A few days ago, I mentioned that I was playing through the Love Live! School Idol Paradise games for the Vita, and at the time I was fairly positive about them, especially as I’d picked them all up for surprisingly cheap in Japan on my last visit.

It turns out, there’s a reason they were cheap.

After I finished the story mode in one, quite happy with myself for getting the “good ending”, I realized that I had barely unlocked half of the songs – and there aren’t that many songs to unlock, either, each of the three games has less than 20 songs and only five of those are unique to each version.

It turns out that some of the songs have really weird unlock requirements, and some of the endings require you to play so poorly that you are only ever likely to see them if you are brand new to the rhythm genre.  The “good ending” is actually the most common one, and getting the “bad ending” is most easily done by simply playing through the story segments and putting the Vita down and walking away while the rhythm bits happen.  There are walkthroughs available on psnprofiles.net, and I strongly recommend following one if you want to see everything in a reasonable amount of time.

The one nice thing is that, once you have unlocked the trickier songs to unlock in one version, the unlocks carry over to the other two games.  So you only need to go through the “live mission” mode (which has things like “finish this song with the number 25 somewhere in the score” or “get x points on a song, playing with the controls reversed”) once, which is something of a relief.

I will admit that the live mission mode was fun in a way I’m not used to seeing in a rhythm game.  Usually the genre is just focused on scoring as high as you can and missing as few notes as possible, so I liked having some different sorts of challenges.

So… there aren’t many songs in the games, and going through the story modes to get all the endings is annoying, and there’s really not much incentive to keep playing once you’ve gotten an Excellent on all of the songs as there aren’t any outfits to unlock or anything, but the rhythm game is fun enough and it has the majority of the songs from the first two seasons of the TV show.  I think a couple of the songs – including “Snow Halation” – were made available as free DLC, but I wasn’t able to download them as I was playing on a US account.  If you have a Japanese PSN account and can switch your Vita to that region, I’d recommend doing that.

It also made for an easy set of trophies, so if you like the platinum hunt it shouldn’t take you terribly long to add this to your display case:

…but, still, pick these up cheap is my advice.