B-Project is a visual novel that follows the point of view of our heroine Tsubasa Sumisora who works for the 14 idols that are part of four different groups — Kitakore, THRIVE, MooNs, and KiLLER KiNG. It’s a Visual Novel, Joseimuke published by PQube and MAGES that releases on 7/15/24 for platforms Nintendo Switch and Steam.
Game Overview
Do you love boybands, JPop? Have you ever dreamed of being the driving force behind a successful idol group? Well now you can experience it in visual novel form!
Step into the hardworking role of A&R (Artist & Repertoire) to the talented idol group, B-Project. Take 14 young members under your wing, each with different personalities and struggles. It's your job to support them, help them grow, and allow them to flourish!
Discover the beginnings of the different idol groups - Kitakore, MooNs, THRIVE and KiLLER KiNG. Learn about their trainee days and the struggles they faced on the path to success. Follow the story as they join together to become one group, B-Project, and stand on Japan’s brightest stage.
Put your headphones on and get swept away with this colourful, idol, visual novel experience.
Characters
Review
I’m actually familiar with this series as I watched a bit of the anime series back when it aired in 2016 — however, it was still a very new experience to me as I didn’t remember much from when I watched it. I went into this game blind but had an idea of how it would play out for the most part as I’ve played similar series such as UtaPri, Idolish7, and I-Chu. I want to start of by stating this is not an otome game — there are no specific routes but merely branching of stories. However, with the heroine being present in the story, there is some occasional flirting and some implications of romance here and there. One thing I really liked is that the heroine is voiced; this definitely kept me more engaged and I liked that you could hear her speak to everyone.
The game starts off by thrusting you into the story of a handful of characters you’re not familiar with yet — so it’s a bit confusing at first. Thankfully, you learn more about the background of each idol by a series of flashbacks which is helpful to get a better idea of how the heroine Tsubasa Sumisora (name changeable) had come to work under all of these idols. Sumisora used to work at a CD shop but was soon scouted by someone after seeing how knowledge she was with music. She was hired as an A&R (Artist & Repertoire) which is a fancy word for someone who handles supporting the artist by promoting them among other things. I liked to see that she was very interactive with the boys and always did her best to support them, offer them advice, and give her honest opinion of the problems that would arise.
While the story is fairly simple and not hard to follow, I admittedly had trouble figuring out who was who at first — especially because there’s so many characters to remember. However, the more you learn about them and the more they appear the easier it got. There’s definitely a lot of content to explore between individual characters and the issues they go through as the hurdles for becoming the best idols they can be are high. However, even with their struggles they all support each other in their own way, like a family. There’s also a lot to like about each character, as they all have their own personalities and quirks about them. My personal favorites were Goshi (because I love grumpy tsunderes) and Tatsuhiro (because he has a very cute — shy side). I think because it’s such a large cast, it’s easy to find characters that catch your eye.
One of my favorite parts of the game was definitely the artwork; and there was plenty of CGs to obtain in my first playthrough. The game is more than colorful so you’ll get a handful of pretty CGs to look at as you play. In addition to that, the sprites have live 2D animation which I’ll admit it’s a bit of an an adjustment if you’re not used to it when playing visual novels. This was the case for me as I find it can be a bit jarring when they move very puppet-like, but not so much that it looked terrible. The sprites themselves look fine so I think anyone who watches VTubers would be fine with it.
While you don’t make in-game choices in the traditional sense, you do so by receiving phone calls and answering texts from the idols. Depending on the text you decide to send, you’ll get a good, great, or excellent. These give you more side stories to check out and extra endings to see. There’s a lot of playful banter and cute emojis sent between each other which was really cute. I was actually surprised to find out there is more replay value to this game than I initially thought as there are two different branching storylines you can go through to obtain many different scenes with each character, leading to different stories to unveil. With that, there’s a lot of content to collect and CGs to unlock.
One issue I had with the texts in terms of the translation was that it seemed that a few of the choices weren’t properly displaying — so I wasn’t sure what I was inputting. Other than that it was pretty solid. As for the game’s music, I think anyone who likes idol games would know that’s one of the best parts — so it was nice they included some songs to play and they were pretty catchy. Personally, I think they could of made the game even more fun if they decided to add a rhythm system to it (in my opinion, anyway). I’m definitely used to that being an aspect whenever I play idol games.
Overall, I think anyone who likes idols and just wants a relaxing game to play, would enjoy this title! I’m usually very open-minded to any game with pretty boys and a heroine even if it’s not explicitly an otome game so it wasn’t a bad experience for me. Even without the romance, there’s still a lot to enjoy especially when you have a stellar Japanese voice cast.
[Many thanks to PQube for providing a review copy]
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