Unity - Completed - Idol Manager [v1.0.6] [Glitch Pitch]

I'm an idiot and played this to completion, I kept expecting something to happen but this game is truly vapid. If it wasn't for the first half hour of game play this would get one star, but the first hour is actually fun, you have to figure out how to make money and not go broke. Once you've worked it out though the game is over, there's no risk to anything you're just grinding through. The dialogue is literally the author speaking, he doesn't seem to bother changing his writing to fit the characters, no matter whose speaking he just goes on inane philosophical monologues about bullshit unrelated to the plot. As for story, well there is barely a story but this is it as I experienced it;
- met a shady guy who gave me an idol agency
- made an infinite money machine from the agency
- got a big gig at a TV show
- a presenter of the show calls for boycott of the show because the producers chose to start an international franchises and this would 'dilute the purity of Japanese idols'
- I refused because that's crazy
- get called a betrayer by my best idol and she leaves
- shady dude reappears and asks for money so he can stop being a pimp, I give it him
- a masked idol group appears, they are apparently quite good
- I successfully audition, and perform at a large sports contest
This occurred over several hours of grinding. Overall it's just a grind fest that seems to promise more than it delivers.

As someone said that few reviews below: " I would rate it 2/5 if I didn't like the general theme/genre and addictive progression games that waste my time. "

The same here except i'm not that cool.

This game is nice to the eyes, the theme is quite "new", and to discover the game is nice.

Then you are in the core gameplay and it sucks.

I played few hours before i realized there was nothing going here and i was wasting my time. Yeah it is still in my PC but i didn't even think about it since... lool

So that game has no sex content and the actual content is seriously meh.

My Review of Idol Manager (1.01)

The game loop
After hiring idols and building some rooms you basically repeat the following things all game long:
- Create a song/concert/stream plan and let your employees work on it very slowly one-by-one
- Constantly pause the game (hopefully in time) to queue up Spa,Promotion,Promotion,Promotion,Spa,Promotion,Promotion ...to gain fans and keep your idols from running of of stamina
- Occasionally talk to your idols to gain enough friendship to be told about bullying and idols having secret relationships
- Choose how to deal with random events which can give you scandal points or more fans (there are like 10-20 total and you get like 1 per hour)
- Find out which idol is bullying others and put her into an empty sister group until she quits, because she will never stop bullying
- Find out which idol is currently cucking you or dating another idol and tell her to stop before you get scandal points, just to have her do the same again a year later (good luck if you have a larger group)
- Retire lesser idols that have scandal points because they give your whole group debuffs and there's no way to get rid of them other then getting rid of the idol itself or cheating

Game balance
Game balance is pretty awful
You struggle in the beginning until you've released 5 songs and unlock concerts.
Concerts give you huge amounts of money (enough to immediately build everything you want and only hire experts) if you do them regularly.
You can then also build a theater with streaming (which requires 30,000 research points) that automatically earns you enough money to go afk as long as you have idols.

The UX
The UX is just awful.
You constantly have to pause and unpause the game because:
- Someone has finished his work and you have to assign the next person to continue working on your current task
refill the queue again and again or get no fans/stamina
- You may be able to talk to one of your idols again (no visual indicator with 7 day cooldown)
- Your daily action queue (7 entries max and very inconvenient to reach) may have run out so you have to manually fill it up again
...the last one is by far the worst, because you can easily forget it and you always want to repeat the exact same actions (stamina,fans,fans,fans)
Not having an option to auto-repeat these actions is unforgivable.
I could write 10 more lines about the bad UX, but I think that's enough.

The story/writing/progression
After reaching specific goals you get the option to progress the story.
The story has 3 main characters:
- 1 shady hotel owner that give you 1 floor rent-free and charges a lot for additional floors
- 1 mentally-ill female rival that wants you to do things that harm your group and give her a free platinum idol (1% drop chance in the highest tier audition with 3 month cooldown - good luck) to have sex with her and destroy both your careers
- 1 nosy reporter that promises to do various things for you and promote your group after you do her same favors and take her and a free world tour - but never does anything
You can chose what route to pick near the end of the game.
Until then the game is pretty linear and the writing average at best.
The main story, for the most part, is completely unrealistic (especially the rival route).

The censorship
The game was initially planned as an adult game, but the developer backpedaled in the last minute.
This led to various gameplay bugs that required cheating to get rid of.
All idols are dressed very modestly with very loose clothing that reveals absolutely nothing, let alone any cleavage.
Idols that are below the age of 18 cannot raise their cool/sexy skills - even with cheating.
Dating is implemented so poorly it may as well not exist.

The dating and sex scenes (with the uncensor patch)
First you have to find an idol that isn't lesbian or hates men.
Then you have to grind romance until you can go on dates.
On dates you just get huge walls of text (which are always the same no matter the idol's personality) endlessly discussing philosophy and having softcore sex.
After the dating phase you can chose to marry her and get a boring text-only ending with 1 generic wedding image.
The sex and before-sex scenes are pretty bad as well.
It's just some hand-drawn images and 1-2 short softcore sex scenes showing a generic idol that looks nothing like the one you're actually dating.
The only exception here is the sex scene with your rival which has a few nice-looking softcore images and slightly-above-average writing.

The audio
The game does have background music and ambient sounds and the main story characters are fully voiced (in japanese).
None of these are really good or bad, just average.
The only exception is the Phantasm Facade theme (a group you encounter later in the game), which is pretty catchy.
Oh and of course the songs you create have no audio, let alone vocals.
Songs generally have no vocals or audio, except in the final ending (which has extremely low-effort visuals).

Additional notes for Windows 7 users
The ending video is not playing (you just get a black/white screen) due to bugs in the engine the game uses.
To see the ending video you have to watch it on Youtube.

Overall I feel a 3/5 rating is still generous.
I would rate it 2/5 if I didn't like the general theme/genre and addictive progression games that waste my time.

It's the first review im ever writing here, just because its a unique game in my opinion.

I kinda expected a simple management game with lewd stuff, but i didnt even look at the tags. Even though there's literally no fucking, i still liked the experience due to how the game lets you connect with the idols, the art being very appealing.

Story mode is good, and interactions with girls aren't repetitive. Different events make the game more immersive, i wish there was more of them though.

There is the so called grind, but every game is a grind, if you are playing a management porn game and not expecting a grind then thats your fault, but the grind here is very pleasant, it's not like i felt bored. Probably one of the most pleasant grinds i've experienced on this site. The game offers variety and has many features.

You dont have a choice here just like in every other game, but the game gives you a very good illusion of a choice, the same like for example telltale games studio.

Surprisingly the game also has wisdom, even though sometimes dialogues are a bit too long, they offer literal wisdom.

Not 5/5 cause theres no sex but meh the game is still good. It offers romance, and as the modding community is growing there will most likely be a sex mod later.

You need to know this is NOT A FAP GAME. I've played for weeks and never get bored. Scandals, fame, personal drama, anime girls, - the whole world of j\k-pop in one game. Definitely going to buy it on steam to support developers.

Garbage grindfest, it's basically a clicker game with 10% more varied stuff. Everything in the UI is there to make you slow down and waste your time, not letting you get more content.

The writing and the majority of the dialogue is flat and boring and repetitive. The scenes with various idols talking among themselves are just bad. The writers have no sense of humor.

The main storyline is okayish, that gives the game its second star, but the UI itself tries very hard to make you not be able to see the storyline.

The UI is a trash, some questionable mechanics (unability to sell CD after first attempt, exponentional increase of rent cost with new floor that makes Cafe pretty much useless, ridiculous time that takes to converse with idol and then week long cooldown after it (good luck checking when they want to retire, and building friendship is even worse), automation seems to not work properly. And it's given even worse job to tie mechanics to them to see logical.

I like when it's trigger events with decisions, but overall the game isn't good and too painful to play. Play Idolm@ster instead.

[Version reviewed: v20 beta. Time played: ~14 hours.]

Art is great (both the character design, and the pixel graphics). Writing (English) is high quality. Background music is repetitive, but also unobtrusive enough for it not to matter much in my experience.

I enjoy the gameplay, but I can see how it can rub some people the wrong way - the in-game tutorial only covers the very basics, so it's easy for new players to get into debt even at the normal difficulty level. Thankfully, there's a "relaxed" difficulty option that allows you not to worry about money.

Idols are randomly generated and I find that there's enough variety to get attached to your regulars. It's hard not to pick a favorite or two and root for them during the popularity elections. Can't comment on the dating mechanics yet, because the management stuff has kept me occupied.

The race to stay out of debt might sound daunting, but you also get an in-game contact who's instantly ready to lend you a ton of cash at 0% interest rate. And if that's not enough,
Conclusion: the foundation is extremely promising, but what's there now is already fun to play.

Perfectly competent little game, if obviously a beta. Still fleshed out enough to be playable, just kind of barebones and repetitive. The worst I can say against it is the stamina system is a little obtuse.

Idol Manager is a terrible, terrible game. I'm not exaggerating, it's an absolute stinker of a game, though it is a game with a gameplay loop, so it gets some points.

Gameplay is incredibly poor. It's a tycoon game, but a very poor one at that. You're expected play it in just the way the developer wants you to, and it makes no sense. I've made a healthy mix of promotions and performances before releasing my first single, and despite copying the #6 of that month's best-seller, it sold 5 copies. So I thought ''Hm, maybe I need to grow slowly.'' but nope. After I made a new save, I copied that month's #1 single 1:1 and it sold hundreds.
And this is never communicated to the player. It's shitty game design, you literally can't ''run'' an idol company, you have to keep copying what other companies do until you're #1, and even then you'll regularly look at what sells and copy that, there's no way to grow on your own.

Music, is terrible. I recommend you turn the music down to %0 the second you boot up the game. It's not terrible by itself, but it's very clearly no copyright music that the dev slapped on.

Performance, well, bad. If you feel your FPS slowly going down, just save and close the game, then open it back again. For some reason, my framerate goes down by 5-10 FPS every time a new visual novel segment occurs but closing the game seems to fix it.

The writing, is overall a big ''eh''. It's like drinking soda at room temperature, it's neither bad or good, just a very big eh. It ranges from pretty decent during normal gameplay to bloody abysmal during any sort of lewd scene.

Now, the good:

The art, it's fucking great. Make sure you turn on +18 content in the settings before starting the game, because goddamn there are some good sex scenes in the game. The game is wrongly genre'd as 'No Sexual Content' at the time of this review, but I've personally used unity asset studio to confirm there are. Most of them are between you and your competitor, so make sure to choose genders accordingly.

And, that's it for the good parts really. Overall, Idol Manager is an unfun game with a boring gameplay loop, just barely held up by 'meh' writing. I do not recommend that you play this, simply rip any sprites you want from it, add the ripped images to your nsfw folder, and move on.

EDIT: Fixed a typo