Woah, did this thread just blow up or something? Three pages of posts within one day.
Anyway I think you'd definitely be able to produce the four idols from RK. C'mon guys, Bandai Namco is not stupid.
I don't think it has anything to do with seiyuus not being able to commit the time or anything. I mean, the game has been in production for over a year. Recording the lines take, like, a week at most? The development team definitely has enough moneyhats to make sure the seiyuus comply.
Story produce for the four RK idols is definitely in the game. In fact, it's probably why Jupiter was added in the first place. RK = rivals for your initial idol unit. After your success with your first idol unit, President Takagi disbands RK and gives you the reins to that, and Jupiter = your RK's rival. Because on your second playthrough, if you can produce a unit with RK members in it, then obviously RK can't be your rival no more.
If story produce for RK wasn't in, there would be no good reason to add Jupiter. Why would your idol unit need TWO story rivals?
Continuing with this train of thought, then it perfectly makes sense that RK's story rival, Jupiter, has to be an all-guys idol unit. It would have been easy for the development staff to pick another 3 female seiyuus for RK's story rivals. However, if they did that, the three new idols would get popular and you'd expect to be able to produce them.
Hence they made Jupiter a male idol unit. It's perfect. Give them one, maybe two songs. Doesn't take much developmental resources since people don't expect to be able to produce male idols - Idolmaster is still technically a galge.
There may or may not be a Jupiter mode. I seriously doubt they're playable - imagine Tokimeki Memorial with all the girls AND the guys from the Girl's Side series combined together... that would be really weird and wouldn't appeal to either demographic. Maybe BanNam is just putting Jupiter in with one song to test market reaction. If it's received positively Jupiter might receive its own spin-off.
But I'm guessing that the thought process behind Jupiter was not really "hey, wouldn't it be a great idea if we added a male idol unit to Idolmaster" but rather "crap... we have a problem here... if we put in a second female idol unit to serve as RK's rivals... it's back to Idolmaster SP again. The fans will want to play as these new characters too. It will take us a lot of developmental resources to make these three new characters (animation for lessons, etc, record A LOT of songs)... what should we do... how about a male idol unit that's guaranteed to be unpopular? That way we don't need to spend too much time making them and stuff."
Anyway, I predict that in a couple of weeks all the gaming publications will do a feature on this right before the game comes out, to clarify things and drive sales for the game.
