User blog:Dorayaki/The Fallen Stars? --- What have been occured to Aikatsu Stars!

Note:

1) The following post and discussion use references from the DCD arcade game, the history of previous series, and also Takara Tomy's Pretty series.

2) The following post contains critiques toward the Aikatsu! series, please understand. Feedbacks are welcome.

Since the arcade game has announced the final update of game before the new series comes, I think this is the proper time to have a post to discuss the whole AiStars deal.

So here is the general issue: Aikatsu Stars fails to meet fans' expectation. What is the expectation fans had, and why AiStars failed? Here is the analysis:

1) The DCD characters:
Well there's really no need to complain. We had ten main characters from Season 1, in Season 2 we have the four Venus characters, Yuri Ashida, not counting characters from the original series, so I guess that's enough. But this is probably the only thing that DCD AiStars qualified.

The only tiny complaint from me is that we don't have Haruka Ruka in the DCD game. Okay, in the final DCD update BANDAI has officially proven that they did create Haruka's hair part in the game, so why not actually make Haruka into the game? That's kinda sad.

2) The copy-paste brand coords:
Which is a previous post I made weeks ago, and very unfortunately even until the series reach the end, AiStars still only release copy-paste brand coords and do not make any new original brand coords.

Somehow, Royal Sword and Perfect Queen, the Season 2 new brands end up as the victims of BANDAI's copy-paste trick since they're almost out of own original coords. Or possibly, we could suspect that the two brands were made to be copy-paste brands since most are recycled from the Romance Story collection of the original series. But I do think these brands have own potential to develp more original coords, as shown in Photokats (Photo on Stage).

Meanwhile, I think TakaraTomy's Pripara series have done a consistant good job in creating new Rare brand coords in their lineup. Almost in each part they would introduce several feature Rare coords that would also show up in the anime CG lives.

The following list seems to show the only actually original coords from Season 2 (possibly contain unfound recycled parts):

ML : Sweetie Peach Coord • Little Heart Drop Coord • Nordic Flower Coord • Flower Misty Coord

SC : Rocking Melody Coord • Spice Red Beat Coord

RK : Cutwork Coord • Romance Purple Coord

GV : Emu Syndrome Coord • Noble Viridian Coord • Eden Apple Coord • Silent Canary Coord

BP/RBP: Framboise Crème Coord • Marguerite Spring Coord • Pink Petit Parfait Coord • Fantasy-ic Sweet Coord • Lovely Pink Letter Coord • Cotton Berry Coord • Berry Pancake Coord • Chocolat Check Coord

FFD : Mary Nap Time Coord • Märchen Lollipop Coord • Pompom Cherry Coord • Melty Pink Bell Coord • Fluffy Poppin' Night Coord

PQ : Royal Flower Coord• Mellow Grape Coord • Majestic Gold Coord

3) The imbalance between dress brands:
To be honest.... this is a very familiar we've met in the original series as well as AiStars Season 1, which favored brands are Angely Sugar and My Little Heart. And for this season, as the list shown above, BANDAI created way more original BP/RBP coords than other brands. Especially Shiny Smile is the worst treated among the early brands.

I do feel surprised that Perfect Queen didn't have that many original coords since Elza was supposed to be the major rival in this season. But this is definitely a shame on Rei who has the fewest promotional brand coords and excatly none of her Rare coords is original.

4) The confusing Dress Make System
Remember we had the thing called "dress make glitters" in the first series? Despite AiStars claiimed to allow gamers to "Dress Make" you dress with glitters, we soon realized that these were not actually useful, given that we cannot actually properly choose different gliters and mixed into a new dress by our own will. Example: use the shape of Dreaming Princess Coord, with the pattern of Picnic Coord and accessory from Flower Fairy Coord.

Weirdly, Pripara's 3DS titles have the actually dress designer fuctions that allow gamers to create the dress they want, with the given coord shape, pattern and accessory. I think this is what Aikatsu! series should really work on.

5) The decrease of Premium coords:
As we know, Season 2 features Star Premium coords, the coords with Wings of Stars, which would be more powerful (aka, more appealpoints in the game) than the regular premium coords.

But as we have nine Star Premium coords, which represent the current nine brand muses, we only additionally have Yume's Première Berry Coord and the Sun dress collection in the final update, no other premium dress in this season. Okay, we can definitely feel that something is wrong- these are few.

Of course we can find a clear standard to explain this, by having other seasons make comparisons, which are AiStars Season 1, Aikatsu Season 2 (which Constellation collection was the "counterpart" to this season) and Idol Time Pripara (rival series aired in the same time). How many premium dress are in each series? (note: recolors are not counted, Pripara counts the CR/SCR dresses)

AiStars Season 2: 11 

AiStars Season 1: 16

Aikatsu Season 2: 13

Idol Time Pripara: 24

......... So AiStars Season 2 has the fewest premium dresses among them, HUH? Seriously, this is pure frustrating. Aren't you supposed to do more premium dresses than before, BANDAI? Why you gave fans eleven, such as sad number? And look at Pripara closesely, they do more thant twenty featured coords this year!!

Well, back to AiStars Season 1, it was meant to give four premium dresses in each seasonal collection. In AiStars Season 2, at first we also thought so, but since Part 2 they only gave us two premium coords since then.

Mahiru's Daylight Festival Coord was also a very infamous case for reintroducing the same coord in part 2 with just adding wings.

This problem also leads to negative impacts on the anime story and characters yeah, that means certain characters that didn't obtain premium dresses in Season 1 still get no premium dresses in Season 2. Well, although there's possiblity that BANDAI could just favor the new characters and still ignore the old characters, but they're still obliged to give fans enough amount of coords.

Adding the problem of copy-paste coord issue, here is the general problem about the coor lineup part: so, BANDAI did not do more rare coords, nor did they do more premium coords, so did they work hard on this Season?

6) The decrease of one-pieces
One-pieces have been a recurring dress parts in the original series, but somehow they make very minor appearances in this series. This perhaps relates to the fact that new series are not able to create new dresses, as one-pieces mostly requires new original designs. In this series, we end up without any ShinySmile / RoyalSword one-pieces designs.

7) The lack of interactive toy merchandise
For those who have watched Pripara series, you must know that they introduce many toy merchandise in the show that you can see everywhere: Idol Link, Idol Time Watch, Rosette Pact, Jewel Microphone... etc. But on ther other hand, Aikatsu series have none of those things to compete with.

So what about hthe Aikatsu Mobile? Here's the problem.... toy mobiles are definitely not something innovative in either Aikatsu! series or in the whole toy market. Pripara noticed that and stopped doing mobiles, instead they do different toys every year. Also, Aikatsu Mobiles do not have very strong interactivity with the arcade, which don't make gamers feel obliged to buy..

The only possible good thing about AiStars could be the Aikatsu Dress Charm, but they also have a major issue that their QR coords have no shoes and acessory parts, only the bottom and top parts. I think this line should be continue as long as they could give us the whole coord

.

8) Poor performance in 3DS titles

Which we're refering to is My Special Appeal. As mentioned above, the rival game 3DS Pripara has very powerful designer function for gamers to create dress and print into game cards. There's also a critical defect for all Aikatsu! 3DS titles that they don't include all songs in the software already, you have to buy them additionally in limited time, which of course decrease fans' wills to buy.

9) The decrease of songs / live performances
Okay, this time we still use the same comparisons to see whether AiStars Season 2 did introduce enough amount of songs:

AiStars Season 2: 13 

AiStars Season 1: 22

Aikatsu Season 2: 22

Alright, AiStars Season 2 yet again falls apart with the lack of nine songs, which means AiStars Season 2 could had released one or two more song albums if it maintains the quantitly. It's more ironic when seeing that AiStars Season 1 actually only had five months, but AiStars Season 2 has six months, which means BANDAI is supposed to give more songs and lives in the final part of the series.

One other problem we can see from the official news videos is, they claim certain recycled songs to be "new content", which is very dishonest.

10) The missing Unit Appeals
The original series had two major occasions for unit appeals: one is the featured idol units from the anime story, such as Tristar and Soleil, the second is the special themes of dress collection such as Romance stories.

However, in this series exactly none of the dress item from DCD has the power to drive a unit appeal. In the DCD game, unit members can only end with "Fever Bonus Time" and there are no actual unit appeals.

Although we know that the upcoming Aikatsu! Friends would have unit appeals return, weirdly, regardless of the trio unit cup in Season 1, S4 is a featured unit in the series but they don't have own unit appeal in the end, which is kinda a sad thing.

11) The imbalance of types of new game stages:
Most of us can pretty much tell that, among the 14 songs in this season, their types are:

Live: 7 (which adds Miracle Force Magic)

Drama: 0

Runway: 4

Dance: 3

Alright, we obviously see the imbalance for that one of the stage type is zero. We may tell the reason that there are too many new characters in this season (adding the return of old Aikatsu! idols), Drama is the stage that requires all voice actors to read the line, which costs alot. This is probably the reason they cut down the dramas this time.

But the rest of types didn't do a good balance either, obviously there are just too many lives, especially both PQ and BP/RBP have two lives songs but didn't cover all types. There could have been one Dance song for each brand, I think.

12) The confusing re-introduction of Aikatsu! content.
Under the name of celebrating Aikatsu! 5th anniversary, at first glance I think most fans would think this is a good thing, but here are several problems we should also notice:

12-a) The abolishement of old brands in DCD AiStars

Which occurre in the beginning of AiStars series, which frustrate many old and loyal Aikatsu! fans who own many Aikatsu cards. So here's the problem: re-introducing the old brand still doesn't make the old cards retrieve their brand appeals, they're still useless. Even worse, old fans are forced to once again collect old dresses they already had in the DCD AiStars.

12-b) The confusing return of brands



To be honest, I do feel very happy to see how old characters perform new appeals and new characters perform old appeals. But it seems like BANDAI still didn't make the best use of the precious old brands.

Just as we discuss the copy-paste isssue before, some of the brandless dress items were from the brands coords of the original series, then, why not make them be old brands?

12-c) The confusing return of songs

Remember we mentioned that there were very few songs in this season? So perhaps it's good to also recycle more old Aikatsu! songs in the DCD AiStars system. However, what we actually got are only "Idol Activity!", "SHINING LINE", "Diamond Happy" and perhaps counting "We wish you a merry Christmas". Okay, among tons of old Aikatsu songs we only have these four? That sounds not very generous to me.

12-d) The still un-released Aikatsu! coords

As I mentioned in my old post, there are several un-released Aikatsu! coords in the original DCD system. Okay, since you'd like to feature the Aikatsu! original content in the new system, aren't you supposed to release these coords first?

We know they have brought back Autumn Picnic Coord, Dressy Santa Coord and New Year Coord, but still several important ones are missing, especially the most wanted Masquerade Coords and Churaumi Uniform.

13) The confusing recoloring coords:
There something new (not positively) in this season: there are recolored premium dresses. One is the Swan Lake Blue Coord, which is the color variation of Dreaming Princess Coord. The second is the Sun/Moon dress collection with ten dresses in total.

Okay, nobody ever said that there can't be rcoloring premium dresses since Pretty series has done that very often (such as Laala's Twinkle Ribbon Cylume Coord, as well as some other different cylume coords). Bu there's a major difference in Pripara: their color variation of premium dress (cylume dress) mostly appear in promotional ways (example ), not in the arcade lineup.

Also as we consider that AiStars Season 2 lacks of more original premium coords, we may actually suspect that BANDAI actually did the recloring premium coords only to be lazy? Cause they could had released these coords in promotional ways just like Pripara, while they the arcade lineup could had been more original.

And this is not the end of story, for that:

13-a) Why not recoloring more AiStars premium dresses?



As we discussed about certain old characters could not obtain premium dresses, so isn't it a very efficient way to create more premium dress for those characters, so that no main characters are ignored?

13-b) Why not recoloring Aikatsu! dresses?



As we mentioned the confusing re-introduction of Aikatsu brands and dresses, actually, it would have been much nicer to recolor the old Aikatsu coords, so that new fans can happily collect and old fans won't feel bothered.

14) No second theatrical film release
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In the Stars series arc, we only had one movie: "Aikatsu Stars! The Movie". And in a narrow sense, it wasn't a really compete movie due to having to give a part to the previous series' short film "Aikatsu! The Targeted Magical Aikatsu! Card", and the Stars film only has almost one hour time. As it was premiered in 2016, we exactly has no movie in the whole 2017 when AiStars Season 2 on air.

But realistically speaking, movies aren't as simple as TV anime. They not only requires better animation, but also need funds to do advertising and theatrical arrangement, and of course a series of movie-only dress coords. It's considerable that BANDAI decided not to do a second movie due to lack of fund or not enough popularity of AiStars.

Of course it'd be nice like Pripara series, which releases theatrical film every year, they afford high payment and get high rewards. Ultimately it's sad for AiStars! fans cause we're unable to see Season 2 characters in the movie.

15) Lack of commercial collaborations
In the case of Pripara, they frequently have collaboration campaigns with other franchises or magazines, such os Detective Conan, Hatsune Miku, Puripuri-Chiichan, Sumikko, Miracle Tunes, and also some other reality collaboratinos such as  Red Flash plums, Mollyfantasy, Tokyo Joypolis amusement park. On the other hand, AiStars only had Rilakkuma and Fuji-Q Highland collaboration this year.

There's also a problem for Aikatsu! series that this series does not release more promotional cards in magazines for girls as often as Pripara, or as often as Aikatsu! series did before. Collaboration gifts for magazine has a considerable advertising effect, so it seems not smart for AiStars to cut it down this year.

16) Talking about anime-only settings
16-1) The over-recycled lives:

Okay, we should blame BANDAI/Lantis for the lack of song, this is not really the anime team's business. But the anime team cannot be innocent as well, cause there are still ways to make recycled songs be different lives. Okay, let's see how the original series handle recycling:



See the difference? They could either do more unit performances or just change their coord looks. It's just extremly weird that the characters in this season just always wear the same dress and perform everytime. I also doubt fans who only watch the anime could even notice that Elza' also have some other dresses for her brand. Here are some of the unused versions of songs that could possibly more anime lives: Heart Ski♡ps (Yuzu solo version), So Beautiful Story (Yume and Koharu duet) and MAKEOVER♡MAKEUP (Kasumi sisters duet).

16-2) The wasted S4 system



This is one of the most discussed topic in AiStars fanbase, especialyl when in Season 1 we didn't know who will become the 26th S4. But, now we know that AiStars are only given two years, the S4 system becomes a very weird setting. Just in my theory, S4 system could be more suitable in this kind of setting:

a) Enough amount of characters 

b) Balanced development between different classes

c) Enough length of story, at least three years, allow us to see how the generations change.

So AiStars has all three things not qualified: a) not enough main characters in each classes, b) overfocus on Song class, and c) there are only two years for this story. Yes, given that there are only two seasons, my theory is that S4 system does not fit in this series, but possibly rather the previous series.

16-3) The confusing roles of M4 and male idols



I mentioned this topic before in my old post about Drefes! the new DCD male idol project BANDAI introduced], which majorly worries us that BANDAI would not focus on the development of M4, now it totally just proves very correct.

This year, Pretty series give BANDAI several good slaps by having their own male characters very good treats. First, introducing KingsOfPrism, the sequel franchise to RainbowLive, give it own movie animation and app game, Secondly, introduce male idol units WITH who actually appear in the arcade game Pripara. In girls-related magazine and media, Pretty series male idols occupy most spotlights and leave minor to Drefes, not even saying M4 from this series. At this point, I defenitly do not believe M4 is a successful case in commercial view.

I'm sure that there are more ways to give male characters to help develop the story without making the male characters idols necissarily, since inevitably audience would question "why idols in an idol anime are ignored?" In the old series we had Tsubasa (designer), Raichi (junior reporter) or Shun (chef / retired idol), that proved none-idol male characters can make sufficient roles to the story.

Aside from Drefes, we also have problems in not properly seeing the general male idol system in the AiStars world. Here are examples of views that we could had got:

a) Changing generations of M4 by adding more male idols: there are supposed to be some rookie boys, just like Yume, who dreams to become a top male idol and enters Four Star. Weirdly, the story claims that M4 don't have to change generations while S4 have to. Somehow I think Hime and Tsubasa could had complained about it..

b) The Venus Ark rivalry: M4 exactly played no important role in the whole match. It probably makes sense that Elza only wants to collect the Star wings and male idols have no Star wings, so she just rather make VA a girls-only school. But we might have had the chance to see more male idols to be good rivals in this series, anyway.

Conclusion:

Many wrong decisions and the lack of budget make AiStars not succeed. I did think AiStars Season 1 was very promising, had a great start in either anime or DCD system, so I'm very sad to see this series end like this. It's more ironic to call it a 5th annivversary of Aikatsu! franchise. But more importantly, what's the future of Aikatsu! franchise? Would a new series ensure it's evolvement and success, or more failure? Hope that we're not seeing the same things above happen again soon...