YMMV / Love Live! School idol festival

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • It's pretty easy to "misinterpret" some of the character's lines this way.
  Example 1: Riko: We're taking a break and snacking on some oranges. This club room is brimming with joy!
  Example 2: You: Yoshiko, are you free tonight?
  • One of the major examples include Nozomi mentioning the "Rape blossom" plants. The alternate name "canola" isn't popular everywhere, but still...
• Archive Panic: In a way. Good luck trying to fill out the entire album of cards if you're a new player. Chances are you won't have much luck- the scouting boxes only contain cards from the past six months (barring the limited "pickup" boxes which appear during events,) and there are numerous promotional cards whose codes have long since expired. To give a bit of a hint, there are over 2000 cards in the Japanese version- including promo cards from subunit CDs and the movie DVD, as well as multiple Dengeki G codes. Softened a bit by the fact that the Sticker Shop will let you buy multiple promo cards ranging from whole Muse sets to School Idol Diary SRs with stickers, but the selection is limited.
• Breather Level: The Kotori/Maki event of January 2018 on EN... if you just wanted Kotori. Thanks to the event being concurrent with 1/4 LP promo songs, you could get all three copies of her before the first weekend was up without spending a single gem. If you wanted Maki, too, though... see Surprise Difficulty.
• Broken Base:
  • Some players of the English-language version don't like that events are nearly a year behind the Japanese version, and feel like they're getting outdated content and interface elements as a result. Other players point out that the other option would be to synchronize both versions but then force EN players to miss out on a lot of content.
    • Since EN started doubling up on events and doing updates early to catch up with JP, the base is broken the other way: camp 1 is happy to get more content faster, while camp 2 had gotten accustomed to a more predictable schedule.
    • In June 2021, over 7 years after the release of the Global version, it will be merged with the JP version of the game.
  • The grind-heavy events are either seen as worth it for getting idolized SRs, or a quick way to turn a fun game into tedious work, especially if one declines to pay for Loveca Stones.
  • As with the anime, the addition of Aqours to the game has opened up a whole can of worms. Some think it's a great way to keep the game going after µ's disbandment and welcome them, others think they're being integrated too soon and that it confuses and ruins the point of the game being focused on µ's.
  • The Perfect Lock ability, which turns all Goods and Greats into Perfects for a short period of time. The divisive parts are that the ability stacks with multiple cards, meaning you can extend it throughout the entire song, and its effect nullifies the "Good" outcome as the Combo Breaker it would be otherwise. Many rhythm game purists consider it a Game-Breaker and refuse to acknowledge any Full Combo run that uses the ability even once, while others appreciate the ability for making it easier to get the Full Combo Loveca Stone bonus.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: Minor compared to other games, but it's still present. Some players, often veteran rhythm game players, carefully optimize their teams for maximum score output during events, and attempt to go for as close to All Perfect as possible that they'll even consider any run done with a Perfect Lock illegitimate. Other players are only in it for the cute outfits and collecting cards.
• Character Rerailment: Yoshiko in Story Mode. Despite her Flanderization in the anime, many scenes in the game play on her insecurities and desire to fit in behind her chuunibyou side, aspects that her original Character Focus episode initially brought up.
• Crossover Ship: On the School Idol Festival and All Stars fronts, there's Shizuku Osaka x Hilda (Pokémon Black and White), Jennifer x Bianca (Pokémon Black and White/Black 2 and White 2) and even Rina Tennoji x Freya Jerbarn (Xak series) on DeviantArt.
• Demonic Spiders: The star notes. Missing one inflicts additional damage to the Health bar, and missing several of them in a row is a good way to guarantee you getting booed off the stage.
• Difficulty Spike: Nawatobi on Expert mode goes from "I can handle this" in the first part to "Oh, Crap! What the hell is this?" in the chorus.
  • There are several difficulty spikes in this game: from standard songs to daily B-sides as a while, from Medium to Hard difficulty, from Hard to Expert, and finally from Expert to Master.
  • HEART to HEART! is one of the most notorious beatmaps in the game for this reason. Not only is it one of the longest tracks in the game at over 2 minutes and 960 beats in Master level, it gets steadily harder as the track goes on, continually adding new and more complicated patterns even in repeated sections, with the hardest part saved for the very end, just when one would think the song was almost over. Other notoriously difficult songs at least let you know what to expect early on.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The game isn't exactly seen as an innovation or refinement of the Rhythm Game genre; many fans are in it for the story segments and hundreds of Costume Porn-laden cards to collect.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Sachiko Tanaka, due to her chuunibyou antics in her cards and Side Stories.
  • Kasane Hasekura, due to her simple yet cute design.
  • Jennifer, for being the Ms. Fanservice of the game.
• Fandom Rivalry: There's a bit of one between LLSIF players and players of other Rhythm Games. The former defend the game because of its comparatively large amount of lore that many rhythm games don't have, while the latter see LLSIF as a Pay To Win game that, by nature of being a mobile free-to-play game, can't be played in situations where Internet access is not available (such as on a plane that doesn't have in-flight wifi, or on a fully-depleted cellular data plan) and severely limits how many songs the player can play before needing to let the game rest.^note The latter has become increasingly offset by the game being very generous with LP-restoring Sugar items, to the point that a long-term player can easily acquire enough so that the LP bar no longer matters.
• Fan Nickname: Some songs have their own nicknames, such as the following:
  • Kodoku na Hell for Kodoku na Heaven's EX random chart before it was fixed. Even then, it's still a very hard song.
  • Eurobeat In Angel for Beat in Angel sounding like something to drift race to.
  • Watashitachi wa Mirai no HanAAAAAAAARGH for being That One Level and for having a layout that kills combos even if you prepare for it.
  • Awaken the Power has come to be known as Awaken the PTSD due to the 20 Million Overseas Players Campaign goals of March 2018, in which players had to play the song a total of 56 times to complete every goal.
  • Certain events also gained Fan Nicknames:
    • The Umi Bloodbath due to the holiday loveca gift, less days, and Umi being a popular character that drove the event cut-offs very, very high.
    • The Kotori/Maki event was labeled Maki Mayhem due to the discounted LP for several songs and Maki being best girl for a majority of the worldwide fanbase causing the event cut-offs to be raised even higher than the Umi Bloodbath above.
  • A few School Idol Festival players have given the Normal card girl Shizuku Osaka the affectionate nickname "Shizu", which is used on occasion in conversations about her. Another SIF example, "Jenny" for Jennifer.
  • ""Adult School Activity" for the infamous bug in ~After School Activity~ Next Stage. Alternatively called "After School Activity Nude Stage".
• Game-Breaker: Rhythmic Carnival's collaborative scoring mechanics turn four specific event SR cards into this (Bear Honoka, Panda Nico, Nurse Kotori, and Cheerleader Umi). Each of them has an ability that adds extra score if a certain number of points are scored, which means that in an entire room of 20-100 people all contributing to the score, that number can multiply up very quickly. This exploit has become so well-known that it's common for a user to just pick a random team without any concern for scoring and reap the benefits of a maxed out 999% score courtesy of one or two users. They were nerfed to only go off 12 times in an entire song for that reason.
• Gateway Series: For all that it's designed for preexisting Love Live! fans, curiosity about the mobile game drew a lot of new players into the franchise.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Most of their foreign outfits had a meaning when it comes with symbolism:
    • Kotori's and Maki's Dirndl outfits from the World Travel Event has a meaning when it comes with bows on their waist: Kotori is actually single due to her bow's placement on the left, while Maki is implied to be taken (Fans would believe that she was taken with Nico), due to her bow being placed on the right.
    • Though more of a Harsher in Hindsight; Hanayo's idolized outfit from the Nov. 15, 2015 card is based on Victorian-era dresses that were dyed with arsenic-based pigments, which caused the wearers to suffer and cause an early death. "KLab hates Pana" indeed.
• Good Bad Bugs: A bug in After School Activity that occurred after the December 5, 2018 update caused all of the Aqours members to spawn on-stage without clothes (albeit with Barbie Doll Anatomy, unsurprisingly). The news of the bug traveled fast among Japanese fans and was subsequently named the "nude bug".
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Nozomi's comments about µ's lasting forever and ever only makes it worse after the Anime series' first movie.
  • In one of Mari's side stories, she claims that her school life will not be affected by the school's lack of students. However, this ends up in an unfortunate way as their school fails to reach 100 applicant numbers in the anime.
  • The 37th chapter of TenFes (Transfer Student Festival) reveals that Jennifer is afraid of Sayuri posing with a◊ pair of rifles◊. Given Jennifer's bloodline, this might have been an (unintentional) nod to the controversial school shootings in America.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of Nishimura Fumie's N cards released in April 16, 2013 had her reading a manga with a character resembling Joesph Joestar, which also became a turning point to a (fanfic) crossover concept that is ultimately reinforced by the fandom.
  • Remember Mari letting out a Big "OMG!" in the vein of Joseph Joestar in Episode 12 of the anime's first season? The international promo UR set has Mari representing the USA, wearing an outfit that resembles... you guessed it, an older Joseph Joestar.
  • Several fans pointing out the Pigeon jokes from Fighbird on a story mode cutscene of chef Ruby holding a cake while claiming that she's reading a book has became a (coincidental) Ascended Meme as the December 14 release of the idolized card actually has her with a butterfly◊.
  • A fan edit that made CHU2 look like Rina with and without the board correctly guessed the latter's eye color.
• Junk Rare: There are many Off-Model cards in the game, especially from early in the game's run, that players instantly trade for stickers. Most of µ's initial UR cards are frequent targets for this.
• Memetic Loser: Almost every player themselves, as the majority of the memes consists of them being self-deprecating for not getting their URs, having bad rolls, and them having one (or two) single miss on their scoreboards.
• Memetic Mutation: Can be found here under "School idol festival".
• Narm: Quite a few cards have been released of Riko with a more smug, playful expression than usual for her character. One could justify it by her gaining more confidence as part of Guilty Kiss, except that when partnered, she still has the same shy, uncertain comments as with the rest of her portraits. However, one card crosses the line into Narm Charm for many due to the sheer amusing image of Riko acting like Sonic the Hedgehog.
• Never Live It Down: The game's luck system will always scar the fans for wanting the the UR Cards almost immediately.
• Once Original, Now Common: When the game was first released in 2013, it was notable for combining gacha, the Idol Genre, and a Rhythm Game that's more than just basic "hit the button on the cue" gameplay, was a smash success for Bushiroad, and paved the way for similar games like The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage, Ensemble Stars!, and Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage!. However, in the final years of the game, it became evident that a lot of its elements were outdated relative to later games of its ilk: Its insistence on absolutely requiring Live Points to play songs (while other games only use similar resources to multiply rewards, and allow playing songs without said resources), harder songs charging more Live Points to play, some songs only being available certain days of the week, upgrading cards requiring tiering events with all the toxic commitment to the game that entails, and multiplayer being limited to events.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The way scoring and Gameplay Grading work is a major deciding factor on whether someone continues playing or uninstalls it after one song. Players introduced to the game's "better idols = better score" system will either quit in disgust and write the game off as Pay To Win, or shrug it off as typical "free-to-play" fare and keep going. While some argue that the game still requires a lot of skill to be able to get high scores, others point out that skill can only carry the player so far, as a team's attributes will dictate the maximum score possible. A player with max-level SRs and URs very much has an S-rank within the realm of possibility on any chart, but for a new player who only has lower-level Rs and Ns, an S-rank is literally impossible on harder charts; see the "all Perfects and a C" meme above. It's not the most crippling thing in rhythm games, but it does force players used to the concept of skill alone determining score to adjust their mindset in order to enjoy the game. This is offset by the fact that the game does have a separate grade for combo length.
  • Related to the above, the game offers no reward, not even a Cosmetic Award, for obtaining an all-Perfect run, unlike most other rhythm games where getting a perfect score is plausible. Even if you still cared enough to try, you'd have to manually keep track of your perfect plays until very late in the game's lifespan, where an "All Perfect" notification (that doesn't come with rewards) was finally added.
  • Songs in the Story folder require you to clear the Easy chart to unlock the Normal chart and the Normal Chart to unlock the Hard chart. For rhythm game beginners, this is not a problem, but those who "immigrate" from other rhythm games may find this as an example of Players Are Morons. Fortunately, songs in the B-Sides folder don't have this requirement; all you need is the necessary LP.
    • As of the last update in the Japanese server, this was fixed, and you no longer need to play Normal to unlock Hard.
  • The randomized song chooser in Medley Festival and Score Match events gets quite a bit of hate. There's supposed to be an equal chance to draw every song in the event, but what happens in practice is usually that you draw the one song you're the worst at far more than probability should suggest, and in a medfest, the Combo Breaker song will often if not always be the one in the middle.
  • Later in the game's lifespan, the game introduced daily missions that required you to achieve a Full Combo with a full team of μ's or Aqours in order to get 1 Love Gem, and a weekly mission that required 15 Full Combos a week for another. This was widely reviled by the player base for introducing a Play Every Day mechanic where there was none previously, one that was often difficult to achieve during normal play and forced many players to go out of their way to clear songs on Easy just to get the Love Gem. Plus, if you didn't have cards of every girl, you couldn't complete the missions. It got even worse when the missions required you to Full Combo 3 songs every day, and 30 a week, which was regarded as very tedious, especially since going for the Weekly mission meant that in practice, you'd need to clear an average of 5 songs every day rounded up. Eventually, Klab relented and the missions were reduced to a single Full Combo every day and the team-specific missions only requiring the song to be cleared, regardless of combo rank.
  • Slider notes. They're an interesting game mechanic if you play with your fingers, but brutal if you play with your thumbs at the sides of the screen, which most phone players do. Thankfully, they're relegated to specially marked Master beatmaps.
  • The higher the difficulty level you choose to play a song on, the more LP it costs. This is especially evident with Expert charts for B-Sides songs, which cost 25 LP, when new players don't even have that much LP capacity, which in turn creates a Slow-Paced Beginning for experienced rhythm game players. In other words, the harder the song, the fewer times the game will let you play it before you have to recharge your LP. While this was never a popular mechanic, it only stood out even more when later idol games not only let players choose how much stamina they want to spend (with more stamina use multiplying the quantity of rewards) but also allow players to play even without stamina (just without reward multipliers or being allowed to play certain limited-time modes, and even then standard single-player and multiplayer modes are still available).
  • Star notes not only do nothing special when hit, but they make you lose a lot of Stamina if you miss them. This can make players wonder why this mechanic even exists other than to artificially inflate the difficulty of charts.
• Spiritual Licensee: The game is basically maimai with the top half of the screen cut off.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • The "daily special" songs are infamous for being a challenge even for the most experienced players. For example, Anemone Heart on Easy is rated at six stars (the same as some Hard difficulty story songs).
  • On a related note, some songs have a nasty Difficulty Spike in between Normal and the harder levels. Woe betide the beginner who full-comboed Eien Friends on Normal, decided to play on Hard, then wondered why his screen resembled something from Touhou Project.
  • The "Umi bloodbath", a in-game event featuring (well, duh) Umi, which happened in December 2014, and was ridiculously competitive, thanks to a number of facts such as free Lovecas, holidays and a delay in the game's updates. It's still referred to as one of the hardest events of the international version (it was relatively tame in the Japanese one), and almost every difficult event will inevitably be compared to this one...
    • ...at least until the EliRin Score Match massacre of June 2016, with cutoffs that blew the Umi bloodbath out of the water. KLab EN had doubled up events in a bid to catch up with the Japanese servers, and that along with LP overflow and daily Loveca Stones led to some of the craziest competition in the game. Many players actually tried for the event assuming that it would be tame, since Rin is the least popular character on the server, and then stayed in with a sunk-cost justification.
    • January 2018 brought a third, but with a twist. The Kotori/Maki Token event with their travel set outfits was fine on JP, but EN had it concurrent with a regular-play promotion that gave temporary B-side versions of some songs that cut their LP requirements to 1/4 of the regular amount. This meant it was a Breather Level for Kotori fans and those who were just in it for the points prizes — you could get every single one in the first few days without spending any gems at all — but if you wanted Maki, who was the ranking reward, you were in for a nonstop slog. Given that even people who weren't trying or using gems were ranking up constantly due to the low LP requirements, this event made players worry that it might well raise future cutoffs permanently (and some would argue it did). Oh, and unlike poor Rin, Maki is EN's most popular character.
  • The lifebar system in this game is unusually strict by rhythm game standards. In other rhythm games, including ones with exceptionally high skill floors, you can miss something to the effect of 50 or so notes and still clear the song. Here, even missing 7-8 notes in a row will end your run. And you don't regain health just by hitting notes, you can only do so from card skills that have a fixed chance to proc when their conditions are met.
• Tainted by the Preview: Fans were incredibly miffed at the price point Square Enix announced for Wai Wai Home Meeting!, with the total cost of all Downloadable Content adding up to over $300! Considering the game is literally just a port of the arcade game, upset fans are baffled at how they could get away with charging such an absurd value for all of the same content that you get on an arcade machine.
• That One Level:
  • Beat in Angel on Expert Mode is probably the most infamous song in the entire game. It's very fast-paced and throws notes all over the board, so trying it on expert is a nightmare for nearly everyone.
  • By and large, the songs that are linked to the early game's main story are not that difficult... except for Wild Stars on Hard. It opens with a hold-note ladder where the holds are only a minuscule bit longer than an ordinary note, and only gets worse from there, featuring some infamous double-tapping. It's so deceptively hard that the Expert Mode version is considered to be easier.
  • It's widely acknowledged that Soldier Game on Super Hard is savage.
  • Nico Puri ♥ Joshi Dou on Expert Mode is a whole other level entirely.
    • On Master mode, most charts have around 600-800 notes. Nico Puri ♥ Joshi Dou has 1061, the first chart in the game to have more than 1000 notes.
  • Both Hard and Expert mode of Koi no Signal Rin rin rin! are extremely hard to full-combo, even if you regularly play on harder difficulties.
  • The Randomized mode (same songs and same combo number, but with notes coming from random places instead of having a set beatmap) is generally thought to be harder than the regular mode, with a few exceptions here and there. Yuuki no Reason Randomized Expert Mode however, has an insane burst of double notes that became an infamous combo breaker. It's now considered not only one of the hardest Randomized Expert beatmaps, but one of the hardest Experts in general.
  • Zurui yo Magnetic Today on Expert Mode. Three words: "note machine gun".
  • Watashitachi wa Mirai no Hana combines the odd timing of slower songs with a really fast pace. The end result is a clusterfuck that often breaks player combos.
  • On the Aqours side of things, the Expert mode versions of Kimeta yo Hand in Hand and Strawberry Trapper became the bane of many players post 4.0 update.
    • Don't forget G-Senjou no Cinderella — even on Hard, it is just as bad a clusterfuck as Watashitachi wa Mirai no Hana above. Part of the difficulty is that it has one section that's entirely spoken, making it harder to follow along with the music.
  • You thought Beat in Angel Expert was bad? Try Otomeshiki Ren'aijuku on Master. Dear lord, all those slide notes.
  • True, Loveless World DOES sound inspired by Dragonforce. Now, though, the Master difficulty of this song is also inspired by Dragonforce, more specifically the Guitar Hero chart of "Through The Fire And Flames".
  • Similarly, DROPOUT!? has a beatmap that makes it seem like the game is trying to intimidate you into doing precisely that.
  • Hajimari Road is extremely fast, which makes its beatmap look like something out of a Bullet Hell game, especially during the chorus where it constantly throws difficult patterns in rapid succession. Clearing it is a true test of dexterity.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The May 20, 2019 release of the unidolized Nishimura Fumie card◊ can be seen as unnerving due to how the thighs' anatomy is drawn.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • After it was revealed in May 2015 that KLab had fuddled with the English translation to strip out references to same-sex relationships and change the Featureless Protagonist's implied gender from female to male, fans were very, very angry at the erasure of the characters' sexualities, with many refusing to buy any more Lovecas (if they were buying them) or outright uninstalling the game. One month later, KLab put out a patch that retranslated the Bowdlerised lines; many fans were elated to see the revised script and came back to the game.
  • Upgrading to version 3.0 — albeit after the Detective Hanayo score match event — also helped.
• Woolseyism: The universal server's translation of one of Nozomi's cards homescreen lines◊, which in the original was a nod to her Kansai accent and would've been quite hard to translate without any translation notes, was pretty well-accepted by the playerbase if only for the fact that is hilarious.