I enjoy this game, I really do. It's a fun little spinoff to the main drama tracks and manga plot of Hypnosis Mic, with some really fun and interesting rhythm game mechanics (besides the scratch notes. I'm not talking about those.). I initially rated this 4 stars, but I've since dropped it to 3; now, it's a rhythm game, so perhaps I shouldn't be so critical, considering most of them are just cut and pastes of each other, but hear me out.

As of writing this review, I've sunk a solid 225 hours into this game, and had a lot of fun playing it, if the fact I'm DJ Rank 132 wasn't evident of my enjoyment. But honestly, when you reach a certain point, it just becomes really repetitive and boring. The only consistent thing to do is complete new bingos that come out, which generally give lacklustre rewards (100-200 crystals), and play to get event points to get the latest event card. That's honestly about all there is to do once you reach around DJ Rank 100. By that point, you've completed all the songs, maxed out your decks to get high scores to complete the individual song missions that get you crystals, and that's genuinely one of the only places you'll get a hefty amount of crystals, the only other places being stories (which are released periodically, and typically give you about 200-300 crystals), bingos (which I've mentioned previously) and the character ranking system, which is fun, but once you get everyone to around rank 20 like I have, it takes a long time to level them up again for such a low reward. Considering the gacha rates are about standard for a gacha/rhythm game, and one 10 draw costs you 2500 crystals, it becomes impossible to actually get the cards you want when they frequently come out, especially when you're a fan of the more popular characters, particularly Samatoki, who genuinely never gets a break from gacha and seems to have a new card at least once a month. This becomes an issue, especially if you're constantly having to spark for these cards, which takes 150 pulls.

I've had a lot of fun playing this, but unless the developers actually give more resources to grind crystals and start regularly adding more game features - as Hypnosis Mic as a whole doesn't regularly release songs, and the game is now nearly caught up to what's currently out - I don't think I can see it being something I will continue to play actively. In-game stories are also pretty much impossible to consume, as the western fandom for this series as a whole is miniscule, and even smaller for the fans that know Japanese who are willing to translate, which is a big selling point of the game in the first place, considering it has an exclusive story that doesn't follow the plot of the canon timeline.

I'm not even sure why I'm so passionate about the bog standard rhythm gacha game, considering these things are cash grabs half the time anyways, but HypMic as a whole is a series that holds a lot of meaning to me, so this I have a lot of feelings about this game, too.