Even people that love idols know it all goes a bit too far in the way it exploits a bunch of girls that want to be stars, but purely on perception, it seemed like this game was trying and wash over all that to be a simple, “fun” take on the industry.īut Idol Manager is surprisingly unflinching about this. The first time I played I figured it would be uncritically fanservicesy and celebratory of a business model that is often terribly exploitative. As the name of the game suggests, it tasks you with building up an idol business – think AKB48 in Japan – and it’s a surprisingly unflinching look at it. That is a pity, because Idol Manager is interesting. But this is too painfully clunky, and does test my definition of “playable.” My over-arching philosophy is that so long as the game is interesting and playable, I’ll sit through it. As people that read my reviews know, I just don’t usually spend entire paragraphs complaining about this stuff.
As a final kick in the ‘nads, you can’t play this with touchscreen control in handheld mode. You can mess around with the speed of the cursor in the settings, but even turning it up to its maximum wasn’t smooth or fast enough for me, and in general, I’ve never reached the point where I’m comfortable with how this game controls. You can scroll through the menu using buttons, but it scrolls in one direction only, and then, if you want to cycle through a window that’s bigger than a single screen, you need to press a button and use the control stick to simulate a mouse wheel action. On the Switch, many of the actions are still designed around the virtual mouse pointer, but unfortunately, the speed of the cursor on the screen is glacial and some real dead zone issues make “clicking” on the tiny icons that you need to a pain. But the problem with Idol Manager starts almost immediately on loading it up.
IDOL MANAGER REVIEW SIMULATOR
As a point of reference, Project Highrise – another simulator built around direct input and with a similar presentation – worked beautifully on consoles.
IDOL MANAGER REVIEW PC
Idol Manager on the PC was very much built around mouse control, but not in a way that shouldn’t have been adaptable to console. I just had no idea they’d get the potential for a console port this wrong, and that has everything to do with the controls, sadly. Idol Manager is a far more thoughtful take on all of this than I was expecting, and consequently, I’ve found the whole thing to be fascinating.” I’m not the world’s biggest fan of idols (at least, idols that aren’t digital and with aquamarine twintail hair), but I do find the culture behind them fascinating to study. The irony here is that the one bit of that original review that still exists – my summary on Metacritic – actually calls for a console port: “Idol Manager really needs a console release – the scope and design of the game makes it perfect for the Nintendo Switch in particular – but in the meantime, I can see myself spending a lot of time playing this on the PC. And that’s a real pity, because I wanted to link to that review, say “this game is really, really good”, and then proceed to rip the console port to shreds. Idol Manager seems to be one of the very few articles that we lost when we transferred from that old, Blogger-based (remember how ugly that site was by the end?) to this new host. Well, this review puts me in a bit of an odd position.
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