iDOLM@STER the anime (and spin-offs)
 

Many have wanted this to happen for years (especially after the spin-off series that happened in 2007).

Source

Official anime site

Video announcement of the anime adaptation:


If it wasn't made obvious already by the trailer, the adaptation will follow the original game, so with that in mind the original voice cast will stay the same. This just keeps getting better and better.



Count on the official site is for the release of Gakken's Megami Magazine, which will feature more information about the project. Can't wait.

Also keep checking the site everyday for the written messages from the voice cast.

Finally, THANK FREAKIN GOD!

I was like 'God, we're NOT goin back for that stupid Xenoglossia anime which it was painful.'

My Reaction


Finally, a proper Idolmaster anime! Hopefully in the future they might also include the Dearly Stars casts, Project Jupiter, Junjirou Takagi and Kotori Otonashi.

Iori! \(^o^)/

Looks like Gainax's Atsushi Nishigori, Gurren-Lagann and Panty Stocking's character designer, is the character designer for the adaptation. Interesting choice, considering he is a self-declared fan. :heh:

My mind has just been totally blown finding out Atsushi Nishigori will be the character designer :heh:. Oh my.

YES! :D Very good news.

Just a month ago, I was thinking that I would like to see an anime more liked the game. Here it is!

Suck on that, SUNRISE for ruining one of our favorite IM@S franchises.

I mean let's get over all of these Xenoglossia Torture just like last time. I mean what were they thinkin?

Sweet so many cute girls all in one place

I wonder which studio is doing the anime.

So much Xenoglossia hate here. :/ Everywhere else I've seen people seemed to like it for what it managed to pull off.

I loved that series and I'm disappointed that they're not continuing it. I mean I'm not a hardcore Idolmaster fan, I've never even played the games. Was it the fact that it was different, and not a retelling of the game's storyline, that makes everyone here hate it? I have some difficulty understanding.

Basically it is because they use the names and the design of the characters from the game but completely re-wrote their personalities, on top of that the story is completely unrelated to the game universe, not even the seiyuus are the same. So in essences there was absolutely no point and no reason in using the same names and character designs in the first place except as a cheap ploy to use the "idolmaster" name as pure marketing hook to milk money from the fans, that's why it pissed off the game players.

So it's got nothing to do with the actual quality of the show itself? I guess I can kind of understand your reasons, but it's a shame really. It's lovely when you come into it with a blank slate, so to speak. It's certainly one of my personal favorites.

I guess it'll be my turn next to have to go without the established universe, personalities and seiyuu I've come to enjoy. :( I'll try my best to enjoy the new show for what it is, though.

Would be far more interested if this was a Xenoglossia sequel,but alas.

If you ask me Xenoglossia took what could have been a painfully dull concept for an anime adaptation if played straight up and made it more workable and interesting for a 26 episode anime. Up to that point I had never really seen an adaptation of a series I would have had zero interest in following reinvented into something I found surprisingly fun and watchable.

If people would rather watch an anime about cutesy girls singing cutesy songs while dancing cutesy though then by all means, don't really see much of that sort of thing in anime these days right? :eyebrow: Hope that goes memorably for ya'll. It's your turn now so make the most of it.

The staff was revealed one day before the release of the Megami magazine.

Animation Production: A1

Director and Character design: Atsushi Nishigori
Series Composition: Touko Machida
Series Director: Touko Takao
Chief Animation Director: Iizuka Haruko and Takata Akira

(not sure about the positions)

From here: http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/blog-entry-559.html

When I read "A1" I immediately thought "Kannagi art style", but then I looked up Nishigori Atsushi. He designed the characters for PSG and Gurren Lagann! Sweet. :bow:

As always, trust Kaoshin to make inflammatory comments on subjects matters he has no knowledge of. :eyebrow:

It would be equally an abomination to borrow an established mecha anime in name only and turn it into something totally different. Something such as the Toei Mecha Girl project perhaps? The moe crowd will lap it up and would probably claim it is "more interesting" than the original mecha shows they were based on (come'on if you ever watched the original GaiKing I challenge you to say that it was actually an interesting super robot show compared with the other classics). But given that these shows are parodies they can still get away with it. Xenoglossia is really just at a completely different level of alteration. All the fans asked was that if the company is going to do a totally different show, then do it properly and not borrow an establish name, otherwise it reeks of no confidence in the show that they are producing in that they had to borrow a name to do bait-and-switch marketing. That's why people criticize it.

And to be honest we really haven't had a true non-magical "idol" anime since, I dunno, Love Doll 4 years ago? If you just lump everything into a big "moe idol" blanket then yeah, we've probably have a few of those recently (I'm sure you are thinking K-On, considering your history of a crusade of sorts against KyoAni, but really it doesn't take 2 brain cells to see that imas and K-On shares no similarities except they both have girls singing), but Idolmaster as a pure "girls wanting to be top idol" with no magic/sci-fi/fantasy spin kind of story with no ero/romance is a pretty rare story line (otherwise I suppose White Album and Macross would count :heh:).

As for cutesy songs, imas song variety is really diverse and has half the casts that are highly skilled singers, not just moe/high pitched singers that sings denpa/moe songs. Any songs by Chihaya, Azusa, Makoto, Takane and Hibiki are almost guaranteed to NOT be cutesy songs. Go listen to "Aoi Tori", "Arcadia" by Chihaya (Imai Asami), "Tonari ni" by Azusa (Takahashi Chiaki), "Agent yoru wo yuku" Makoto (Hirada Hiromi), "Next Life" by Hibiki (Numakura Manami) and see for youself. Then there's classics like "relations", "Overmaster", "Me ga au toki", "9:02pm", "massugu", "inferno", "my song" etc, there are so many good non-cutesy songs from Idolmaster that brushing it off as "cutesy" is just plain ignorance and shows that you have no objectivity.

lol director is Nishigori Atsushi but not by Gainax. As long as there are NO FUCKIN MECH, I will be happy to invest my time on this. Brilliant news.

http://i.imgur.com/GHrXa.jpg
and there is nothing wrong with that.

I know little about Idolmaster, aside from the fact that Rie Kugimiya is in it. So I can't speak for the disappointment fans felt when they watched Xenoglossia. On the other hand, I thought Mai Hime was exceptional. So when I started to watch a series with a similar theme, mostly the same staff, and a similar budget... I was disgusted by the sheer waste of talent.

A low-budget production from a new (or historically bad) studio - utilizing a staff and cast of unknowns - can be quite bad, without drawing ire or rancor. But in this case, with everything going for it? That's pathetic.

I wonder if the great and infamous Jupiter will appear... :heh:

First Preview picture of the anime

A1 doing Gainax character designs. Nice. :cool:

I hope they have the Jupiter guys in there somehow XD Would make my day LOL

^ Yeah, them and the others from Dearly Stars.

The official site went online today: http://www.idolmaster-anime.jp/
The countdown pics and messages can be found here, if you missed them: http://www.idolmaster-anime.jp/special/index.html

See also the webradio channel with Eriko Nakamura (Haruka) and Asami Imai (Chihaya): http://hibiki-radio.jp/description/idolmaster

Are you done? :eyebrow:

Anyway it's still your turn now so you'll hopefully get all those things you'd want out of an iDOLM@STER adaptation. However, I would be lying if I said I wouldn't have personally preferred a sequel to Xenoglossia. Also I've "played" iDOLM@STER, I actually have a copy for 360 lying around and I have to say it's pretty damn cutesy and not much of a game or even very interesting by my standards. However the fans of it certainly deserve to be served with a more faithful adaptation that carries into the anime what brought fans to the game in the first place.....whatever that is.

As for why we haven't had many idol animes before if I had to hazard a guess it's because (Warning: Time to get inflammatory I guess...though how much more inflammatory than people taking shots at Xenoglossia remains to be seen) the ones so far have been pretty terrible. The one that sticks out most in my memory is the Lemon Angel Project where they got gravure idol Ryo Shihono (who has no experience acting whatsoever) to do a voice. I've yet to read a review that wasn't particularly scathing of that performance. Then of course there was Lovely Idol which was also pretty panned across the board....in fact the only idol themed show I can recall that was generally well-received off the top of my head was Full Moon O Sagashite. If they can work that series charm with an iDOLM@STER adaptation they might have my interest yet (though I don't see how that's going to work with a straight up adaptation), but whose to say they don't just play cash-in with the video game fans and put out something incredibly safe and forgettable.

I guess my point is that people are quick to vilify the efforts of the iDOLM@STER Xenoglossia crew in being creative and retooling the license into something else by calling "cash-in" while there's arguably equal chance of this adaptation played straight being little more than a cash-in that only fans of the game are going to care about. People are free to see it there way of course, but the way it comes across to me is a little sketchy and presumptuous.

P.S: Believe it or not I'm not nearly so possessive of mecha anime that I would find fault with a company for retooling a license to attempt to target it at a different audience that otherwise wouldn't be interested in what was being offered. In fact I've seen it happen many many times already (for example when this happened I took it in stride) and was perfectly fine living with it since they're still making shows I like all the time anyway. Maybe that makes me a terrible fan, I don't know.

Hahahahaha! Of course not, it doesn't work that way in these cases. It's all about being as arbitrary and bitter as possible.

Seriously though, don't feel guilty for wishing for a Xenoglossia sequel. I actually find it quite interesting to see someone who was made aware of the whole iDOLM@STER thing not by the games but by Xenoglossia. Obviously they did something right with that idea.

I was actually being sarcastic lol.

All I want to know :

Will producer-san be in the anime?

Will the Producer be the grandson of the owner of 765 studios just like the Idolmaster Break manga?

Ritsuko is most likely going to be the placeholder of Producer.

If "Producer-san" is an allegory for the player than perhaps not. I see only female voice actors listed for this on ANN so far so I'm tempted to think it's probably one of those shows. You know, the one where male characters just flat out don't exist because they'd get in the way of any fantasy the fans of a particular character(s) might have surrounding them.

Considering how much some of the hardcore fans of the franchise in Japan freaked the hell out over the announcement of Jupiter and how possessive they seem of said franchise that would probably be a good idea sales wise.

I have a hard time imagining an iM@S anime faithful to the source that won't have the Producer in it, since the very premise of the game is that the girl's rise to fame is based on the Producer's actions. I can imagine them doing something like the Idolm@ster Break manga, which makes the Producer an actual character in the form of Takagi Yuutaro. Suddenly I wonder if this iM@S anime will be something of an Idolm@ster Break adaptation...

I enjoyed Xenoglossia quite a bit back then, but I can understand why fans of the game didn't like it.

Anyway, an adaptation following the original concept was required. Looking forward to this new project.

I highly doubt it since the producer bit can be handled by Ritsuko.

And Jupiter's appearance wasn't the reason why fans are furious, it was because of the fact to make room for them, they made several idols NPCs only.

Pardon the stupid question, but this is not a mecha anime right? :p Not that I mean anything by it, just confused as I recall another anime with a similar name.

The chances of it being a Break adaptation is infinitely small since Break is based on the SP universe, while the anime is setup to look like it is based on the IM@S2 universe. Even though all the games share the same characters and settings, they don't actually all take place in the same universe/time line. IM@S2 is not a canon sequel to any of the games or manga before it, and neither are any of the manga related to the games - they are all their own unique interpretations of the universe. It's kind of confusing, but that's how the franchise works.

Also a lot of hints suggests that this anime is going to be a prequel of sorts that take place before the IM@S2 game, in which the setting is that they didn't have a producer which was the reason that Ritsuko became one (that and she always wanted to be a producer, trying out as an idol was a means to the end).

None of the IM@S manga did particularly well since it was a well known fact that people only bought the manga for the tie in CDs, in fact BREAK was pretty hated for the naive and happy-go-lucky young producer which most of the fans cannot associate with (the unpopularity is also why the manga is ending next issue!), so if they learned their lesson it would NOT be a BREAK adaptation.

Which I must add was pure speculation. People have rightfully counted by pointing out that the 360 game were quite small in data size (somewhere along the 2G-3G size IIRC, but either way well within a D9 DVD), so game size was definitely not a factor in that they had to "make room", especially that the Juipter team are also not going to be producible, so it can't be that 3 NPCs have such an impact on the game design and storage space that they need to take out 4 playable characters.

A more credible theory is that people were suspicious that NGBI might have deliberately gimped the 360 version and plans to release a "complete PS3 version" aka Tales of Vespera/Tales of Grace later down the line, this actually makes more sense considering NGBI's recent track records. 360 owners would particularly feel cheated as they would have to invest in another game machine and/or re-purchase all the DLCs etc.

So now you acknowledges that we don't get many idol shows then why make it out to look like IM@S as another uninspired show in a supposedly saturated genre that only exists in your mind? Sure there's been a lot of moe shows featuring girls singing, but there isn't one that had it being the sole focus recently and that's preciously the point.

Well you don't have a point to stand on. The show was quite mediocre and was trying hard to ride the hotblood/cute girls MaiHime formula which Sunrise themselves started while waiting for MaiOtome to come into fruition, and even at that it didn't live up to the premise. Production value was bland after the high profile MaiHime, money was spend all on the hot idol seiyuu in yet another attempt to repeat the same formula that made MaiHime successful. The creativity you claim doesn't exists in Xenoglossia because they merely pasted faces from IM@S without taking anything else from the IM@S universe, onto a fairly generic Sunrise robot show which would have been decently entertaining to some mecha fans but probably would pass by completely without flair if not for the IM@S controversy. I think fans would be a little bit more accepting if they at least kept the personalities of the characters the same! There was nothing in the show that justified the using of the IM@S name except for a poor attempt at bait-hook marketing. You really have very little ground to argue here that it is the IM@S fans being quick to vilify.

No it only makes seeing you appear in these threads extremely irritating and tiresome because, as easily predicted, you would latch on to moe shows like you are on a holy crusade or something. And look who's trying to call others being arbitrary and bitter. :heh:

So wait who is the one piling hate on here? Cause I don't think it's me.

I sense some sort of longstanding grudge here that I'm not sure I'm willing to entertain for much longer. As far as I can tell I'm the one being vilified here for having a stance different from most people in saying that I'd prefer a Xenoglossia sequel to a straight up iDOLM@STER because I personally feel that a straight up iDOLM@STER will probably be boring to a person of my tastes and preferences. Maybe you should find some way to deal with this....I don't know. :confused: Like I said, you're coming across as incredibly possessive not only of the iDOLM@STER concept but as of now this thread, and that to me seems to be the source of all problems we are faced with at the moment. Do you see me arguing with anyone else in this thread or vice versa? There's no cry for help going out here so I'd suggest chilling out.

Also you ought to take the time you use chilling out to realize how this whole arguing points things work. Saying I don't have any firm ground to stand on and supporting it with what is basically your own observation on the Xenoglossia matter doesn't really cut it. I'm perfectly willing to accept your wanting to see the situation with iDOLM@STER's anime adaptation history your own way, however I'd kind of expect you to do the same in return. If that's not possible I don't think we have much left to say to each other here.

Xenoglossia? No this is a pure idol anime with the original VAs reprising their roles. No Producer though. Ritsuko's got that covered.

Also, Megami Pinup, I can assume the next couple of months will feature the other girls

Short TV spot:

Short. But when will the actual animation come out?