Trivia / Ensemble Stars!

• Acting for Two: Whenever the two 2Wink members are in the same scene together, since they're both voiced by Soma Saito. They have very few similarities in the way they sound, which has been lamp-shaded in story. Lucky, they’re both color-coded and have name tags attached to their dialogue boxes.
• All-Star Cast: A majority of the cast were voiced by new voice actors at the time the game was launched, but Trickstar played it straight with the characters being voiced by already famed voice actors. Even FINE and UNDEAD is one (Sans Yuzuru and Kaoru's voice actor as Kaoru's voice actor is more well known as a stage actor than a voice actor). The idols of the units that came in the second year of the game's release (Switch, MaM, Adam and Eve) are hugely popular seiyuu.
• Audio Play: Has had several.
  • Back in the early days of the franchise, there used to be unit and cross-characters drama CDs released alongside unit CDs. In the recent years, these stopped being made for unknown reasons, though it’s speculated that this is due to the sheer number of characters the game has now.
  • Frontierworks also has the Radista program that they do between characters from different units.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Wouldn't you believe it. The franchise quickly became one of the most popular male idol series in The New '10s boosting tons of merch, several "live" tours, collaborations, character seiyuu events, figurines, nendoroids, musical adaptations, an Anime, you name it. It's been a long-running competitor to the other big male idol franchises such as Idolish 7, THE iDOLM@STER: SideM, and Uta No Prince Sama, as well as female-character dominated franchises such as THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls, even more so now that it's introduced a proper Rhythm Game.
• The Cast Show Off: Played interestingly - Tsukasa is meant in-universe to be fluent in English, but the actor isn't, so while his English definitely sounds less Japanese than that of the other students, it still sounds kind of weird. On the other hand, Kaoru's voice actor Kei Hosogai went to school in America for several years and actually is fluent in English. However, he hasn't had a chance to show it off in-game yet.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Kaoru is voiced by Kei Hosogai, better known for his role as Basco Ta Jolokia in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger.
• Content Leak: There have been several over the years, the most being the creators accidentally leaking the 5th anniversary video for the Rhythm Link office weeks before it was originally supposed to go live. Happy Elements accidentally leaked the MV for MaM’s song Festive hours before it was supposed to go live.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The franchise is frequently mislabeled as part of the Otome-genre likely due to the Cast Full of Pretty Boys and the lone female protagonist. This is despite the game not actually having Otome elements beyond a bit of Ship Tease between the protagonist and the characters, which is actually more of a rare occurrence as the story puts more focus on the relationships between the cast. According to Word of God, the game is a Josei story with Shounen-genre elements (primarily attributed to the main story plot) as they explicitly that didn’t want romance to be the focus of the story.
• Creator Backlash: The main scenario writer Akira isn’t above venting his frustrations toward Ensemble Stars!! on Twitter.
• Crossdressing Voices: In the original Japanese, all of the cast are voiced by male voice actors regardless of how feminine they look or sound. In the English dub of the anime adaptation, the more feminine looking characters are given female voice actors, those characters being Hajime Shino who is voiced by Brittney Karbowski, Tori Himemiya who is voiced by Mikaela Krantz and Sora Harukawa who is voiced by Emily Fajardo.
• Development Hell: The anime adaptation was announced in 2016, but despite that fact very little news has been brought up since, and it had been quietly dropped and reannounced within two years. Finally, as of 2018, there is a definite date for the adaptarion's release, which aired on July 7th 2019.
• Dueling Games: With IDOLiSH7, I-Chu and THE iDOLM@STER: SideM as male idol mobile games, and A3! as a mobile game in general. Now that it's released a proper Rhythm Game in 2020, it also duels with THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls, BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! and Love Live! School idol festival.
  • For joseimuke games in general, it duels with Twisted Wonderland due to both currently being the highest earning games in the genre. Both games were also released around the same time, in early 2020.
• Fan Community Nickname: In the western fandom, fans are called “enstarries”, usually to make fun of them.
• Fan Translation: Before the game was officially brought over to the West in 2022, foreign fans mainly used fanmade translations on the Enstars English Wiki for most of the game's tenure.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Following EnStars' long reigning popularity, there have been numerous games that have opted to imitate the gameplay, aesthetics and mechanics, most likely due to most of its popularity coming from the simplistic play style. Some examples include the training games DREAM!ing, On Air! and its biggest competitor, A3!.
  • As of 2020, Ensemble Stars!! follows the lead of other idol games by finally giving players the long requested Rhythm Game, which is thankfully a separate app from the original game for those who preferred the original games gameplay.
  • Ensemble Stars!! is also following the lead of Granblue Fantasy, as they implemented what is essentially their equivalent of a spark system. To trade for the currently featured cards in the pool, the player would have to roll 30 times for 300 scout coins to trade for one copy. With each trade, the requirement for the next copy becomes lower. Lower rarity cards have a lower scout coin cost, and there’s a deadline for the scout coins to be used before they disappear.
  • Several aspects of THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage have been copied over to Ensemble Stars!! Music, such as the office function, the new attributes function, rainbow attribute songs, Great not breaking the players full-combo, and etc.
  • The SPP function in Ensemble Stars!! Music is lifted from THE iDOLM@STER: Million Live! Theater Days where it's referred to as Special Appeal.
• Late Export for You: The game wasn't initially licensed in West, not that it stopped anyone from playing it. Soon China and Korea both got their own respective servers with some exclusive content. And English-speaking territories got an official English version of Music released in June 2022.
• Milestone Celebration: Has had several due to being one of the longest running male-idol games out there as of current. Perhaps to show the longevity of the game, the 2020 anniversary has lasted several months and is still on-going as this trope is being written, with a half anniversary coming up and a final anniversary gacha covering the last new office on the horizon.
• Meaningful Release Date: The 1st episode of the anime aired on July 7th, which coincidently is the start of Tanabata (Star Festival).
• The Merch: Gets plenty due to Ensemble Stars!! being a Cash-Cow Franchise for the company Happy Elements. At one point and for some time, fans could even vote on dakimakura for characters.
• Newbie Boom: The relaunch of Ensemble Stars! in the form of Ensemble Stars!! Basic, as well as the introduction of the long-requested Rhythm Game Ensemble Stars!! Music attracted many new fans to the franchise.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Arashi Narukami's voice actor changed from Sosuke Soma to Ryo Kitamura a few months after the game's launch due to undisclosed reasons.
  • Tomoaki Maeno replaced Yoshimasa Hosoya as Hokuto from 2017 onward as the latter took a medical hiatus for a throat condition that year that led him to step down from multiple singing roles.
• Portmanteau Series Nickname: The game itself is shortened to EnStars by fans.
• Real-Life Relative: In On Stage, Hinata and Yuuta Aoi of 2wink are played by actual twin actors.
• Reclusive Artist: For most of the staff outside of the main scenario writer Akira, who actually has a twitter that he updates occasionally following event stories and the voice actors. Very little is known about the people who work on the game. The main card artists are elusive in that they go by aliases so vague that one wouldn't find results for them on search engines. The artist for the Ready For Stars manga artist is this as well, as googling what's assumed to be their pen-name will bring you to the twitter account made specifically to update readers about the manga and nothing else.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Junya Ikeda was arrested in October 2023 for participating in special fraud, leading to his voice work for Mitsuru being removed from the games the following November before being replaced by Daiki Kobayashi a month later.
• Trolling Creator: From the Yume100 site there is the picture of Subaru and one character switching outfits for April Fools. Lots of fans didn't think both staff for the game is actually planning a collaboration with each other when they announced the collaboration for real. Even the text is added "This time, it's not April fools."!
• Virtual Celebrity: The characters became this with the introduction of DREAM LIVE, which is a concert consisting of units from the game performing in front of a live audience via projection, similarly to Hatsune Miku’s "live" concerts. So far, there have been four live tours titled Morning Star!, Bright Star!, Double Star!, and Prism Star!, respectively. A fifth tour was originally planned for 2020, but was inevitably pushed back to 2021 due to COVID-19. More units are introduced to perform with every tour update and so far the only units to perform have been Trickstar, Akatsuki, UNDEAD, Knights, RYUSEITAI, Ra*bits, 2wink, Valkyrie and Switch. MaM and fine were announced to perform in 2020 (which was pushed back to 2021) for the 5th tour with a guest performance from Eden.
• What Could Have Been: The various official artbooks and interviews from Word of God reveal a host of things that were changed compared to what ended up in the final product.
  • Beta Trickstar's unit costume design originally had darker colors than the current, bright colored costumes.
  • One of the early iterations of the Hokuto and Subaru’s unit outfits made them look like they came out of Idolish7◊.
  • Ensemble Stars! was originally planned to have some more supernatural elements outside of the Pseudo-Vampires seen in Rei and Ritsu Sakuma. For example, Chiaki was initially going to have the ability to transfer the wounds of others onto himself, while Kanata would have been a robot, with this being the explanation for his lack of an ability to swim. Naturally, these were scrapped and the story remains at least somewhat grounded in “reality” as a result.
  • According to one of the early drafts of Rei's concept art, he was planned to have pointed ears◊ to reflect on his pseudo-vampiric nature, however this was evidently scrapped. The ears did return for a scout card where he's depicted as a demon.
  • Leo almost had pink hair with blue or gold eyes◊, according to his concept art.
  • The story transition from Ensemble Stars! to Ensemble Stars!! was initially going to have Anzu waking up from a long coma to the new year in order to introduce a new character to reintroduce the old characters, but this idea was scrapped. Instead, new players were given a Mr. Exposition character in the form of Fanboy Aira Shiratori, who knows a lot about idols and has knowledge of all the past characters.
  • According to Word of God, Ensemble Stars! wasn’t originally meant to be an idol game.
  • Madara Mikejima was originally going to be the focus of the April Fools 2020 event with the theme being “Together with Mama” according to one of the games head writers, Akira. According to him, however, due to various unexplained difficulties this idea ended up being scrapped with the Yumenosaki staff members Kunugi and Sagami ending up leading the event instead.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Word of God admits to doing this in an 2020 interview, stating that Ensemble Stars! is written as though it’s an “unplanned Fanfiction”. Unfortunately, due to this method of writing the story runs into quite a bit of Negative Continuity issues, retcons and more often the writers taking the story in a direction that doesn’t quite match up with any of the developments that came before it (usually in the form of things established in Ensemble Stars! event stories being contradicted) solely because they wanted to give the characters a new struggle, much to the consternation of readers.

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