Love Live: School Idol Festival is a mobile game released in 2014 that consists of three gameplay styles; a visual novel, where you get to experience the story of Love Live, a rhythm game, and a gacha game. The gameplay mechanics and the art style of Love Live mark it as a casual game directed towards women, but the community surrounding the franchise is deeper than a typical mobile game, with anime adaptations featuring multiple seasons and movie releases deepening the lore.

The story portion of Love Live is one of the features of the game that make it unique. The player can go through the story of either the original Muse idols or the more recent addition of the Aquors idols. The story is divided up into smaller narratives of the day to day lives of the girls, culminating in you receiving rewards for going through it, as well as a song for the rhythm game section you must complete in order to get the next narrative. The narrative of Love Live is very much that of a slice of life anime, of which the game was adapted into in 2015, and details the journey of nine high school girls becoming friends and popstars in order to save their school from being shut down. This narrative is very feminine in itself, with the majority of characters being young girls and women. It features no action, and barely any drama, focusing instead on cute, funny interactions between the girls.

The next gameplay mechanic is that of the rhythm game. You can use virtual cards of your idols, which usually have a special ability, to form a team, and you then use that team to tap out the rhythm to a chosen song at varying difficulties. While this part can be challenging, the player can stop playing and resume using a pause button, and one can only play so much based on the amount of in-game energy that they have, which can be replenished by in-game ‘love gems’ that can both be earned through events and consecutive use of the app, as well as buying them. You also expend different amounts of energy depending on the difficulty of the songs that you play. Just because Love Live is seen as a very casual game, being a mobile app, featuring a story that focuses on young girls, and using exclusively cutesy, anime style graphics, does not mean that there isn’t any competition for the game. In a video from Sukufesu National Convention 2018, (Sukufesu National Convention 2018 Competition), a convention dedicated solely to the Love Live franchise, a Love Live e-sports competition is taking place. Four young adult men are sitting up on stage, headphones on and smartphones in hand, playing the rhythm game while an announcer comments in the background. Even though you can’t see them, you can hear an audience cheer at appropriate moments, and sigh in disappointment when a player misses a beat. When the blue player wins, he fist pumps, and shakes hands with the player next to him. It is clear that despite the perceived casualness of the Love Live franchise, there is a vibrant community of diverse players enjoying the game.

The final gameplay mechanic is that of the gacha game. Gacha is similar to loot boxes, in that you use in game currency, that can be earned either by playing the game or with real world money, to get randomized items. In Love Live, you can get different ‘cards’, each with a different illustration of one of the characters on them. These cards can have special abilities when used in the rhythm game portion, and can vary in rarity from normal, rare, super rare, super super rare, and ultra-rare. The pull of the gacha game is the illustrations. The art style itself is very cutesy, with all of the different girls dressed in themed outfits, with some of the most intricate illustrations being featured on the ever illusive ultra-rare cards. Youtubers will make videos of themselves playing the gacha, showing favoritism, or a desire to get cards that feature a specific character.

Love Live is a casual game that makes use of multiple features seen in other casual games throughout the years. It has a simple storyline that is easy to understand and can be resumed at any point, not unlike many other visual novels in the industry. It has a rhythm game, a genre popularized by franchises like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero, a gameplay style that is easy to learn, and easy to play in one’s spare time, a defining trait of casual games. The gacha portion of the game centers on the franchise’s cute art style, and capitalizes on the collectability of the illustrations, a tactic used by many other card games that precede it. By all means, Love Live: School Idol Festival is the ultimate casual games. Despite the casualness of the game, there continues to be a strong community that loves and continuously interacts with the franchise, to the point where a second game was made, Love Live: School Idol Festival: All Stars! was made in late 2019, a mobile game app largely similar to the first game, with a few new additions. It is clear that as long as there is appeal to your game, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it is a casual game, if it has a deep and epic storyline, if it has expansive and complicated lore, because sometimes all people really want are cute anime girls and some catchy j-pop tunes, and I think that that is pretty neat.

Works Cited

スクフェス全国大会2018 決勝, Sukufesu National Convention 2018 Competition, プーさん, Aug. 4 2018

Love Live: School Idol Festival, KLabGames, 2014