First of all, I want to give my respect to the developers and all the work put into this game. It honestly shows a lot! From the animation, voiceovers, music, story and each character. I loved all of it. If you like a gacha x osu x rpg x tycoon game, here it is. However maybe because the story was more targeted towards a Japanese audience but it soon became tedious and confusing at times. I’m not sure where I as a character (seemingly producer) come into the story on top of all the different characters, elements and game mode you can play. The Home Screen gets a bit crowded and hard to navigate so playing the main game became quite frustrating. Choosing your idols for each live is unclear as It’s not clear what their speciality is. Overall, downloading and playing it was a fun experience and I can definitely see this going somewhere in the future. The game just needs to develop and simplify a bit more for user experience but the graphics animation and music are EPIC and really entertaining to watch!

I have been following this series for a while via the Japanese branch before the release of the English version, I have read over 30 stories from the series from the original game and I can say with full confidence that the English localisation is some of the most negligent and poor work I have seen. The game not only makes frequent mistakes with simply character names but they have willingly cut out dialogue and altered it drastically where they see fit, in particular anything regarding the character Narukami Arashi has been cut up and stuck back together again in the worst way possible. They have removed large amounts of context for her characters gender and gender expression and have even gone as far as to have characters use the wrong pronouns for her when that character would never do so. In the first game Ensemble Stars! (now known as basic) in 2017 a story featuring Narukami Arashi and Tetora Nagumo was released wherein Tetora learns a lot more about Arashi than others by the end of the story he refers to her as a “charming woman” this characterisation has not changed since and Tetora in particular has always upheld this opinion of her, so to have him blatantly disrespect that in the English translation is heinous. Especially as you can choose which language you want to read the app in, the Chinese and Korean versions AVAILABLE in your OWN app do not do the same. I will no longer be spending any money on this game unless care has been taken to correct the egregious mistakes in your localisation. Terrible job and a completely disrespect of the original game.

The fact that there’s a cap on how many cards you can hold is frustrating. You can use gems to increase it but only a certain number of times (15) before that is capped as well :( I wish they would just have it so you can permanently and infinitely increase your limit with gems so you can hold more cards. It makes no sense why they would cap it. You can’t even expand it past that with money instead. You reach the max and that’s it.Edit: did a big UI update, and it does look great. However it’s been a year or so since I wrote this review originally and you still cannot further upgrade your card limit. You also still cant filter your songs by those that you have not full combo’d yet. Every other rhythm game I’ve played (Hatsune miku colourful stage, bang dream, d4dj groovy mix) dont even HAVE card limits to begin with, and in the first 2 I just mentioned you can filter by those missing the full combo. It makes ensemble stars the most annoying to play and if I hadn’t invested so much time into it I would have uninstalled by now

The game is fun and the characters are for the most part all loveable, the english version also adds features that aren’t in the Japanese version including the societies and the auto feature which are both amazing additions to the game, however if i was to mention a gripe i have that would be translation quality; for the most part poor translation issues aren't too noticeable but in some parts it becomes very apparent, especially in stories with Arashi and stories that are fully voiced. Also I've noticed the english version tends to pander to people who want to date the characters as compared to the Japanese version which panders a bit more to fujoshi’s