Asuka Idol Journey

[後半に日本語レビューあり] [h1] A Classic Idol-Training JRPG [/h1] An introverted girl chasing her dreams aims for the top idol spot together with her friends. It is a classic yet refreshing growth story. The game's progression is very easy to understand, consisting of a one-week routine. On weekdays, you polish parameters such as "Singing," "Dance," and "Visuals" through lessons, and on weekends, you enjoy events with friends and shopping during free-action periods. The system where daily accumulation directly links to story progression makes you feel as if you've become a manager yourself, naturally deepening your affection for the characters. Live Battles that occur at story milestones are depicted as command-based turn-based battles. While it appears to be an orthodox JRPG system at first glance, since your idol skills are directly reflected as combat power, there is a great sense of satisfaction as the results of daily lessons lead to victory. The difficulty is set to be mild overall, and a retry function is available in the unlikely event of defeat. The design allows you to purely enjoy the story and production without feeling the stress of getting stuck in progression. This is a versi…

You like idols, no? Why else would you be looking into Asuka Idol Journey? If you're the idol slop enjoyer I'm imagining, you're probably painfully aware of the lack of non-hentai idol games on Steam. Asuka Idol Journey (a non-hentai idol game), seems like a great choice then, right? The game itself is OK. It's not a terrible game, although a bit confusing at times. I'd say a quarter of the confusion comes from the gameplay itself and the rest is from the absolutely horrendous English translation. This "translation" (done by AI) is crude and lacking localization in every way. Not only is the text borderline unintelligible at times, the English text often overflows out of the text boxes and runs off screen. There are many scenes in this game where you simply won't know what they're talking about or what your next task is as you can't see the words! I'm no big fan of AI, but I can appreciate and see it's usefulness in situations. However, the English version of this game is in dire need of an overhaul. The store page for Asuka Idol Journey states: "I use AI for text translation.After that, the text is manually adjusted by humans." -- There is no way in heck that this text was manu…

I cleared both endings and the unlockable Maria mode. The game is very unique, I particularly like the Talent Space system. The characters are endearing and grow a lot, and without spoiling too much, is there is supernatural lore beneath the surface. It seems to be connected to a larger universe of games from dhR Lab, so I hope the developer will consider bringing even more titles to Steam!