Update 2014/08/31: Added information about storing cards in presents, some bits about the big game update and a “Late Late Game” section.
Love Live! School Idol Festival is a mobile game (iOS, Android) based on Love Live!. This guide is for the Japanese version, although the international version should be similar. I will not be writing about the rules and mechanics of the game because there are already good sites for that. Below are some useful resources. The English wiki has two links to Japanese wikis, which have a bit more information regarding things like the amount of experience required to level up cards and card lists (the English wiki added card lists earlier this year) random information that may or may not be useful.
- Love Live! School Idol Festival Wiki
- Love Live! School Idol Festival (rhythm game) – forum thread at MyAnimeList.
- ラブライブ！スクールアイドルフェスティバル攻略wiki
- ラブライブ！スクフェス 情報まとめwiki
This guide will be more about insights that a player develops over time and implications of the game mechanics. That is, tips on how to play the game that are not obvious when you start out. When I play a game, I naturally try to optimise for efficiency. You need to know the limiting factors and whether to save money or stock up experience or friendship points. Just knowing the game rules isn’t enough; you need to know how the game plays out in the future, e.g. that events happen on a fixed schedule and new songs are released, and whether you will eventually run out of ways to get loveca or friendship points (you don’t).
Screenshots
Firstly, here are some random screenshots to liven up the post.
Early Game
This is when you first start playing.
Japanese Version: If you’re starting fresh, the English version might be okay because you won’t need all the latest songs and cards right away and can go along with the updates as the English version progresses. If I were me though, I would still use the Japanese version because I could level faster than content is released, you get current events, more players (doesn’t really affect much) and you get the culture (player names, Score Match messages, 25251 rankings).
Installation: Android: You need to either use a Japanese IP address or download the apk from somewhere. In-game downloads and updates are fine, but app updates on Google Play need a Japanese IP address. The app version updates around once every month or two, entirely dependent on the developers (events only need an in-game update). You cannot play with root. Just use SuperSU and disable root. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get working than PuzzDora. iOS: You need to change your app store to Japanese (I don’t use an iPhone so I’m not sure about details).
Account Password: This is a 20-digit number that is used to restore your account when you change phones. BACK UP THIS CODE AS SOON AS YOU CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT. If your phone dies or your app data gets deleted you won’t be able to open the game to get the code. Then everything will be lost. You might be able to write to customer support (in Japanese) to restore your account. And how do you tell them which was your account? Do you know your account ID (a different number, found on your profile page)?
To access the 20-digit code, go to the settings screen. Press the button on the third row on the left. Then on the next screen, press the bottom right button. Then there is a confirmation screen. I’m not sure why they make it feel like you’re going to delete your account or something. Also one more thing: this code changes every time you use it, so make sure your code is up to date. Also I heard that to switch between platforms (Android/iOS), you need to have exactly 0 loveca in your account.
Score: Your Unit isn’t powerful enough to get more than a C rank. This is fine, it will come eventually.
Kizuna: Rotate your cards to max out their kizuna. Since you’re not going for score, using level 1 cards is okay. Also you will be able to max out all your kizuna pretty early on. Also if you’re a person who optimises for efficiency, note that no kizuna is wasted unless everybody on your team has full kizuna.
Skills: Don’t bother. You will rarely get more than one of each SR and most of the SR’s skills are unique. For the Rares, their stats are too low to use them in the long term and the skills don’t make up for it. Getting a skill to level 2 is easy. But I estimate it takes 127 cards to get a skill to level 8 (the information on this is sparse). Game update: Still don’t bother. DO NOT SPEND BLUE TICKETS ON SKILL CARDS. Save those or the UR draw. A 20% chance of a UR is worth something like 100 loveca.
Inventory: Your inventory is big enough. This has probably changed since I started playing since they added so many new cards, but when I played, I had enough inventory space to keep all my unmaxed normals until I maxed them and used them to feed the rares.
Levelling cards: Always level using the same colour. It gives 20% more exp. (I didn’t realise this for several weeks.)
Album bonus: I levelled/evolved all my cards just for completion’s sake. You get some album bonuses which are nice but not essential and the rewards are not much. All that effort gives you about 15 loveca total and about 15 inventory space (3 inventory = 1 loveca). But if you don’t do it, there’s nothing much left to do with regards to cards.
Loveca stones: Save up 50 to do the 11-draw. Also, wait for the period just after events when there’s a guaranteed SR.
Events: There are two events per month, 5th to 15th and 20th to 31st (last day of the month). You probably won’t be able to get the SR rewards if you play on Easy, so hurry up and get better!
Friendship points: Just use these up so you can get Rares.
Money: You will never have to sell a card because of lack of money at this stage of the game. You get a lot from song rewards, login rewards and events.
Song rewards: Getting the bonus for completing a song lots of times takes a long (calendar) time. Concentrate on Easy songs first because you get more cards that way, and later on the Easy songs will be too boring to play.
Calibration: It helps to calibrate your device. If you can’t get perfect every time, it might not be because of your lack of skill. On a good song, I can get about 90% perfects. The 10% greats are probably my lack of precision. The default setting was close, but I found that on my phone, a setting of 4 (or minus 4) worked a lot better (I don’t know the conversion rate, but it’s only maybe 20ms). Also I find that the warmer my hands are, the more easily my screen will pick up my touch. I don’t even need to make contact with the screen if my hands are warm. This affects timing because the screen will pick up the signal a few milliseconds earlier and release a few milliseconds later at the end of held-notes.
Mid-Game
This is when you’re playing at Normal Difficulty and can start to get SRs in events.
Cards: I kept all my Rares because they have a higher experience to inventory ratio. That way, I could instantly level up a UR using rares (although this rarely happens). You will still have a lot of Normals that you slowly consume to level up SRs. It takes about 4 level 40 normals to level up an SR.
Friendship points: Don’t worry about running out. Even though getting points from choosing a friend to play with is so low that it’s not an option, you will get points from events and login bonuses and new songs.
Money: You should still have enough money so you never have to sell a card (unless you get lots of URs). If you do run out of money, sell level 1 cards. They are plentiful and also less efficient to level cards with because it costs more per exp (1000G per 120exp).
Song rewards: Getting S combos might be annoying but it’s good practice. I never considered getting S combos in previous rhythm games, but it’s doable in Love Live. Try to finish off the Easy song completion bonuses because after getting to Hard songs you never want to go back. Or don’t finish them; they’re not that important.
Events: To be able to get the SR reward playing on Normal difficulty, I had to try not to waste any LP. Well, I wasted about 3 hours every night because I my maximum LP wasn’t high enough to last the night, and at the end I might have had one day spare. I found that the placement in Score Match is quite random, so even if your unit is bad you still have a good chance of getting first or second (or third or last). Since it’s so variable, it doesn’t matter if you don’t put full effort into getting full combos every time. Also I found that the claim tickets have a lot higher chance of giving an SR than a 5 loveca draw. I’ve received maybe 5 SRs out of 8 draws, but due to the small sample size I’m not really sure.
Event cards: The Rare reward card (the one that you can’t use for anything) gives lots of experience. The Alpaca card gives 30000G or 2000 exp. At first glance it looks like a better deal to sell it. However, if you had 20 normal cards, it takes 20000G to use them whereas it costs very little to use the Alpaca card for 2000 exp. The maths is conceptually complicated, but trust me, it’s better to use the Alpaca card for exp unless you have absolutely no need for exp. If you disagree, it doesn’t make much difference overall, but I just like to know that I’m being efficient.
Hard songs: It depends on your skill, but I thought hard songs were hard so I stuck to normal songs. It’s worth a try though, because after I full comboed all the normal songs, I started doing the hard songs and they eventually became as easy as how I thought the normal songs are. It’s rewarding to know that you’ve actually made a significant improvement. I think all rhythm games that I play will be easier now. I guess playing every day (takes at least an hour throughout the day) for 9 months is more than I’ve ever spent on any instrument (I learned piano for 6 years and never practised). The power of games.
If you’re having trouble, note that in Winter it’s a lot harder to play fast with cold hands. It’s troublesome to have to warm up your hands just to play, so you might want to wait for Summer? Lol, I don’t know, I’ve only played through one Winter, when I was struggling with full comboing Hard songs.
Friends: Try to get friends with a UR centre, since it will give you a higher bonus when you choose them for songs. You only really need one of each colour, but I made all my friends URs (sometimes they change their centre card). It’s easier to get UR friends when you have a UR yourself, but I managed to get all UR friends before that. Once in a while everyone receives a bonus SR (or UR) card (e.g. UR Kotori at the end of last year), or there are exclusive cards that come free with Weiss Schwarz decks or Dengeki G Magazines: these cards usually have a bad centre skill (equivalent of a Rare) so watch out for those.
Maximising score: Just do automatic unit selection. When I first played I thought maybe you could optimise positioning/colours based on note frequency to each of the 9 positions (there are frequency charts on the Japanese wiki), but it doesn’t work. The score is based on your total unit score, so individual card scores don’t matter. The colour matters, but all your cards are the same colour anyway so that doesn’t matter either. Sometimes you might have a UR of a different colour (because the stats are high enough to make it into the team of another colour), so only in that circumstance will it matter, and the effect will be small. Also you have to tune it for each song specifically.
Late Game
This is when you (finally) unlock all the songs and finish the story. Rares start becoming disposable. I estimate it takes about 6 months of playing every day to get to this stage. Game update: level 1 to 100 takes half the time now.
Songs: This game has so many songs! It took me until level 86 to unlock all 33 songs in April. My profile said 45 songs because it included the event songs. This number will be higher in future because a new song is released after every event (twice a month) so don’t expect to run out of songs any time soon if you started playing recently. A new story chapter is also released with the new song. The releases keep the game interesting after you have unlocked all the songs. Actually it’s as if you haven’t reached the end because it’s the same except that unlocking new chapters/songs is a bit slower.
LP: I still don’t have enough LP to last the night all the time, but on weekdays I can usually do it. My max LP is 77 at Rank 104 (after 9 months of playing). The formula for LP is 25 + Rank/2, i.e. you get 1 extra LP every 2 ranks and you start at 25 (I’m not sure if it’s every even or odd level).
Hard songs: This might depend on the person, but suddenly I was able to do hard songs without any difficulty, full comboing more than 50% of the time (depends on your concentration). The songs on rotation have a different difficulty scale (Easy is Medium, Medium is Hard, Hard is very hard), but I managed to get full combo on a few of them (9 star difficulty) after looking up the difficult section on YouTube. It’s great that they reduced them to 15 LP instead of 25.
Expert songs: This really depends on your skill as a musician. I don’t like Expert songs because I have to really concentrate and I might fail and I don’t really feel like I’m playing the song, but just struggling to hit random notes. There are some songs I can’t even pass, although I haven’t practised them. If you really want to do these songs, look up the videos on YouTube to practise because you’ll never be able to do them otherwise.
Money: Only sell level 1 cards. They are more than enough. At this stage you may have run out of money, but at the same time you will have more than enough fully levelled Rares so you can start selling all your level 1 cards and start to accumulate millions of Gold.
Inventory: You will run out of inventory if you kept all your Rares. You will have to choose which rares you want to keep.
You are able to free an inventory slot every time you get an SR because the SR uses one slot, but you free two slots because it takes two level 60 Rares to level up an SR. One level 60 Rare gives 8928 exp and only costs 24750G to use. To level an SR to 60 requires 23802 exp which is 2 level 60 rares plus 5946 exp, assuming you don’t get an Ultra Success or the other Success (I never stay on the screen long enough to see).
- SR 1-60 requires 23802 exp.
- SR 60-80 requires 12998 exp.
- UR 1-80 requires 59408 exp.
- UR 80-100 requires 20282 exp.
Unlimited Inventory: You can store an unlimited number of cards in Presents, however they expire after 60 days. Cards from Friendship points do not expire (and claim tickets, and probably premium draws) I think cards from premium draws do not expire either. The disadvantage of keeping cards that expire is that you might forget about them and lose them, and that it takes time to scroll down to the bottom to withdraw, so I don’t recommend keeping those cards in the long term. Just keep them during events or before a 50 loveca draw when you know you will be getting an SR.
How do you “put” cards in presents? You probably know this by now, but when your inventory is full, any extra cards go to Presents. There are a few opportunities to do this:
- When you complete a song and get 3 cards. You can’t start playing a song if your inventory is full. If you have one inventory space, the first one will go into your inventory and the other two will go into Presents. The top one will be the non-level 1 card and the second one will be the level 1 card (in Presents it doesn’t show what level the card is). If you want to add the non-level 1 card to your Presents, play songs while having exactly 2 inventory space free.
- You can draw two cards with Friendship Points even if you have 1 inventory space. This way you can add one level 1 card to your presents.
- The daily friendship card and “claim ticket” draw can be drawn with 0 inventory space.
- The 11 card loveca draw. (Not sure about what can be drawn with 0 inventory space.)
Friendship points: You should have almost all the Rares by now. It’s those annoying one or two that you never get. You shouldn’t worry too much, because it’s not like you need them. It’s only for the sake of completion. So instead of using all your friendship points instantly to try to get those rares, start managing them so you accumulate them and use them up when you want to instantly finish levelling an SR (or rarely, UR).
Events: It’s probably better to stick with Hard songs unless you can get S score and A or B combo in Expert songs (or you’re bored of Hard songs).
Cards: You probably have 1 UR by now. If you’re lucky, more than one. If you’re unlucky, none :(. I have one (plus the special URs that are given to everyone). Almost all the cards in your units should be SR or higher at this stage. Is the 10+1 draw better or getting a high event ranking to get two of the same SR?
For the 10+1 draw:
- You might get an SR that you already have 2 of (evolved).
- You might get one that is too weak to go in your unit.
- It’s the only way to get URs, well, besides claim tickets.
For event SRs:
- Guaranteed to get the same SR so you can evolve.
- Guaranteed to be a card you don’t have.
- Takes time and effort.
- Number of loveca stones required is around 20 as of July 2014 but it will change depending on popularity of the card and just in general along the lifetime of the game. Also keep in mind that this will work better at higher levels because you have more LP.
- Evolved means a higher unit strength sooner than getting random SRs, so you might be able to get a claim ticket from getting a high rank for the song score in the token collecting event.
Suppose it takes 25 loveca to get a high enough rank in the event (note that the number of loveca required might be higher). The tradeoff is two level 80 SRs, or one random SR and a 1% chance of a UR. The level 80 SRs sound really good, but ultimately, are you aiming for URs or SRs? If you’re not spending money, you will not get many URs so those level 80 SRs will be with you for a long time. However you need to have at least one UR just for the satisfaction. I think keep trying for URs until you have at least one and then reevaluate. Game update: SR and UR cards more than 6 months old are not in the random pool for regular loveca draws, which affects things slightly. If you don’t get two of the same SR in the event, you will probably forever have only one. You can still get older cards from the themed recruitment boxes and the voucher (blue ticket) boxes.
Late-late Game
Inventory and levelling: Your inventory will fill up with SRs so get rid of all your Rs. With the inventory trick in the previous section you won’t need to keep Rs as feeders anyway. You will also have the feeder R and Alpaca from the event to help level the event SR.
Events: See “Late Game”. If you’re going for event rankings, you want to make maximum use of LP recharges. When you get to Rank 146 or 148 you will have 98 or 99 LP so you can play 4 Expert songs in a row and then recharge LP again. Having the right Rank so that you can use all your LP without any leftover doesn’t come often. If your maximum LP isn’t optimal, you can either wait for it to charge, or play a song that requires the exact amount of LP, or waste some LP (if you have less than 4 LP). Waiting is inconvenient because you have to do something else for a short period of time and have to set an alarm and have to be available at that time. Playing a song that is less than 25 LP is slightly non-optimal (you get fewer event points per LP) but another consideration is the amount of time you spend. If you have to play an extra song every recharge (e.g. if you have 20 LP left, you need to play two songs to use it up), that’s an extra hour if a song takes 3 minutes and you recharge 20 times. Even if you only have to play one song, you are getting e.g. 10 or 16 tokens in the time it takes to play one song instead of 27.
Money: In “Late Game” I said to only sell level 1 cards. But then what do you do with the non-level 1 cards? Well, you may have reached the point where you just sell all cards sooner than I did because I was collecting Rs for a long time.
Friendship points: I still can’t get the last few rares. Also new Normal cards come out every event (or two?) and the chances of getting any specific card are becoming ever smaller.
Money Game
If you’re spending (real) money, it’s a whole different game. I don’t recommend spending money to try to get specific cards. This person spent $1000 trying to get a card. I think it is okay to spend a bit to show support for the the game.
Game design
I find that the game is simple but well designed. I played Rage of Bahamut before and that game really made you rage. I also had a look at the AKB48 game, which made me realise how well designed Love Live is. If there is nothing that really annoys me about Love Live after playing every day for 9 months, it must be really well polished. I don’t know if it was specifically designed that way or if it’s just a coincidence, but either way, they got it right.
- In Rage of Bahamut, each page takes a few seconds to load, like a website, and doing things requires too many button presses. This really adds up and you end up pressing things for an hour just to finish up your stamina and level up cards. Love Live page transitions are client-side mostly and also data is transferred in the background. The AKB48 game takes about 30 seconds to load a song and the song results screen and rank up animations are unskippable. Love Live takes about… 0 seconds to start a song.
- There are way too many cards in Rage of Bahamut so your inventory is always full. Even doubling the inventory wouldn’t be enough. I can’t remember if you could increase inventory without cash, but in Love Live, you can use Loveca stones which you can pay for but you usually have plenty from events and bonuses.
- Love Live is simple. You don’t have to worry too much about card management. Levelling using one card gives the same amount of experience as using 10 cards. You use two of the same card to evolve and you don’t have to keep track of which cards you need to evolve. I guess Love Live is a music game first and foremost and the cards are secondary.
- At first I questioned whether a mobile game could be good because it didn’t have multiple symbols like in Project Diva. However, now I prefer this game because the touch screen is a lot more responsive than a button, and you don’t get confused as to which button you need to press. AKB48 has swipe notes, which breaks your rhythm because it takes a lot longer to do a swipe (btw, their hold notes suck because they come at a different angle and speed).
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