Ensemble Stars Music 12+

As an avid rhythm game fan, when I saw this in my recommended games section, I had to download it. I had vaguely heard of Ensemble Stars on the Internet, and it appeared to be your average idol rhythm game. However, this game was more delightful than I expected. The tutorial explains the games functions in a brief yet understandable manner, and the game’s UI is very simple and clean. As for the characters, there are a multitude of idol groups to choose from, and the voice acting is pretty good. The songs are catchy and the 3D MV’s are top tier (like seriously, the MV’s blew me away with how smooth the animation was). The actual rhythm game part took me a bit to get used to, but is pretty fun when you get the hang of it. (I also like how you can customize the note look and sound) At the time of writing this, the game has only been released for a couple of weeks, so some parts of the game are still locked (like the Ensemble Live function). My only complaint (which is opinionated) is that there are a LOT of characters, like almost too many. It’s hard to level up each card because there’s a lot of them, but this is more of a personal problem for me because I’m a completionist and like having every card maxed out. Overall, a very fun game that every rhythm game enthusiast should play (or anybody, really).

In the game you play as a girl named Anzu who has a story of her own but takes on a more silent protagonist role in this game. The characters are full of variety and the music is really good! There’s happy moments, funny ones and dark heartbreaking stories to be experienced as you play. The beat-maps are fun, songs are catchy, all in all fun game to play. The art is very beautiful and that is something enstars is known for. I encourage new players to join if you want a vast world to explore! It’s also suitable for those who enjoy this kind of game too. A few bugs here and there (very few in my experience) but I trust that the developers will solve these issues easily and quickly (I am writing this very early) I have no issues with the translation, and if there are simple errors they can be fixed whenever. Again, I trust the developers will be able to manage everything well. Thank you for working on this game! I recommended it to some people and they all enjoyed it!

In terms of the actual game- characters, gameplay, story- I am a big fan of Ensemble Stars.

However, as a Japanese speaker who is simultaneously listening to the voice lines while reading the story, I was taken aback at what a poor job the team did on localization and translations. It doesn’t help that the story comes with an already-established plot that one would have to go to outside of the game to fully get a grasp of. But everything from the dialogue of the game to basic menu controls is translated in a way that’s so clunky that sometimes I have to read the same line several times to even understand what is going on. Some translations are too literal, some are just flat out wrong. For characters like Rei that use vocabulary words over a middle school level, you can clearly see the inadequacies of the translating team because they do not know how to properly use the words in a sentence. It honestly seems that 1) a lot of these are machine translated, or 2) translated from Chinese rather than Japanese, and 3) do not have a native English speaker or editor reviewing any of the translations.

This level of translation is truly unacceptable for such a large franchise. It’s laughably bad and insulting to fans who spend money on the game. I can’t recommend this game to anyone, and won’t be spending money on it until they improve the quality of the translations.