I*Chu: Chibi Edition Review (Switch)

I can’t wait until Kuro gets out of his emo phase.

Sometimes you tell yourself you won’t get a game, but then you get it anyway. This was I*Chu for me as the rhythm game aspect tempted me way too much. I love rhythm games, but I actually don’t play gacha games and don’t care about idols or just celebrities in general. But hey, I’ve played games that had aspects I’m not normally interested in and really enjoyed. So maybe, that’ll be the same for this title. Let’s find out.

I*Chu: Chibi Edition sets its focus on idols, specifically idols within the same agency, and the events that take place after the new set of boys come in to be trained. You take the role of the Producer, which you can rename her, to guide all of these idols through thick and thin so eventually they’ll be able to make their major debut as an official idol. The agency, which is both fairly new but renown, is called Etoile Vie School and the game starts with the third generation starting their first day there. It mainly focuses on Seiya during the beginning, the one that’s going to this academy to follow an idol he admires, but we do get quick introductions to the other boys joining this year (and how eccentric some of them are) and a quick rundown of what they should expect. The cute Kokoro, the crossdressing idol, is the first of their seniors they meet and more come in as they progress through their tests. Oh yeah, while the third-generation boys were accepted to attend Etoile Vie School, they have to go through a set of tests to prove they have the tenacity to succeed as idols. Those that go to Etoile Vie School and successfully get through their tests are thus given the title of I-Chu. I-Chu not only is this game’s title, but also means that they’re idols in the making. They’re not quite trainees, but they’re also not quite idols yet. They’re somewhere in the middle.

Throughout the main story, which is separated into three “Parts” (which are basically the big three arcs), you’ll get to see the trials and tribulations that not only the third generation I-Chus go through, but also the second and first generation boys and the Producer. There are a total of 32 idols split between 9 idol groups that the Producer has to manage. It’s a lot for one person for sure. You’ll get to witness the third generation getting their footing in the idol industry, the third generation getting help from their seniors, getting to know all the boys, seeing how all of them interact with each other and their fans, and the many conflicts that arise within all the generations whether its between themselves or outside forces. Nonetheless, you’ll be there as their trusty Producer to help them through…as well as the weird CEO who is dressed in a bear costume.

I found that I*Chu’s story fluctuated between being serviceable and good; as well as it shifting from being boring and interesting. I honestly found the first half of Part 1 boring, but it actually gets good and interesting halfway through once introductions are all done and the third-generation boys are officially I-Chus after completing their tests. It keeps this up going into Part 2, which is most likely helped with the overarching mystery and conflict, as well as the mini mysteries and conflicts that happen throughout that lets you learn more about these characters. It also helped that the reveals were pretty unexpected, but in a way that totally fits. I tried to guess what the reveal would be, but most of them I guessed wrong and it turned out to be something I was not expecting. I did also like most of the characters, the dynamics they had with each other, and the growth they go through as time goes on. However, while Part 3 starts out intriguing due to the cliffhanger at the end of part 2, it soon goes down as it continues. To the point where I dropped it almost halfway through Part 3 as I found myself not caring anymore and going back to being reluctant to go back to playing it.

I’m not really entirely sure why I found myself not interested in the story. I do have a few guesses though. I*Chu doesn’t really have a central character as it shifts focus between all of them. The closest ones are the F∞F boys, specifically Seiya, as I feel they come into focus more than the others. I did also find it weird that while the Producer is set up as the central character, through the game description and being able to rename her, she’s not. Most of the choices you’ll get don’t even affect her actions as you’ll often be surprised on how it’s meant for another character, mainly Seiya, or just asking you which scene out of three you want to see. The big cast of characters may also be the cause. There are 32 idols, separated into 9 idol groups, and that’s not counting other characters like the Producer, the CEO, and the characters introduced in Part 3 (I’m only counting characters that get their own character portrait). Due to this, you really only get their surface level characterization and get a bit more (this depends on the character as some idols are given more importance) when they become relevant for a conflict before they’re pushed into the background again. There are a good handful that you don’t get to know past their short introduction in the very beginning of the game for a while. The two idol groups with the most members are a big example of this where for most of them, the only thing you know is their quick introduction they gave in the very beginning before they become relevant later on. Making me not really care about them. I didn’t finish Part 3, but I was also surprised that we didn’t hear more about F∞F’s Kanata and Akira’s background other than using to to make Seiya self-conscious about being a newbie in the industry. Lastly, maybe part of it was also the fact that I’m not at all interested in idols. There is another visual novel that focuses on idols, which is also published by the same publisher funnily enough, but has way less characters and seems to have a central character based on the demo, that I might pick up and try just to test this.

While I probably shouldn’t have expected an amazing story from a gacha rhythm game (which also has an anime), it’s a shame that it went from boring, to interesting, and then back to boring for me. I won’t hide the fact that I dropped the story almost halfway through Part 3, but I do think it says something about it that I lasted that long when I was actually originally going to drop the story in Part 1. I gave Part 1 some more chapters to get my interest and it did, but Part 3 wasn’t able to when I gave it the same chance.

Each Part of the main story are comprised of Chapters, which are then comprised of three episodes. However, you won’t be able to just go through it. Each episode will grant you a reward when you finish it, which is for the gacha aspect of this game, but most of the chapters will require you to play the rhythm game half of the game to unlock the next chapter (sometimes, it’s to unlock Episode 3 of the chapter).

With that said, it’s time to get into the rhythm gameplay and the gacha aspects. I’ll get into the gacha aspects first as it does feed into the rhythm gameplay. Before you go into a song for the rhythm half of the game, you do need to form at least one team. You do this by pulling, or scouting, I-Chu cards with the discs you get by playing. You can then add them to a team and you’re set to go. However, there is a bit more to this. Each card has its own stats that do affect how much they score when they’re a note icon. Every song has a type and every card has a type too (like Wild or Pop). Every card also has a value per type. The value determines how much it adds to your score when you successfully hit it and you get a score bonus if it matches the song type. There’s also a strength stat that determines how much health your team has. In addition, the rarity and level of a card determines how high its stats are. You can try to scout higher rarity cards, but you can use “Change” to combine two of the same cards to push it to the next rarity and thus increasing its stats. You can only do this once and after that you can add an “Etoile” to it to have a bonus towards your stats. You can then level up these cards, increasing the stats even more, by going into “Lessons” and using up cards to level up the one you selected. These option aren’t free as you do need coins. You can get coins through playing the game or “graduating” a card. Though, honestly, I have more than enough coins just by playing the game.

It’s a lot, but from what I gathered, you have to balance between having I-Chus with the same type as the song, having all members of a group be together, and having high scorers. Or you can just use the auto formation and call it a day. Personally, I just had three teams that I formed with auto formation, one for each type. When you first start, you may wonder what’s the point as getting max score rank is easy on Easy difficulty, but you’ll realize it’s not so easy on higher difficulties.

Whether you previously played a rhythm game before or not, you’ll get the hang of the rhythm gameplay in no time. Notes, in the form of the I-Chu icons that are on your team, will fall from the top of the screen to the bottom where they’ll reach the end of the track. When the note reaches the circle on the bottom, you have to press the corresponding button or touch the screen (depending on how you want to play). There are the regular notes where you just tap the button, as well as the simultaneous notes and hold notes (of course). The closer the note and the circle are to each other when you tap, the better judgement you get and thus the more points. This will then let you build up your combo and your score. However, getting a “Good” will cause your combo to be reset and completely missing it will cause your team to take damage. If your health goes to 0, you can either use one disc to continue or end it. There are also skills that will occasionally go off as well. Each card has two skills, one that I’m pretty sure activate whenever you hit the requirement (like getting a certain combo score or a certain amount of Perfect notes) and one that only activates if you have their entire idol group in the team.

There are five different difficulty settings that you can pick as well. You get access to the Easy, Normal, and Hard right away and have to earn Expert and Nightmare by completing the song in the previous difficulty (so complete Hard difficulty to unlock Expert for that song). The differences between these difficulties are the amount of notes, the way they’re placed, how fast they fall down their lanes, and the addition of a flick note for Nightmare. You do get more rewards if you go for the higher difficulties as well.

Once you successfully get through a song, you’ll get some rewards. Most of them depend on how well you scored, if you kept up your combo, and the average of both where you’ll get coins and discs with each rank; with what is dependent on the song difficulty being the amount of EXP you get to level up your rank, how many coins you get, some I-Kids cards, a handful of discs, and finally favorability EXP towards the I-Chus you used. Though I swear you don’t actually get the amount of favorability EXP it says you get, as the I-Chu card I checked had 150 favorability, was said to have gotten 32, but when I checked only had 158. I tried this again with a team all with 0 favorability. The leader got the amount the results page said (26), but the others only got 2 even though the results page said 10.

Once you unlock the songs through the main story, you can play any song you want at any time. However, I do recommend not doing that and instead going to events and playing through the seasons. Each season has a variety of event types and most of them have you accumulate event points through the rhythm gameplay. The amount of event points depend on the difficulty and how well you did. The events do differ, like Jack Event where an I-Chu hijacks a performance and you need to score enough to take it back or just plainly play the rhtyhm game. Luckily, you don’t have to wait for the season to roll by as you just have to clear three events in a season to unlock the next. Clearing a season is basically just getting a certain amount of accumulated points. Seasons do also have an additional requirement of reading through the main story to a certain point and getting a season unlocked will also unlock the scouting option that had it as a requirement.

I’m neutral on the gacha aspect. I don’t like it, but at least there’s no monetization and you can get discs through gameplay. The rhythm gameplay, though. I loved the rhythm gameplay. All of the song maps that I’ve played were all well made and did feel like they synced up to the music pretty well. This may seem weird, but also a lot of the song maps when you get into normal and hard difficulty (especially the hard difficulty) are pretty fun. It’s hard to explain if you’re not playing it, but the way the notes are placed makes it fun to learn the various maps and fun being able to do it once you get the hang of it. I also really liked how notes that need to be pressed at the same time have a point to them, making it easy to see at a glance. It’s especially helpful when you go to the higher difficulties. I also think that having the background be the stage and simulate the I-Chus performing using paper replicas of them, and them being able to dance (as well as they can being paper), jump, and move around was cute. As well as the stage effects that pop off during key moments of the song and their choreography.

Also, while playing through the main story is needed to unlock songs, you can just skip through the story if you don’t care about it.

There are quite a bit of negatives that I have for I*Chu: Chibi Edition. Aside from my qualms about the story that I already talked about, I also really wished it was more streamlined in terms of how it’s given to us. I don’t mind needing to play the rhythm game half to unlock chapters or episodes (even though it’s way too often in the beginning) as sometimes it does fit when the characters perform the same song during the story, but it was pretty annoying having to click through two pop-ups to accept the reward and to confirm you want to continue to the next episode. I don’t know how this was when it was a mobile game, as I couldn’t find many gameplay videos when it was still a mobile game (and it having an anime did not help), but I don’t see why you can’t just get through a whole chapter without being stopped and getting the rewards at the end. And on that, it was pretty annoying how episodes and chapters would often end in the middle of a conversation (and most often not in a way where it’s supposed to be a cliffhanger). It was also pretty annoying how the game can send you straight to the song in the song selection so you can complete the requirement, but not go straight back to the chapter/episode select. It was admittedly a great way to find a good time to fiddle with settings while you’re in the middle of reading the story (as strangely you can’t when you’re in the main story), but it does eventually get annoying. I did also wish that it wasn’t so strict on what difficulty you have to complete a song in to continue. I appreciate how it is always the Easy difficulty, as it doesn’t bar those that aren’t great at rhythm games from continuing the story, but sometimes I want to play a higher difficulty.

I actually have no complaints about the rhythm gameplay other than maybe have a slightly bigger hitbox for touchscreen and the fact that one song has 9 different variations, but I do for the gacha aspect. I really do appreciate how the monetization was taken out and I don’t mind having to earn the currency through gameplay, but there could have been some quality-of-life changes. I have no idea how this was when it was still an active mobile game, but I do feel the drop rates for gacha pulls could have been increased. I did also wish you could see what cards are in the pool in the various different scouting options. Especially when there are a lot of scouting options (most that you’ll have to unlock by completing the season events). It also doesn’t help that for the event scouting that has a specific theme (like Halloween or beach day), the cards that have artwork associated with that theme seem like they’re a rare drop. I was pretty disappointed when I mainly got cards that show up in the regular scouting option as I was expecting all the cards to be the theme. I don’t know, I guess I don’t see the reason why the gacha pulls have to be similar to how it probably was when it was an active mobile game when there’s no more monetization and the game is a flat fee now. I don’t know if Crowns were a premium currency, but Crowns are very hard to come by in this version. I originally thought it was just a leftover remnant when it was monetized, but I did find out how you can get crowns in the middle of writing this review. You can only get crowns by “graduating” high rarity cards, with the amount you get depending on the rarity. However, it looks like how many you get were vastly lowered in this version. The Help section says a GR card should give you 80 crowns, but it’s set to only give you 10 here. To bring in the other rarities: SR should give 10, but it gives 1; UR should give 20 but gives 2; and LE should give 40, but gives you 5. I’m probably being too harsh here, but this gave me a feeling of being ripped off. There’s no reason to be this stingy with crowns in this version of the game.

Other than that, the romantic side stories weren’t included in this version (which I didn’t know until after I started playing and so disappointed about), but the Help section still mentions them like they’re in the game. Events are also made out like they have a side story attached to them, but there isn’t. Some aspects aren’t explained that well or at all. Like, I have no idea what favorability affected or if it’s the same as affection, nor do I know what Special Lives are specifically other than additional songs. I also had no idea what the point of the I-kids or Principal cards were until I thought to see if they could be used to level up a card and saw you not only can, but the game doesn’t give you a warning (well, for I-Kids at least). There are a couple confusing explanations, like the explanation for leader group skills. Oh, I almost forgot about this, but the menus for team formation have a problem with putting you on the wrong layer. If you’re setting up a team and tap “Y” to see the card’s info (like their skills) and go back, the cursor will be on the Team Formation layer rather than the I-Chu selection layer. As you can guess, this was annoying.

I do also have qualms with the translation, performance, and art, but I’ll mention those in their respective upcoming paragraphs so I can go in a bit more detail. Though, I will say that I hated when they would cut off half a word and send the other half to the next line (especially since they don’t use a hyphen) and how small the text gets when the dialog box has 3-4 lines. Not to mention the 3-4 line dialogue doesn’t go all the way to the end of the dialog box, which I do wonder if it could have helped with it not being so small.

I*Chu’s translation is okay to good. It does not make a good first impression if you go through the tutorial, as it has a lot of mistakes, but the mistakes are more spread out when you get into the main story. It’s not the worst translation out there, but it’s also not the best. You can still get what they mean and it’s not overly stilted (and trust me, I’ve played officially translated games that had these problem), but at the same time there are a lot of mistakes. If you’ve read my previous visual novel reviews (otome and non), I only mention mistakes when they’re ones I notice myself. I consider it a great translation or localization when I don’t notice mistakes or when there are only a few that I noticed. However, with I*Chu: Chibi Edition, I noticed a ton, and I mean a ton. The most common mistakes were spacing, whether it’s too much or none between words. Punctuation can be a problem too, having an exclamation mark or question mark at the beginning of a sentence when there shouldn’t and often it can be wrong or doesn’t make sense for the situation. There were also a lot of misspelled words, using the wrong version of the word, or using a word that sounded the same, but doesn’t mean the same thing (one I remember is using “greatful” instead of “grateful”). There were a couple instances where something was weirdly worded, a word was repeated, and a few where a sentence didn’t make sense until I restructured the sentence. There were also lines that I swear were supposed to be lines for a different character, as it didn’t make sense for them to react to their own line like they weren’t the one that said it. The game jumps between having I-Chu be written out as “I-Chu” and “IChu”. Lastly, there were even a couple lines that caused continuity errors (like saying one group was working with a second-generation group when in reality it was the third-generation group).

There’re even mistakes in the Help section and for unlock requirements both for episode unlock requirements (it makes it seem the song will be unlocked rather than the episode) and Special/Event Scouting options (making it seem you clear seasonal events to unlock chapters rather than needing to do both to unlock the scouting option). I did also notice that the results page when you complete a song lists favorability gained for the leader, and then popularity for the others even though I’m pretty sure both should be favorability.

I was honestly hoping there would be a patch around launch to fix these issues, as the majority seem easy to spot, but there wasn’t. This script really needed at least one more pass over.

I really liked the artwork and music that I*Chu has. The music for the main menu and main story are nice and does change depending on the mood of the scene, but the real stand outs are the various songs that are included. These songs are mainly for the rhythm game half, but they do play during the main story half when the characters are performing it as part of the story. There will, of course, be a few duds in there, but I really liked most of the songs here. I also did really like the artwork for the various characters. Everyone looks really nice, I love all of their idol outfits, and I love their various outfits that you can see through their I-Chu cards. However, it does seem like the artwork images themselves are low-res. They’re fine most of the time, but if they have a close-up (which happens sometimes during the main story and when you get a high rarity card) you can tell as it gets all pixel-y. I’m not sure if this was the same for the mobile game, but it’s a shame here as the artwork is pretty good here.

For the game’s performance, it does run well like you’d expect a visual novel to, but I did find that it does lag sometimes. Specifically for certain black transitions where it lags when it fades in and out; which is also accompanied by fade ins and outs for character portraits for the rest of the scene. Which I found to be weird as you would think the other transition, the one where there’s a white left to right wipe with stars at the edge, but it doesn’t lag.

Verdict

I*Chu: Chibi Edition is a conflicting title for me. Especially since writing out this review made me realize how many complaints I had. Part of me wishes that I went with my gut and didn’t pick up this game, but another part of me is glad I played it. There are aspects that I really enjoyed, namely the middle of the story (which did, in a way, make the boring beginning worth it), the dynamics the characters had between one another and how they grew as the story progressed the rhythm gameplay, and the artwork and most of the songs. However, there is a lot that I didn’t like, such as how boring the story’s beginning is and how boring and dragged out Part 3 feels (which ultimately led me to drop the main story), low-res art, how many mistakes there are in the translation, how there could have been some quality of life changes, and how this version seemingly lowered crown acquirement way down and how non-leader members gain way less favorability than the results page says they do. Not to mention how the romantic side plots were taken out of this edition, how the Help section acts like its still in, and how it makes it seem like Events have a little side story along with it when they actually don’t. The more I dived into the game, the more I found faults as I didn’t know about the discrepancy for the crowns and favorability gained until I was writing this review.

That said, in terms of whether or not you should pick this up, I’d say it’s a big maybe. Despite all that I’ve complained about, the big part of the story I enjoyed and the highly enjoyable rhythm gameplay made the game worth it for me. It certainly helps that the translation was okay enough to where it didn’t hamper understanding the text despite having a lot of errors. I will also recommend figuring out what you want out of I*Chu: Chibi Edition. If you’re purely going in for the story, probably not (even though what I found boring was purely my own personal taste). Although, if you’re going in for the rhythm gameplay or half story and half rhythm gameplay (I was the latter), I’d cautiously recommend it.