Definitely not done with this game but done with the first playthrough so I might as well post a review. I've only played this and The Idolmaster SP however so keep that in mind.

Probably one of the most enjoyable things for me in games is building a group of characters and seeing how they interact. It's pretty difficult to have interesting character interactions when you don't know who the player is going to have together so not many games do it, (Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Suikoden to a degree,) so whenever it appears in a game I always cherish it.

Idolmaster 2 doesn't have a massive amount of unique interactions between the characters (or maybe I just got unlucky) but even without them the game has a very nice feeling of building a group and playing their strengths (and weaknesses) off of each other. Certainly enough of a sense to fill in the blanks with your own imagination (which this sort of system pretty much requires of the player anyway.)

I think it's able to do this because as with all the other Idolmaster games the character writing is consistently solid, keeping a really good balance between comedy and occasionally some drama - admittedly nowhere near as much drama as SP - but SP was a more story focused game to begin with.

Gameplay-wise there was enough depth and complexity here to keep the game enjoyable the whole way through without having it get bogged down in minutiae, which would likely destroy the character aspect of the game. A ton of replayability as well as is usually the case for these games.

Not much else to say, it was just a really good management experience!

After hearing all the stories about this game being the most controversial in the whole series, I knew I had to check it out and see what this game was about on my own. For the most part, I think that the criticisms that this game has are pretty overblown. It definitely sucks that idols that were producible in the first game are locked away for no real discernable reason, and I can understand why producers for those particular characters would be upset. The other big criticism I heard about were the villains, and honestly I thought they were pretty serviceable. Maybe times were different in 2011 and people just couldn't stand dudes in their idol games. Anyways, the visuals and UI have been very stylishly upgraded this time around as well as the core gameplay being entirely redone from the first game. Things are more about sales than fan numbers and you have to manage your popularity across the entirety of japan. There are also a lot of arbitrary geography questions that are thrown at you so better hit the books on those prefectures. While all the new mechanics are cool, I don't think the game does a very good job keeping the player informed about them, I think it just explains things once and then never again, so I'd rec a guide if you want to do well. There's also a lot of free agency in how you get your songs to perform on the sales charts, though again guides help in actually reminding you what the hell everything means. Near the end of my playthrough, sales were looking dire, I messed up the timing for my last song release and it wasn't looking like I was going to sell enough to get the good ending. So I naturally tried a hail mary revival of an earlier song that I hadn't done in a while in hopes of getting a revival break to bolster sales of the previous song, and it actually mfin worked, which was incredible. Idolmaster games are all about tension, after all. This game is way cooler than what I was led to believe by imas fans. F to all the azusa, iori, ritsuko, and mamiPs that had to sit this game out though. play if you like idols