What a complete joke of a game from start to finish. I had so so SO much hope for this game considering they had to kill TWO games for it and this was one of the biggest disappointments ever.

I'll start with the good things because it's going to be very short and sweet. The gameplay definitely felt better than ever. It was apparently pretty messy on launch in Japan but for the global launch they seem to have gotten everything together very well. The amount of customization you can do for the live shows blow the original game out of the water so it was really fun being able to relive the gameplay from the original game in its ideal form. The new cards are absolutely gorgeous and oh my GOD the Daily Life shorts are pure dopamine. There's also a decent chunk of goodies in the app while you're not doing shows (I definitely spent a LOT of time going through all the song descriptions, whoever wrote those was probably the most passionate person on the entire team). The rehearsal feature was SUPER nice, as was being able to restart songs without having to waste LP, despite that it encouraged me to retry spam quite a bit lol.

Aaaaand unfortunately, that's where the positives end. SIF2 is unacceptably buggy and unfinished for how long it's been out in Japan and how long they had to work on it beforehand. Buttons that don't work, text that is left completely untranslated, even entire features that just straight up did not work (including ones that already worked in the Japanese version!). While events were running, the game would legitimately just completely break at every strike of the hour, leaving the game inoperable for around 15 minutes each HOUR. Not only that, they repeatedly DENIED it through bug reports and emails to support. It really just shows that the team did not care whatsoever about the game and just wanted to make as much money as possible before shutdown.

Aside from what I described in the intro, this game is just objectively inferior to the original, which released over a DECADE ago. The game has ZERO story content aside from the short introduction with each group and the 5-part Daily Life shorts. Any form of side-story was also removed and replaced by the messaging feature, where you can engage in short text messages with different members. Cool in concept but in practice was very obviously just a way to do less work. The gacha is much more expensive, there's less to do in the app, I could go on and on.

Events are a complete disaster as well. Results take a full two days to come out when it took less than an hour in the original. Complete lack of anti-cheat leaving event leaderboards FULL of obvious cheaters, which don't even get removed after the two days of results processing. One event shortly after release would give rewards that expire immediately upon collecting them. The complete lack of playerbase made the events feel so hollow and empty. I could consistently get top 1k on the events just by playing for a couple mins every day so there was no incentive whatsoever to actually put effort and time into getting into the higher tiers like the original had (which, to be fair, I wouldn't want to regardless on this piece of garbage).

I am so utterly disappointed and Bushiroad should be embarrassed they ever shipped this abomination of a game. This was most likely our last chance for official μ's content, so it's depressing to see it go out with such a whimper. The Love Live franchise is one of the most important things ever to me and to see it treated with such disrespect is just plain upsetting to see. Here's hoping we can somehow get a SIF3 managed by literally anybody but Bushiroad but if not, guess we're stuck with what, Link Like? The Yohane games? After School Activity? I don't know.

You're a disgrace, Bushiroad.

It's just not the same anymore. Technically speaking this game is a clear step up compared to the 10 years old sibling, yet cutting the umbilical cord did nothing but upset old and newer players. What really killed it for me is, no matter how many cards you had, all you got back are coupons and the completionist equivalent of seeing those members, even those released on a strict timeline or during single time events like the Persona 5 one, on a marble display unable to actually hold and play them. The sacking of Alexandria but for us idol heads.

You'll own nothing and you'll be happy; Bushiroad is still kicking this franchise in the ribs after all the success and pride of years prior. I understand keeping up a 2013 game live for so long had its expenses, also thanks to the trend settling down and SIF hemorrhaging players, trying to revitalize it through a new game was a gamble but all the good faith went nowhere and what was reaped now we sow.

It's genuinely embarrassing that the game has released in this state. The EN launch has numerous localization QA issues that shouldn't be in a shipped game (including a button that froze the game so it had to be forced closed that had to be patched day 2), but of course stuff that won't get patched as well like line breaks in the middle of single-word buttons, buttons that lead to pages with JP text, text in the UI overlapping, and buttons that don't do anything. There are some general piss-poor decisions that I assume plagued the initial JP launch and caused it to be a failure (yeah let's launch the game with just the worst fucking card art from the first game that was mocked a decade ago, we don't need to add any of the nice art we ALREADY HAVE MADE), like there being no way to sort the game into the order of the songs from the original version (when the only reason to play this game is nostalgia for SIF 1), features that were present in SIF 1 that are absent here, or the bizarre way Full Combo rewards are distributed, There's other embarrassing things like live 2D animations are awful compared to the standards set by contemporaries such as Bang Dream and Colorful Stage, the icons designs' using same color scheme for multiple items so they look both different from the original and hard to distinguish from each other without a second look, whatever. I could go on. It's bad. Do not recommend.

anyway, still gonna be playing tho! still gonna be playing for the nostalgia of tapping along to these beatmaps! still gonna be playing until the game gets shut down three months after launch! nostalgia is a drug i will be gladly enjoying for the next three months! god bless!