs but is incredibly short, if you get what I mean? There’s a lot to be said for something that’s reliable in what it delivers.

That’s assuming you don’t fall into the trap of continuing to watch some kind of boys-comic claptrap what goes on long, long after the material has fallen off a cliff in the futile hope it may regain it’s quality at some point. Not naming any names, of course.

Of course, I absolutely wouldn’t suggest that Aikatsu’s popularity has any relation to how easy it makes it to ship the characters, oh no.

For my part, I’ve been satisfying my appetite for double-artificial idol music by picking up the CDs as they come out – well, aside from Siginalize, which I’ve somehow repeatedly forgotten to buy. I’ve not got the two most recent CDs either, but those are bundled in with next weeks release of the all-important Precure All-Stars New Stage 2 BD. Funny thing is, my favourite song is probably still Idol Katsudou from way back at the start of the series, though as far as the insert songs go, I guess Take Me Higher, Tristars image song, is pretty popular at the moment.

Well, as pretty popular as a song from Aikatsu can get, anyway.

With the recent release of the 300th figure, Good Smile Company have done something of a soft relaunch, or at least a minor rebranding, of their Nendoroid figure line. After all, at 300 entries, it’s probably one of the biggest series of specifically branded figures outside of the low-end capsule-machine brandings like Bandai’s HGIF, but at this point they’re facing increased competition from other manufacturers finally launching ranges in the same size and price point regions.

It’s kind of an interesting rebranding as well, in a sense – I don’t actually follow any of GSCs social presence, even though they do things in English, but it definitely feels like they’re playing up to the series popularity outside of Japan with their new packaging style (despite the “For Sale In Japan Only” moniker still displayed on the back). The Romanized version of the character name is now more prominent than the Kanji one, and the sculptor information on the front is now in English, the Japanese demoted to the back of the box. Whilst the traditional Nendoroid “Something Something Action Figure!” line in Japanese is still displayed on the front-left, the box also features slightly-awkward English lines like “Cute to look at, fun to play with and great to collect Nendoroids!” all over it.

Although it is kind of unfortunately that the rather cleaner, less busy graphic design of it all does actually end up making it more like, say, the competing Cupoche packaging than the busier, older ones did.

It’s also kind of unfortunate that the two Hidamari Sketch characters they’ve released as part of the series ended up juuuuuust either side of the rebranding, cursing the boxes not to match, despite being released barely a month apart.
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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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From episode 58 of Puchimas, the iDOLM@STER gag anime spin-off which, like the Mini-Goddesses, exists in the handy petite size. Not that this was the only example in the show – I actually had two different examples brought to my attention by Calaggie and Peter over on the Twitter ages back, but since I completely forgot to favourite the tweets like a sensible person at the time, I’ve had to go back on trawl the BDs for them. I figured I’d cap the post with this particular example because PiyoPiyo is my favourite underused Puchidol, and also it’s upside-down, which is kind of interesting!

Well, maybe not so much the latter point there.
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This one was brought to my attention by Peter over the Twitters, because I’m doing an absolutely awful job of keeping up with things I should probably be trying to watch this season. Turns out it was a pretty bad weekend to take off to make a terrible, and terribly broken, game about hugging for Molyjam, as when Monday rolled around I discovered that there were eleventy billion things to be watching and, honestly, I’m hardly even managing to keep track of what is and isn’t actually streaming on Crunchy at the moment. Whoops.

So this is presented without any kind of content relating to context or even the show, because, frankly, all I know about it right now comes from that gag comic edit with the samurai complaining about the apparent heteronormality of it all that was doing the rounds a couple of days back.