Love Live! is a franchise that's not exactly a stranger to controversy. It all got started with Love Live! School Idol Festival, a free-to-play mobile rhythm game that hit phones in Japan back in 2013 before making its way to North America and Europe in 2016. The game combined microtransactions with a cast of adorable school girls to become one of those money-printing mobile games that every major corporation wants a piece of these days.
Now there's a new game coming for the PS4 that has a name so long that we're actually going to prepare you for it. Are you ready? Here goes:
"Love Live! School Idol Festival ~after school ACTIVITY~ Wai-Wai! Home Meeting!!." That's the whole name, which could be shortened in a number of hilariously different ways, but we're just going to call it "Love Live" for simplicity.
If there was any question about what Love Live is for, here's your answer. The game is a free-to-play rhythm game where you mash the appropriate buttons on your PS4 in tune with the song. Although the game is free, the songs and costumes for your troupe of schoolgirls are most certainly not. In fact, they can get rather pricey.
According to Gematsu, there are 8 songs and 9 costumes with the base game and an additional 117 songs and 60 costumes that can be purchased via microtransactions. Each additional song costs 440 yen (with a Western price to be announced), and songs can be purchased via bundles for a bit of a discount.
A helpful ResetEra user did the math for us and calculated that purchasing each and every song for Love Live via bundle packs would cost 37,510 yen, or approximately $360 USD. If you were to do the same thing for each and every costume, it'd set you back 38,490 yen, or approximately $273 USD.
It should be noted that there hasn't been any announcement regarding Western prices, and it might turn out to be cheaper when the game arrives on the American PlayStation Store. But in Japan at least, this game will cost you a mint.
Love Live! School Idol Festival ~after school ACTIVITY~ Wai-Wai! Home Meeting!! arrives on March 24, 2021, for the PlayStation 4. It'll have Japanese audio with English, Japanese, and Chinese subtitles.