#ixa collab

[otoroll]

Well, folks, there was a brief moment of hell where ALL of my mobage were going through maintenance...

But the A3! x I★Chu event is here and we are all doomed to cutesy shiny Armageddon.

[otoroll]

In I★Chu, you can already play MANKAI☆Kaika Sengen in the daily song selection (the song may have changed by the time this gets posted, thanks to queue), but I’ve never actually listened to the A3! songs so this is my first time hearing it…

So far the collab event is just being able to play the songs and roll for the collab cards in a special gacha, there’s no points or anything to earn. That said, I’m clearly low on Discs to do gacha with so I guess I’m gonna have to actually try and S-rank everything just for the scout.

I really adore the special A3! stage though. You’ve got Kamekichi in one corner flying about with Sankaku-kun and you’ve got the two Kumakochos in the other corner dressed as Romeo and Julius duking it out. I may just play every song on this stage for as long as I have it.

[otoroll]

The gacha for IxA is out, and on A3!’s end you get to see the other side of the I★Chu LEs! That’s super cute, even if the art isn’t entirely depicting the exact same situation. (All links are to the images of the paired card.)

Sakuya’s fistbumping Seiya In my head canon, it becomes Sakuya’s favorite new thing so as Spring Troupe Leader he wants everyone to do a fistbump before they perform and he wears them (well, Tsuzuru and Masumi; Itaru doesn’t give a shit and Citron’s gung-ho for everything) down into doing it with his sweet puppy eyes

Homare’s reciting to Hikaru; in the original one it looks Homare’s supposed to be standing and facing away, but here he’s sitting and facing Hikaru.

Yuki has the stuffed cat from Kokoro’s card while the other boy admires his bear purse

Hisoka is actually not asleep against Mutsuki yet! ...but there are no marshmallows, so give it a minute or two.

Taichi and Ban were all gung-ho in their cards because they were feeding each other and now not only does Taichi not have a hot dog, he’s grabbing the wrist that feeds him so of all the discrepancies it sticks out most here but whatever these cards are gonna launch a thousand ships anyway

Masumi and Saku are doing their stalking stuff, just switching out who’s in the background.

The limited scout actually went up before they released all the images on Twitter, so of course I gave it a run, but it looks like after double Jiangshi Taichi, Gacha God Sakusaku is no longer gracing me with his presence. Gotta get those Diamonds again...

A3! Official Twitter Tweet 1 & Tweet 2

[otoroll]

It might be the season (with all the Japanese boybands showing up on music shows and whatnot), but like Spring has come!, Winter Troupe’s theme song to bloom... really sounds like something I might hear on mainstream Japanese charts. To wit, I kept imagining Arashi singing this only to get thrown for a loop every time Homare and Tasuku’s deeper voices came up.

As a track, I really like it. (Also, the bell effect that signifies you’ve hit the beat right works really well to make it even more wintery.) As a song in I★Chu, the track pattern is okay - I had more fun with it once I upped the difficulty to Hard - but I genuinely like it more than 90% of the songs I’ve played so far and I’m going to be sad if this is gone with the event.

[otoroll]

I think this is only a little below average for an Etude Event for me - I never manage to hit 700,000 (so no bloomed collab cards), but getting above 600,000 is already pretty nice considering I divided a good chunk of time between this and I★Chu and then there was that day where I played only Kakupuri trying and failing to use up the event tickets.

But more importantly, between 1500 and 1750 Kamepon, I managed to use up all of my points neatly and that’s what really matters, right?

[otoroll]

If Spring has come! was delightfully and perfectly generic, ORE-SAMA Natsu summer has a lot I would hate as a song on its own. I’m too old for this introductory talky-verse stuff (even if it is the stuff boybands were made of for a period of time). It’s super energetic to the point of being chaotic. It is unapologetically anison.

It’s not a song so much as it is an anthem for Summer Troupe to run around Veludo Way in the most cartoonish manner possible, limbs and triangles akimbo.

But oh my god I love it as a rhythm game track. The frenetic pace makes it easy to keep the beat. The track pattern is a joy to play on any difficulty. Honestly the whole reason I recorded this video was so I can simulate playing this song even after the event ended.

And this is all to say I’m ready for an actual A3! rhythm game so long as it has this song. what is wrong with me I★Chu I’m begging you don’t take this song out

[otoroll]

So the A3! x I★Chu collab has just ended, and if you ever wondered how serious I was being when I said I play these things to the very last second, the answer is deadly serious.

As you can see in this video, by the time I hit song’s end, the game had already gone into maintenance mode to remove the event. 😭 It’s cool, I already traded in my uchiwa for LE collab Seiya so I have at least one event card on the I★Chu side.

So now that the event’s completely over, let’s talk the A3! songs, because I’m a wonderful fan, and this event is really the first time I’d heard any of them. Spring Troupe’s song is named Spring has come! because of course it is, and at the risk of being mean, it’s kind of generic. Like generic anison, generic mainstream pop song, it’s just 100% inoffensive. The track pattern’s kind of fun, especially on Hard when we get the double swipes alternating between rows, but MAINTENANCE! so you don’t get a video of what that looks like.

Also goddamn I actually really like Masumi’s voice, I’m totally going to hell for accepting the advances of my underage stalker