A
spin-off game of
Love Live! School Idol Festival was announced during
Tokyo Game Show 2017 as part of the game's 4th anniversary. The new game titled (officially abbreviated as or
SIFAS) for 2019 release. The game uses an alternate story that differentiates it from other media where μ's and Aqours are in the same school year and work together as one along with the girls from
Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. Owing to this, μ's isn't disbanded, and Chika Takami's original reason for becoming school idol in the anime and earlier sources, which was after seeing μ's on stage, was slightly changed to admiring school idols and then become one herself. The game is described as "the ultimate idol rhythm RPG game" that allows players to 'participate' in the game and customize the school idols. Nijigasaki High School Idol Club performs the opening theme titled "Tokimeki Runners." The game was officially released in Japan on September 26, 2019. A global version which features English, Korean,
Traditional Chinese, and
Thai languages was released on February 25, 2020. Players assumed the role of the protagonist, a 2nd year student at Nijigasaki High School who becomes interested in school idols after seeing joint live between μ's and Aqours. After looking for a related club in Nijigasaki, the protagonist learns that the existing school idol club is on its last legs of survival and decides to rebuild and reform the school idol club. New features included: tree-based growth system, new Live system, and system. At launch, players could link both games under the same SIF ID account. Syncing their SIF ID created on
Love Live! School Idol Festival with
LLAS, players were able to port their rank and their progress made in the game to the new title. Benefits of the new ID offer extended far beyond saving player progress, as player rewards could be obtained until February 2022. As announced through in-game news releases, SIF ID player links ended in April 2022. In August 2020, a character that appeared within the game's story, Shioriko Mifune, was added to the game as a playable character and Nijigasaki High School Idol Club as an official member. She received a solo song, a 3D model, and cards obtainable within the games scouting boxes. More new members, Lanzhu Zhong and Mia Taylor, were added as playable characters in September 2021. On December 23, 2021, in a news release in-game, it was announced that the development and operational rights of
School Idol Festival All Stars would be moved from KLab Inc. to MyNet Games Inc., while Bushiroad would manage its publishing rights of the game, effective January 6, 2022.
Live show system Instead of focusing on its "rhythm game" system, the game used an "RPG-like system" where it required the player to carefully build their teams with strategy and train their idols in order to be able to successfully clear a live, as all tapped notes would drain the stamina bar, even when tapped perfectly. The 9 tap note icons that represented the 9 members of an idol group were reduced to two, and the player was able to tap anywhere on the screen to register a tap. During a live show, the participating member(s) were depicted as full-3D models with dance choreography on screen. In addition to the original members' elements (Smile, Pure, Cool), 3 new elements was added: Active, Natural, and Elegant. Besides elements, the members were also divided by 4 different attributes: Voltage (Vo), Special Skill (Sp), Guard (Gd), and Skill (Sk). During the lives, 9 members were divided into 3 "strategy" units. Strategy units could have different positive and negative effects depending on the members' attributes in the strategy, such as increased tap score, reduced stamina damage, or more frequent skill activation, as well shortened strategy switch time. Only one of the strategies was active at a time, but the player could switch to a different strategy to take advantage of different members' skills and effects and to clear "Appeal Chances" that appeared during a live. The player could also put the live show in autoplay, where the notes would be tapped automatically, allowed player to focus on controlling the Strategy units completely. However, all tapped note timings were "Great," which gained less total voltage compared to manual play. Achieving S rank in a song difficulty allowed player to use Skip Tickets, where player could clear the cleared song without having to actually play the same song's difficulty.
Event system Besides the two types of event that also featured in
School Idol Festival, there were some type of new event exclusive to
All Stars: • '
SBL (SIFAS
Big Live)': A big event where 20 people played at the same time and worked together to reach the goal that the event has set. With the rewards obtained from the event, player was able to acquire the event cards from the previous events, scout tickets, and others. •
Dream Live Parade: Player needed to clear one stage to move onto the next stage with one limitation: they could only use one card for one time (except for featured characters, which was two). Player was able to obtain coins that allows them to exchange the coins with accessories and others.
Systems Aside from the new live and event system, the game also had some new systems: •
Practice system: To rise an idol's stats or "Idolizing" them, the player had to acquire needed items through performing live shows, "training," or event rewards. Through practice's skill "
bond board," player was also able to unlock the idols' costumes (as well as the re-colored version), side stories, "Inspiration" skills, and navigation voices that was listenable in the front page. The idol's skill tree could also be unlocked further more by acquiring the idol's card's duplicate through "
Scouting," event rewards for event-exclusive cards, or using the "School Idol Radiance." •
Training: Player could create a team of 9 cards and send them to a "training camp." The training camp required an Action Point (AP) and giva items for skill tree advancement due completion. The APs replenished up to 3 every 12am and 12pm
JST. For certain chances, idols that came to the training camp could get "Inspiration Skills". Depending on the card's rarity, up to 3 Inspiration Skill slot were unlocked by default, and one more slot can be unlocked through practice. •
Bonding system: The player was able to boost the idol's stats through the bonding system. The boosts were applied to all cards of the same idol, not per card. This section is divided in two parts, as the latter was added in later update: •
Bond Level: As the player cleared (or skipped) live shows with idols in their formation, the idols received certain amount of their "bond points," depending on the difficulty. When reaching certain number of bond points they could reach a new bond level, which gave more stats boost to their cards, and would be able to unlock bond boards as detailed below. It would also unlock their "bond episode," which some was required to unlock certain songs. However, their bond level was initially capped at level 15 at the beginning, but their cap would increase by up to two for each new cards, and "limit increases" (receiving duplicate cards, and using Radiances in practice). •
Bond board: As the player levelled up the idol's bond level, the player was able to unlock bond boards. Their idol stats could be boosted further through bond board, using their "Memorial Pieces" and "Memento Pieces." A single board consisted of five boost panels, with three of them were always Appeal, Technique, and Stamina each, while the other two varied for each board. Completing the board would proceed to the next unlocked board sequentially, and gave the idol additional bonus. The material cost for each panel became higher in higher level boards. The bond board feature was added since version 1.7.0 in both servers. •
Costume system: Player was able to change a character's 3D model costume, where it would affect them in main menu, bond menu, and live shows. These purely cosmetic costumes were obtainable through UR and SR cards within their bond board or by exchanging the costume tickets.
Service termination On April 30, 2023, it was announced that the game would end service on June 30, 2023. == Nijigasaki High School Idol Club ==