GO MY WAY!!

This game is so cool, the premise of the game that is.
Your goal: Raise a school girl into being an Idol under a time limit, sounds cool right? N-no? Well, I think it's cool! But unfortunately even with how cool or uncool that idea is, the game is poorly executed and overall a pretty frustrating mess that I truly wish was more fun to play and way, WAY less repeating.

The main gameplay loop turns around training your girls to raise her 3 skill stats, which are singing, dancing, and posing. Each of the 11 girls you can pick at the start are stronger at one skill but can be weaker at another, and by weaker I mean it's harder for her to learn them. These are predetermined for all characters so it's nothing random, and you'll be thanking the game for giving you that because the rest of the game is full of RNG bullshit.
So every time you do an action it spends an in-game "Week" and you only have 53 weeks to finish the game (I think the starting months can change the number of weeks available.) Though to make things easier just see these as days to keep things simple.
53 actions isn't a lot and especially if you aim for the best ending/rank, but with how frustrating this game is you'll want them to be over quickly.
The actions you can do in this game are either training, passing an audition, or going outside with the girl for some sort of free-time event thing. All of these are boring and are not fun to play, the training is made in a minigame collection (only 5) and god they are either luck-based or just really tough and frustrating, my favorite one was the camera/pose minigame.
So after training your girls you can do the auditions which is a minigame about gaining points based on the stats you trained for and it's really confusing I still don't understand how it fully works but lots of points = good and not enough points = bad. Finishing an audition gives said amount of fans to get a better idol rank, the issue is that this game is very greedy with fans and it takes a lot of auditions to get to rank A/S. I ended up finishing my playthrough at rank C.

The game ends with a final concert based on many stats that I cannot understand it makes no sense and the game said nothing about it so I guess I was just supposed to know they'd be throwing bullshit at me at the end of the game. And yes I failed the last concert.

The reason why nobody played this game is that it's Japanese only and stuck on the Xbox360, I'd say the language barrier isn't that much of a big deal, I used an MTL tool to translate the game at first but then I quickly realize 90% of the lines in this game are recycled and your character just says the same thing every day so I guess a translation would only help for menu managing.

Do I hate this game? Not really it's still playable but awfully boring and frustrating at times but I can see why people would enjoy playing it, though it seems that the "classic" type of idolm@ster games are dead.

Will this game live rent-free inside my head for decades? Most likely

Does this game have soul? Yes.

And is Miki number one? She is!!

An interesting start to the now-famous iDOLM@STER franchise, considering this is the only port of the original arcade game (and even then it takes a few liberties). Half the fun of this game is trying to be able to play it, since the game itself is region locked and there's emulation issues on xenia, so good luck! I produced Chihaya on my playthrough, and this game is short but designed to be replayed dozens and dozens of times. The game gives you 52 in-game "weeks" (which are really just turns) to get as much done with your idol as possible and reach the A rank (or even S). How you get there is entirely up to you, which is pretty cool. Despite that tho, it does mean that once you stick to a plan that's kinda what you are gonna do for most of the game, so there's not much to really surprise you from then on out considering the fact that this game also is light on the story. The idols have backstories, sure, but they are told through optional communication events that you might not even do considering the fact that lessons and auditions are so important and will take up your time. My word of advice is to bring a guide with you since there are some secret ways to earn fans that the game literally never will tell you as well as just having the right commu answers with you so you don't have to reset the game every single got damn time you screw up. Also the game is pretty heavy on RNG, so sometimes you will just die and have to reset anyways! yeehaw! All in all, this is a very cool curiosity and I'm very glad I have at least done one playthrough of it, but to the casual imas fan this is absolutely optional. You don't need to start with this one, and honestly you should probably play something like SP if you want a "classic" idolmaster experience that is accessible, since that games even got dang fan translated. If you are curious to know the series origins and have the means to play it tho, go off i guess. play if you like idols