Hey, folks, the PS3 iDOLM@STER2 trial version is out for those of you with Japanese PSN accounts. I figure that, since a lot of people (and not necessarily those planning on picking up the full game) will probably be giving it a try, I’d just quickly run through what the demo gives you to play around with.

Actually, from the details they released yesterday, they kind of suggested that they’ve be covering the first six weeks of the game (basically, all the tutorial stuff – if you play the game, it actually makes a lot of sense that they’d leave things there). As it turns out, they’re only presenting you one week of game, and week five rather strangely. This does mean that I’m now sitting on a really rather long tutorial post for the game that I guess I’ll be sitting on for a couple of weeks.
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…Because the Escaflowne movie is so boring that it’ll knock you out cold, amiright?

Actually, that’s being a bit unfair. Having eight years of distance from my last rewatch of the TV show, as opposed to eight minutes like the last time I watched the movie, rather did wonders for my appreciation. After the TV show, where most episodes end on some kind of cliffhanger or high-point, the movie is simply uneventful. Taken on it’s own, it still has it’s share of issues with pacing and underdeveloped character arcs, but it’s still a very pretty looking movie with some really neat action sequences.
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It’s that time of year again… is what I’d be saying if this was more than just the second occasion the event has been held, or if I’d actually been to the Glasgow weekend last year. Instead, hey, it’s the second year of Scotland Loves Anime, the event in which two cinemas in Scotland show anime movies all weekend.

Not that, on paper, this years line-up looked as good as last years. This isn’t the fault of the organisers, though – The advantage of doing one of these for the first time last year is that they could get away with pulling content from the previous couple of years, whereas they didn’t really have that luxury when following things up just a year later. Add to that the fact that last year was really an abnormally good year for anime movies coming out of Japan, with things like Redline finally hitting after years in production.

I’m not saying that this years line-up is bad (particularly given I’ve not yet seen A Letter to Momo, or next weeks enigmatic “MYSTERY FILM”), but at first glance, not quite so spectacular.
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Bandai Namco released another PV for PS3 iDOLM@STER2 a few days ago, but there’s a subtle (in incredibly anal sounding) difference between this and the previously released PS3M@S trails – this one isn’t actually a trailer for the game, rather it’s the first trailer for the games DLC. The game isn’t actually out yet, but this is Bamco settling into business as usual, and you’ll be seeing one of these every month now for a while to come (heck, the eighth 360 DLC promo was released just a couple of weeks ago).

It’s hard to tell if the PS3 version will work the same, given that the platform hosts have different policies regarding bandwidth costs on their service, but it’ll probably worth me spending a little time discussing how DLC in the games, or at least the 360 ones, work.
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So, Famitsu revealed over the last few days that the iM@S Hatsune Miku cross-over Bamco announced at TGS is more than just a costume for your idols. Rather, it’s something of a suspiciously cheap Miku megapack. Well, suspiciously cheap compared to vanilla iM@S costume DLC.

So, aside from the Miku costume for your idol unit, the pack will add Miku to your game… kind of. The main part of what it will do is add a Miku performance of World in Mine, based on the SEGA Project Diva routines, presumably, to the S4U (Stage for You) mode. This means you’ll be able to pop into that mode, watch Miku sing and dance, and presumably exert the same basic level of camera control over the performance as you can with other performances (though the fact that’s actually more limited than what was presented in iM@S1 and L4U was something of a matter of contention with the 360 release of the game – curious to see if it’ll have been tweaked for PS3). I’d imagine you’ll be able to choose the stage as well, I guess.

This is presumably the same thing that they’re doing by including Jupiter in the games S4U mode, as came out of the TGS PV. I guess this means that they’ve added functionality to allow unique character performances into S4U, most importantly via DLC. Most tellingly, the production staff mention that they’d like to get Macross Frontiers Ranka and Sheryl into the game somehow.

It’s interesting, though I do wonder how much scope beyond those Macross characters there actually is for cameos. I mean, iM@S, engine-wise, is geared up for idols, so the current go-tos for anime groups, like Hokago Tea-Time or Girls Dead Monster, are kind of ruled out with them actually being bands with instruments and all that. What’s that leave us with – Starish? Of course, part of the reason why Miku was easy to put in the game is because all the performance data actually already exists in digital form. From that point of view, the options become even more limited, though I guess a series of DreamClub cameos would be hilarious given how much that game riffed on the iM@S character designs.

Actually, Miku will be integrated into the main game as well, admittedly in a limited fashion. In the most limited sense, she’ll appear as a ranked artist in the weekly charts. In a less limited sense, one of the screenshots in the Famitsu article shows Miku doing a Burst Appeal against the player. This suggests that you’ll be able to go up against Miku at a Festival event at some point. In what sense, I’m not entirely clear – it could be an additional Miku-specific Festival added to the Scheduling screen (though that may be balance-breaking a little). I’d wager that it’s more likely that Miku will just randomly show up as an opponent as you are doing Performance events. As the game stands, the opponent units at non-special Festivals (as in, anything which isn’t versus Ryuuguu Komachi or Jupiter) will just appear as random 765 girls who you didn’t select. That’s kind of odd in it’s own sense, I guess, so having an additional pool of character models to pull from would be nice.

Overall, I’m just curious to see how far they choose to take this new cameo functionality. Though Rin/Len costuming would be amusing to a certain degree because of the Ami/Mami thing, it’d be nice to see this go beyond just Vocaloids, though not necessarily for my wallet at those current exchange rates…

(I really must endeavour to not become an iM@S news blog…)