Video Game / Link! Like! Love Live!

Link! Like! Love Live! is a free-to-play mobile game and multimedia app developed and published by ODD No. Inc.. It is one of many mobile apps based on the Love Live! series and the fifth mobile game to join the series' history, following Love Live! School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE!. It was released on April 15th, 2023 as an Early Access title, with the game elements being fully implemented on May 20th, 2023.

Set in the mountainous regions of the city of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, the story mode follows the adventures of Kaho Hinoshita, a 1st year attending Hasunosora Girls' High School. Having been cooped up in her family home for most of her childhood, Kaho is elated to finally get out and see the world on her own for the first time, but she soon discovers that high school in the mountains isn't all that it's cracked up to be, putting her dreams of a perfect school life in jeopardy. While trying to find something to rekindle the light of hope, Kaho happens upon Kozue Otomune, Tsuzuri Yugiri, and the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club, and a new world opens up to her: the world of school idols. With newfound determination in her heart, Kaho joins the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club and strides forward on her own journey to bloom.

As a central multimedia app for the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club, the app features multiple interactive features. Players can attend Story Mode, where they can catch up on new episodes of the Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club, and Live Streaming, where they can attend streams featuring the girls and watch on-stage performances.

The game portion, School Idol Stage, is a real-time card game where players attempt to clear live shows by earning enough LOVE from the audience using a deck of 6 to 15 cards, with up to three cards each representing the six idol girls. During live shows, players generate LOVE in the form of hearts and can collect them by tapping on them or power up their value by spending Action Points generated over time to play the cards in your hand, activating skills and generating Voltage to boost your school idols. New cards can be earned in the form of a gacha, where players can spend SIsCa to buy booster packs of beautifully illustrated cards.

The game has a companion Yonkoma, Link! Life! Love Live!, which runs alongside the main story giving glimpses into the characters' lives, and included an "Enrolment Prep" arc that serves as an extra prologue for Kaho. A manga adaptation, Love Live! flowers, began serialization in Ultra Jump magazine in November 2023, retelling the game's events with only a few differences.

In April 2024, following the start of the real school year, three new members joined the group as part of the 104th class.

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Link! Like! Love Live! provides examples of:

• Abandonment-Induced Animosity: The awkwardness that's been hinted at between Tsuzuri and Sachi since Chapters 12-13 is initially said to be this, over the latter leaving the School Idol Club to become student council president. It's a bit more complicated, as it turns out. What Tsuzuri feels isn't actually animosity, but fear that Sachi didn't consider them as important to her as she was to them. When she finally (with Sayaka's help) becomes able to confront Sachi about this, the latter immediately realizes what's wrong, chastises herself for not talking things out clearly, and admits that she only left because she felt she had to, and cried when she made the decision. And that's all Tsuzuri needed to hear.
• April Fools' Day: For April Fool's 2024, you could play a bite-sized version of Puchiguru! Love Live! on the official website with the Hasunosora girls as playable characters. Scoring at least 500,000 points would earn you a serial code that can be entered in Link! Like! Love Live! to get stickers of the cast in their Puchiguru! forms.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: 103rd Class songs are allowed to take 1 Main and 2 Side cards for each playable character to form a Deck. 104th Class songs instead allot 1 Main and 1 Side per character, thus keeping the overall Deck size identical to 103rd Class songs while distributing the card variety across three more characters.
• Art Shift: The main story is predominantly animated using 3D CGI, but the opening scene that plays at the end of Episode 1 is partially animated in traditional 2D style like the main Love Live! anime series.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • You can tell the game to auto-build a deck, which will attempt to put all of your best cards together given the preset conditions. While this is alright for getting something together quickly, it will completely disregard the actual usability of the cards or any possible synergies they may possess due to their Passive Skills.
  • The game will play itself somewhat competently, but the AI has a bad habit of mindlessly playing cards as soon as they can pay the AP cost with little regard to the card's efficacy or present use case. It will also flat-out refuse to use the Special Appeal whatsoever. If you have enough UR cards this will likely be enough to get you through the lower difficulties, but once you hit Lv. 60 stages clearing them on Auto or Skip will be extremely difficult without the correct build or manual play.
• Bathtub Bonding: Several bonding scenes between the girls occur in their dorms' communal bath.
• Beach Episode: As per series tradition, Chapter 10 is the beachside training camp episode.
• Big Fancy House: Kozue's home is finally shown in Chapter 18, and not only is it a huge, three-story country house large enough that Kaho is out of breath going from the guest room to the music room, it seems to include a pretty large estate as well.
• Birds of a Feather: During the unit shuffle in Chapter 17, the resulting pairs actually match much more closely in personality than the original teams; cheery and sociable Kaho and Megumi, methodical and hard-working Sayaka and Kozue, and laid-back Rurino and Tsuzuri. But while they do enjoy the experience, they're very eager to go back to their original partners afterwards.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • The main lead does not serve as either a Second Year Protagonist or The Leader of the unit.
  • Uniquely, the main character isn't even one of the founding members of the school idol club (and doesn't have to put the club back together). She actually joins fourth, with two members already in the unit when she arrives and Sayaka joining before her.
  • There are no characters who act as a Obstructive Bureaucrat. Kozue, whose backstory and history with music might be the closest model to the Ojou or Student Council President, but as a Subverted Trope, she is instead the club's president and even actively recruited Kaho.
    • In fact, the actual Student Council President, Sachi, is a retired member of the School Idol Club. This also serves as a major inversion of another typical Love Live! trope: the Student Council wants to protect the Club, not to dismantle it.
    • While there are antagonistic characters, they're on the adults' side and have proper reasons, is that so students can focus on studying. However, their methods (banning internet usage inside school grounds) are rather extreme and conservative, and the problem is treated more seriously than usual.
  • Hasunosora as a school is quite different from all the ones in the preceding main series, being in no danger of closing, having a long and prestigious history (including a previous school idol group having won Love Live), and whereas Nijigasaki emphasizes modernity and individuality, Hasunosora leans towards tradition and arts.
  • They are the first group to officially cover songs from other Love Live series; each sub-unit covered the debut singles for Liella, Nijigasaki, and Aqours respectively, then the entire group covered "Bokura no LIVE Kimi to no LIFE".
  • They are the only Love Live group to primarily use handheld microphones during performances. All the preceding groups use headsets.
  • Compared to previous units, which either focus primarily on the main unit or soloists (Nijigasaki), Hasunosora is the first unit to focus predominantly on subunits, with each of the six girls in the group being pre-divided into groups of two and having many interactions in the main story revolving around respective duos.
• Brick Joke: At the end of Chapter 9, Kaho prepares a cardboard box for Rurino to hide in when her battery runs out. Rurino is not amused. Come Chapter 12 (which aired three months later), she ends up using it anyway (and it's gained a bunch of doodles and stickers along the way).
• Bridal Carry: In Episode 1 Part 2, upon hearing that Kaho's legs are tired, Kozue tries to carry Kaho back to Hasunosora this way. Kaho immediately protests and asks to be put back down.
• Cap:
  • The base level cap for a card is Level 20 for Rare, Level 40 for Super Rare and Level 60 for Ultra Rare. The level cap increases by 20 for each Idolize performed on a card once their hit their current level cap, up to twice, making the final level caps Lv. 60 for R++, Lv. 80 for SR++ and Lv. 100 for UR++.
  • You can only have up to 100 Beat Hearts on-screen at once. Any subsequent Beat Hearts or Skill Hearts earned while 100 Beat Hearts are on-screen will be immediately lost.
• Caught in the Rain: Kozue and Tsuzuri get caught in the rain after helping out at a festival in town, and end up spending the night at Tsuzuri's house.
• Character Class System: Rather than simply being Smile, Pure, and Cool, every card has a "class" that designates what type of ability they can use.
  • Performers are cards that increase LOVE gain, either by generating Beat Hearts or stacking LOVE gain multipliers.
  • Mood Makers are cards that increase the Voltage Gauge, which affects how much LOVE is gained when you pick up Hearts.
  • Cheerleaders are cards that recover the Mental Gauge. If Mental drops to 0 during a Live, the Voltage Gauge decreases and you'll be temporarily stunned, preventing you from playing cards. The Cheerleader card class is the primary card type for Megumi's cards.
  • Tricksters are cards that manipulate the hand in some fashion, such as granting buffs in exchange for discarding your entire hand and refilling it with new cards. The Trickster card class is largely populated by Rurino's cards.
• Character Focus: Due to longer chapters, no major plot to deal with, and fewer characters, the game story is able to spend a lot more focus on each character compared to other Love Live series, resulting in much deeper character development over a shorter timeframe.
• Childhood Friends: Megumi and Rurino.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: The "Link to Us! Link with Yours!!" special event involves the players needing to team up to gather support for the School Idol Club due to the events of Chapter 14. This is executed by having three contribution pools with which players can fill by spending limited plays (refreshed daily) to boost up. Players must work together to fill all three contribution pools to 100% and earn a grand total of 10,000,000,000 points.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each of the four card types are associated with a skill color: red for Performers, yellow for Mood Makers, green for Cheerleaders, and purple for Tricksters. In addition, there is a fifth color, black, which is reserved for unique gimmick skills typically found on Limited cards.
• Continuity Nod: A few to the preceding Love Live series are scattered about.
  • Kozue mentions her inspiration came from seeing school idols perform when she was young, and how they saved their school from closing down.
  • When Kaho finds the club notebook, she comments on a caricature someone drew in it and how it'd make the subject mad, recalling how Chika doodled Riko's face in her notes when she was supposed to be writing lyrics.
  • Tsuzuri does the same yoga dancer's pose that Chisato did... as a basic stretching exercise.
• Cover Version:
  • In a first for the franchise, the game features covers of songs from not only outside the main unit's original discography but also outside of the Love Live! franchise altogether, primarily to pad out the game's playable song count. These include subunit covers of other units' songs, such as Nijigasaki's "Tokimeki RUNNERS" and Aqours' "Kimi no Kokoro wa Kagayaiterukai?", popular VOCALOID songs such as "1, 2 Fanclub" and "Kyoufuu All Back", and other miscellaneous Japanese pop songs and anisongs such as "Kokoroyohou" from Eve and "Sobakasu" from the 1996 adaptation of Rurouni Kenshin.
  • "CHANGE!!!!" from the The Idolmaster anime adaptation was covered by Hasunosora to commemorate the franchise's Crossover event Ijigen Fes.
  • A Crossover event with Aikatsu! adds Diamond Happy and Lucky Train to the list.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Kaho seems to be developing a knack for doing things like this.
  • In response to an unexpected rainstorm preventing them from performing during Open Campus day, she gets the idea for them to make their own Umbrella Sky over their outdoor stage.
  • In Chapter 14, when they're hit with data restrictions that prevent them from streaming their Love Live! performance, she sees Sayaka tether their phones to get a peek at School Connect, and gets the idea to do that on a mass level to get enough data for the stream. Sure enough, everyone comes together to help them out, the performance is a success, and they win the Hokuriku regionals.
• Crossover: The game received its first crossover with the Aikatsu! series. In addition to getting covers of "Diamond Happy" and "Lucky train!" (from the anime adaptation), the game also received exclusive stickers and limited Ultra Rare gacha cards for Kaho and Kozue.
• Delicate and Sickly: Kaho used to be cooped up in her home due to being sick frequently. Her health eventually stabilized, but her parents continued to be extremely overprotective of her, which frustrated Kaho to no end as they stopped her from hanging out with friends and doing fun activities.
• Difficult, but Awesome: "Link to the FUTURE!" Kaho Hinoshita's Special Appeal, "Link! Like! Order!", adds a six-notched combo meter to the bottom of your UI above your hand. Every time you use a card from one of the six playable characters without repeating a character, a corresponding colored bubble with that card's AP cost lights up on the meter. If you are able to fill all six lights, the Special Appeal's effect activates and grants a massive Skill Heart and LOVE bonus, with the bonus scaling upwards relative to the cumulative amount of AP spent to activate the effect.
• Early-Bird Cameo: One of the new club members of the 104th class, Ginko Momose, appears in the foreground of one of Kozue's cards from the Open Campus back in November 2023. Fans have also spotted Hime Anyoji's screen name "Tsumayoji" in the chat comments of Hasunosora (especially Mira-Cra Park!) livestreams prior to her official introduction.
• Elaborate University High: Hasunosora Girls' High School is a massive Boarding School located deep within the heart of the Japanese mountainside, complete with everything needed to make school life comfortable, including dorms, all kinds of facilities, and a school store with virtually all manners of products. This is partly to compensate for the fact that the school is located practically in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else around it and no way to get in or out except an infrequent shuttle connecting the school to Kanazawa itself that only runs to allow students to grab necessities.
• Feud Episode: Chapter 17 revolves around a brief spat between Rurino and Megumi due to their different personalities.
• Fight Like a Card Player: Cards are used for gameplay, but contextually the cards have nothing to do with the actual performances.
• Foreshadowing: When Kaho first meets Kozue, the latter teases her about over a hundred students having gone missing in the mountains over time. When Kaho meets Sachi in the storage room, the latter also jokes that over a hundred students have become lost and gone missing in the storage room. This likely isn't a coincidence, as it's later revealed that Sachi is a former member of the School Idol Club, and probably Kozue's mentor.
  • In Chapter 13, when Tsuzuri joins the Open Campus committee and declines Sayaka's help, Sayaka mentions that when someone you trust and are always together with suddenly distances themselves, it's natural to worry and wonder why. As it turns out, this is revealed to be the essence of the issue between Tsuzuri and Sachi; Tsuzuri had never gotten over Sachi leaving the club, but had always been too afraid to ask her about it... because she trusts Sachi to be right so much, that she couldn't bear to hear her give a good reason for abandoning them.
• Fourth Wall Psych: Kaho's opening dialogue in Chapter 1 sounds like she's narrating to the audience, but after a bit, the scene changes and shows that she's actually talking to Sayaka on the bus.
• Freemium Timer:
  • Play Points are the main method by which the game time-gates progress. One Play Point is generated every 5 minutes, up to a maximum of 100 Play Points. Play Points are spent to play stages, in multiples of 10 per stage. Play Points can also be replenished by spending SIsCa. Maximum Play Points can be increased by clearing Grade Live, which awards permanent Play Point cap increases in multiples of 5 for clearing certain Rank Point milestones.
  • Daily Live has its own system separate from Play Points, where you can only play up to three Daily Lives per day and refreshes at daily reset. Much like Play Points, the Daily Live limit can also be refreshed with SIsCa.
• From New York to Nowhere: Kaho came to Hasunosora to get away from her overprotective parents, expecting it to be in Kanazawa city itself. Unfortunately, Hasunosora is located in the mountains, meaning that the restrictions on getting around and performing activities is practically identical to her situation at home. She later admits that she did absolutely no research on Hasunosora aside from knowing it was far enough to be a boarding school.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: The climax of Chapter 6, where Sayaka calls out to Tsuzuri by her full name to reaffirm her desire to perform together. It's included in several story trailers as well. Especially notable due to Sayaka being normally very formal.
• Gift of Song: Chapter 18 consists of the second-years creating a song for Sachi's graduation, with Kozue composing, Megumi writing the lyrics, and Tsuzuri creating the choreography.
• Gilligan Cut: In preparation for the Rindo Festival and the Love Live regional qualifiers, Kozue exhorts everyone to take care of themselves and make sure to not get sick. The next scene is Kozue in bed, having caught a cold due to overwork.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Kaho's plan in Chapter 14 involves calling on everyone they know, from the other students at school to the people at Omicho Market and elsewhere in town, to tether their phones en masse and give them enough mobile data to stream their Love Live! performance.
• Gray Rain of Depression: The low point of Chapter 6 has Kaho find Sayaka sitting outside in the rain.
• Guide Dang It!: The gameplay mechanics are very poorly explained with a barebones tutorial, requiring much guesswork to figure out what's actually going on and inferring details based on card effect descriptions. The game's actual tutorial exists in the form of online videos on the game's official YouTube channel, but there's seemingly no reason why they couldn't just put the tutorial in the game. It took several months before they updated the School Idol Stage menu to link the tutorial videos directly in-game. The worst part is that even if you can look at a guide that tells you what is even happening in the game, there's a very good chance that it won't make any sense regardless! It was so bad that even Japanese fans couldn't figure out how you were actually supposed to play it and the game had to be explained in an official livestream.
• Hit Points: The Mental gauge, which is placed above your hand at the left side of the screen. Mental is determined based on the cumulative Mental stats of the cards in your deck and decreases over time during a performance, with the decrease rate scaling based on the stage level. If Mental reaches 0, the team will be briefly stunned, temporarily locking the ability to play any cards and decreasing the Voltage gauge by 3 before partially refilling. Mental can be recovered by various card skills, primarily by the Cheerleader class.
• Holding the Floor: In Chapter 11, Megumi ends up having to do this at a concert to buy time for the other club members while they finish helping out at a Ryokan Inn. Her being an experienced streamer helps her keep the audience entertained for a while, but even she reaches her limit eventually. Of course, that's when everyone else arrives to get the concert started.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Dream Rare rarity. Not only do they have a maximum level cap of Lv. 120, giving them even higher inherent stats than Ultra Rares, but their Skills are explicitly designed to be extremely powerful and superior to Ultra Rares. The tradeoff is that they can only be obtained from Dream Live, which takes months of work to complete.
• Idiosyncratic Combo Levels: Picking up Beat Hearts causes a congratulatory phrase to appear based on how much you've boosted the Beat Hearts' value. This starts at "NICE" (blue) and increases to "GOOD" (yellow), "GREAT" (orange), "PERFECT" (red), and finally "LOVE LIVE!" (pink).
• Internal Homage: At the end of Chapter 15, the girls visit Mt. Utatsu in the morning, declare their resolutions for the new year, and recreate the scene used in the first teaser video for the project.
• It Only Works Once: At the start of a Live, the chosen Main Card for the character who is the designated center for that song is added to the Special Appeal slot that appears at the right side of the screen. Unlike the cards in your deck, the Special Appeal is always present and can be used at any time, providing a special effect and accompanied with a unique animation. However, Special Appeals can only be used once per Live.
• Item Farming:
  • The Main Stages are the primary source of materials needed to level up Skills on the cards.
  • Daily Live allows you to farm for Medals needed to Limit Break cards, as well as large amounts of EXP needed to level those cards up. You can only play Daily Live up to thrice per day and only certain stages are open each day, but both can be resolved by paying SIsCa.
• Jack of All Trades: Where the larger groups could divide up the work, and Nijigaku didn't often focus on the music creation aspect, here we see just how much a school idol has to be able to do in a small group. Kozue is shown doing work on her own set, composing and writing her own song, creating the choreography for it, and having made Kaho's costume (or at least modified an existing one).
• Jumped at the Call: Compared to Kaho, who hesitates about wanting to become a school idol, Sayaka is immediately on board after a convincing invitation from Yugiri and an outstanding stage performance. It's revealed that she was so gung-ho about it because she wanted to break out of her comfort zone and figure out how to improve on her original passion: figure skating.
• Lap Pillow: While agonizing over lyrics, Megumi briefly plops her head onto Rurino's lap, who just smiles and keeps talking as if she's used to it. It nicely highlights their closeness.
• Limited Animation: The main story episodes are noticeably stiffer than the motion captured Live Streaming videos, with most characters using stock animations against a 2D background.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: A card in your deck can be designated as your Ace Card during deck customization. An Ace Card will always appear in your hand at the start of a Live.
• Mana Meter: AP (Action Points) are the resource you need to spend to play cards and use Special Appeals. AP builds over time up to 10 AP (20 AP in 104th Class songs). Each time you play a card, AP is deducted according to the number displayed on the card.
• My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad: Kaho and Sayaka end up in this kind of argument about their respective senpais, while trying to write an article in Chapter 7.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The School Idol Stage portion once again makes use of the three Attribute system originally coined by Love Live! School idol festival, with cards and songs having Smile, Pure, and Cool stats.
    • When the "LIVE FINISHED" display closes after finishing the stage, you can hear the iconic tap sound from the aforementioned game.
  • Kaho has a magazine with Ren Hazuki depicted on it at the end of Episode 1 Part 2.
  • In Chapter 15, Kaho and Kozue find Rurino moping on a pier at the lake. Kaho proceeds to tackle-grab her in the mistaken belief that she was gonna jump in, which almost causes both of them to fall into the water anyway. Aside from Kozue being there to stop them, it's the exact same situation that happened between Chika and Riko at the beginning of ''Sunshine!!''
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Initially averted, as Sachi is on the school idols' side. However, some of these finally enter the story in Chapter 14, in the form of a faction within the school administration that wants to restrict student activities so they will focus solely on their studies. It's revealed that this faction has been a consistent presence whose influence comes and goes, and one of the reasons Sachi became student council president was to fight against this group so students have more freedom.
• Obvious Rule Patch: You can choose to leave Side slots unoccupied, which would reduce your overall deck size and increase consistency, allowing you to draw the cards you want more often. To discourage this approach, every unoccupied card slot in your deck applies a drastic LOVE gain penalty, making your deck much worse for omitting cards.
• Old Save Bonus: An end-of-service campaign for School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! allowed players to link their accounts and get SIsCa, Style Points, a UR Ticket, and Stickers in LLLL based on their account Rank and earned Titles.
• One-Gender School: As is typical for the franchise, the setting is an all-girls' high school.
• One Head Taller: During their brief team-up, Tsuzuri and Rurino are very much this (20 cm difference).
• Pinball Scoring: Score scaling is bizarrely high. The lowest score requirements start at 1,000,000 and only scale upwards, with it being possible to earn 50,000,000 or more points in a single play.
• Poor Communication Kills: As is often the case, while everyone had understandable reasons, a lot of trouble and heartache left over from the year before the story started could have been avoided if everyone had been more open about their feelings.
• Premium Currency: SIsCa is the currency used to roll the gacha and recharge the Freemium Timer. You can earn SIsCa by completing stages for the first time, completing missions, earning login bonuses, and of course, charging real money.
• Prolonged Prologue: The game's opening cutscene plays at the end of Episode 1, which is split into five parts and constitutes roughly an hour of story detailing Kaho's journey to joining the School Idol Club.
• Real-Place Background: Downplayed a bit compared to previous series, due to the story mostly taking place inside the school grounds. When they do go into town, though, the locations are as faithfully reproduced as ever. Notable ones include Kanazawa Station's iconic tsuzumi gate, Omicho Market, the Mount Utatsu lookout point, etc.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Kaho is the cheerful, impulsive red to Sayaka's straight-laced and meticulous blue.
  • As it turns out, Megumi and Rurino are this as well; it simply wasn't apparent due to Rurino trying her best to go along with her best friend, but at heart she's much more laid-back and slower-paced.
• Relationship Values:
  • Each of the girls has a Fan Level that you can raise by participating in the app. This not only includes collecting and upgrading their cards in School Idol Stage, but also attending "Fes X Live" and "With X Meets" videos in the Live Streaming channel. The combined Fan Levels across all six characters dictates your total Fan Level displayed on your member profile. In addition to being a representative number of how much you've interacted with a character, raising a character's Fan Level to a sufficient value is one of the prerequisites to unlocking a character's Dream Live, a special School Idol Stage campaign that rewards you with a unique Ultra Rare card of that character.
  • This also extends to a subcategory of Fan Level called Season Level, which accumulates alongside your Fan Level but resets at the start of each month and caps out at Level 10. Unlike Fan Level, which has no tangible gameplay benefit outside of being an unlock requirement for Dream Live, Season Level does have a gameplay benefit, as your total Season Level for a given Season is translated to a Score Multiplier in Live Grand Prix that boosts the rank points you are awarded for completing a Live for leaderboard calculation.
• Refusal of the Call: Kaho gets the invitation to join the School Idol Club early on, but she declines and dodges attempts from its members to get her to join up. She eventually gets a temporary gig working as the club's manager for a week in preparation for an upcoming performance, although she is still hesitant to have anything to do with school idols.
• Ryokan Inn: The club visits one in Chapter 11, and end up helping out during a rush caused by their promoting the inn. As is often the case for a Love Live! location, it's a real inn.
• School Festival: Hasunosora has three major cultural festivals that play important parts in the story, and like the school itself, are all named after flowers: the Nadeshiko festival in June, the Rindo (gentian) festival in October, and the Renge (lotus flower) festival in March.
• Ship Tease: There's some within the sub-units, as usual, but Chapter 8 unexpectedly throws in some heavy teasing for Kozue and Tsuzuri, with several close-proximity heart-to-hearts as they talk through their issues... and them spending a night in the same bed, with Kozue wearing Tsuzuri's shirt.
• Slice of Life: The yonkoma mostly falls into this genre, showing snippets and gags based on the girls' everyday lives, while leaving the plot and character drama and development to the main story.
• Small Town Boredom: There's pretty much nothing interesting about Hasunosora besides the school itself due to its remote location. Kaho spends an excessive amount of time trying to bring the big city to Hasunosora rather than adapting to living in the mountains and nearly considers switching schools.
• The Three Faces of Eve: The second-years have this dynamic amongst themselves, with Kozue as the calm, reliable Wife, Tsuzuri as the innocent (or just oblivious) Child, and Megumi as the socially adept Seductress.
• Training Montage: Most prominently in Chapter 3, which shows Kaho beginning her training and slowly becoming able to keep up.
• Vetinari Job Security: When Kozue falls sick, and with a festival approaching, Tsuzuri and Megumi declare they'll take care of her work for her... and promptly fail, as they all realize how much background work Kozue actually has to do. Unsurprisingly, Sayaka eventually volunteers for the job, and manages decently well with the others' help.
• Virtual Celebrity: The Hasunosora Girls' High School Idol Club partakes in this aspect by featuring livestreams as a major feature. Players can watch livestreams of the actresses performing in-character in two types of events: WITH x MEETS, where you can watch the cast chat about various topics and interact with the audience, and FES x LIVE, which are live concerts. Gift items you can obtain by pulling on the gacha can be spent in a livestream to earn Gift Points, rewarding you with Season Levels and Stars that are used in other parts of the game. Furthermore, attending FES x LIVE is the only way to obtain the elusive Dream Fragments, which are a required item to unlock Dream Lives.
• Waxing Lyrical: While chatting in Chapter 18, Megumi and Rurino amusingly dip into "Do! Do! Do!"'s dialogue part for one of their back-and-forths.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 14. A traditionalist faction of the administration forces through a ban on extracurricular internet use and outings, jeopardizing the School Idol Club's participation in Love Live! and their future activities as a whole. It's the first time the story has anything approaching an antagonistic force.
• What Were You Thinking?: After getting depressed over realizing she'd looked down on Rurino and thinking she'd gotten surpassed, Megumi declares she is going on a journey. To California, so she'll become stronger like Rurino. We don't find out how much she actually planned out since she misses her bus, but the idea is so insane that Rurino finally gets angry and blows up at her.