iM@S2
RK and Jupiter forced events are a waste of time and kills pacing, also RK kills the mood in your unit twice!
The game has unneedlesly complicated mechanics with lots of variables and pretty much all of them can be thrown out of the window if you break the charts early on.
Producing and managing is somewhat more realistic, you manage various regions, work on building fans and stop decaying etc but youd need more planning, assuming youre playing regularly. That is, unless you notice that every playthrough is the same.
You'll always meet the same reporters in the same week if you keep triggering them.
Only 3 lessons, and Bumco's obviously favoring Vi seeing as how it's so easy and has much room for error for perfect. Vo is just unreasonable.
Though I'm complaining that there're only 3 lessons, an optimised playthrough consists of only spamming main lesson up to week 15-18 or so anyways seeing as how popular genres dissapeared.
boxM@S and SP forced you to do more kinds of lessons and are beter in that regard.
To prevent decay from taking too many fans you want to do all lessons at the beginning, adding up to the boringness. Afterwards you'll be wasting time farming fans to get awards and farm money starting from week 40-45.
All characters are the same period. Personality? Quirks? Traits? Those don't add anything to the gameplay a all; In boxM@S we had downward spirals, end of week auto regenerating tension and happy go lucky chars, in iM@S2 it doesn't mater who you pick.
Because of this all idols are reduced to a pile of numbers and the only things worth to consider are 6/2/2 bursts and total stats.
boxM@S trio planning changed the difficulty and gameplay strategy.
The main theme is unity, but aside from morning and evening commus your 2nd and 3rd member are useless plot-wise.
iM@S2 has lazy storywriting, 5 out of 9 idols use the same formula for their story. Also iM@S2 has an enormous lack of commus; boxM@S had millions of commus where you can learn more about the characters. iM@S2 has like what, 20'ish per character and they're mostly workrelated. You won't be seeing most of them either because of the chart-job rank relation.
The problem with the actual game is that youre doing the same thing over and over with little to no variety for 70+ hours, also lacking some of the original 11+5 songs breaks it for me.
Tl;dr.
Ranking in early is too easy and kills every gameplay elements, forced events are a pain, lazy writing, little variety.
I hope they at least fixed the first thing in hyper mode.
boxM@S
boxM@S Vi lesson was stupid and the random element in the game sucked, though the reverse also holds true; because of the random element you can get some giggles from time to time.
2 minute wait times bad.
Washed out colors compared to iM@S2.
Also, easy mode bully P is just silly.
Duos and trios have a line editor. Working on trios in boxM@S is more satisfying than iM@S2.
Much better story than 2 as well.
iM@S SP
SP technically is a better version of boxM@S.
Sure, the game's graphics are lacking a lot and we can't manage duos or trios but the gameplay's a streamlined version of boxM@S.
We don't have to wait for auditions, we can change song or costume before we start an audition at the cost of losing the ability to change one of them for free. You can change costumes as much as you want. We have more types of lessons and the horrible Visual lesson was changed to something still used in future iM@S generations.
2 modes, story has different endings from Free Produce. Free Produce's basically the superior version of boxM@S.
Easy mode bully P exploit gone.
Getting items is easier than in boxM@S.
New scheduling system.
Splitting all the idols up of course is bad.
iM@S DS
DS had great story and great characters, sure the gameplay's lacking but the former 2 greatly outweigh the latter.
Acceptable if you view the gams as a VN with game elements instead of a game with a lot of story.
Story has its silly, greatly exaggerated moments, hyper Yayoi and international superstar singing diva Chihaya.
All endings are completely different and all of them are great.
