YMMV / Idol Showdown

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Botan is the most frequently used character in online matches, owing to her sheer power as a character.
• Fridge Brilliance: Some of the talents' movesets do a good job at encompassing each other personalities and perception by fans.
  • Korone is the game's resident Shotoclone and generally the easiest character to get a feel for...which makes sense, considering how many people were introduced to hololive and VTubers in general through her.
  • Fubuki is a similarly well-rounded character who, like Korone, was many people's first introduction to hololive. However, she also comes with a built in randomness mechanic to represent her love of gacha games.
  • Suisei is infamous for her Cute and Psycho tendencies, particularly when she gets the opportunity to attack her other talents in games like Project Winter and Among Us. Her gameplay incentivizes you to play up this side of her, as Suisei is kitted with a host of ways to pressure her opponent at close-to-mid range, allowing you to easily corner your opponent and watch them squirm before going in for the killing blow.
  • Sora, as the first member of hololive, is treated with the utmost respect by all of her kouhais. In Idol Showdown, this is translated by making Sora a setplay character that forces the opponent to "respect" her in neutral lest they get blown up by her explosive singing notes.
  • Pekora is an unorthodox Trap Master whose explosives interact with the rest of her kit to create pressure from a variety of unpredictable angles. However, she also has weak defenses, so anyone who can catch up to her will have an easy time knocking her down a peg. This sums up Pekora's dynamic with a lot of her peers: pranking them by building explosive traps while laughing and acting smug. Sometimes she succeeds, but when she fails, she gets knocked down hard...to everyone's amusement.
  • Ollie is a Glass Cannon, perfectly encapsulating her boundless simping energy for senpais as well as her hilarious tendency to fall apart as soon as her senpais start flirting back.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Due to the way the game handles combos, it was possible for Botan to put the opponent into an infinite blockstring. This allowed a skilled enough Botan player to take a health lead and then keep them blocking until they won by time out. All of this is being mentioned in the past tense, however, because the loop eventually got patched out of the game.
  • Botan also had a glitch that allowed her to change sides when she normally shouldn't be able to in the corner, creating guaranteed resets that would allow her to immediately start a combo after her current one ended. As with the previous infinite blockstring, this was patched out as well.
  • Suisei's standing medium attack had a glitch that made the amount of time an opponent blocking her was locked down random. This led to her being able to randomly put certain characters (usually Botan) in a near-permanent state of blocking.
  • Aki's teleports are some of the fastest in the genre. Combined with Mukirose, this allows her to create some very hard to see mix-ups that are nigh unreactable.
• Gateway Series: For hololive and VTubers as a whole, considering the number of FGC members who have since become VTtuber fans.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Suisei's standing medium attack inadvertently had more hitstun than was intended, allowing players to link it to her standing light, which — due to how the combo system works — could then be chained back to the standing medium attack. The attack's animation of Suisei dabbing left players calling this the "Dab loop" and was deemed funny enough that the devs decided to leave it in the game.
  • When the Ollie update was released, it was discovered that the Final Boss of Virtual Frontier could be selected via getting lucky with the random select, though this was later patched out.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • X character is "Kawaii" ^ExplanationThe Japanese fighting game scene has been very careful to not anger idol fans. Instead of calling characters broken or overpowered, they've instead resorted to calling anyone or anything strong as "Kawaii" (Cute) or "Chou Kawaii'' (Super Cute).
  • "I don't do aerial combat" ^ExplanationBased on a certain thread in the game's Steam Discussion Forum where someone was complaining about Coco's command grab, ignoring the fact that you can jump out of it.
  • The "As long as botan exists i will never respect this game as competitive" copypasta. ^{Full text}I dont care how salty i sound. As long as botan exists i will never respect this game as competitive. Theres no such thing as being "good" at a game with botan in it. Idol Showdown is the exact same thing as mario party until botan is removed. Shopping cart is so broken. Braindead super that doesn't have counterplay. Why do you get to ignore resets and have a full combo on hit. It used to be punishable on block but then they decided you can just burst after it. All yall botan players are carried af This one started in some Twitch stream and is often edited into other contexts.
• Periphery Demographic:
  • Idol Showdown is primarily a love letter to hololive and its fanbase, but the game's also garnered attention from notable Fighting Game Community channels that aren't VTuber fans like Maximilian Dood and Woolie Versus, owing to its well-designed fighting game mechanics and nods to various other fighters.
  • The game even has a page on Mizuumi, a wiki that dedicates itself to covering more niche and lesser-known offerings from the genre.
  • Since then, the game has become so well-regarded in the FGC that it seems to have been adopted into the scene in a sense, even becoming a side tournament at EVO 2023.
• Unexpected Character: While it was basically a shoe-in that someone in holoMyth would become playable (with Ame and Kiara's Collabs excluding them from the running), pretty much no-one was expecting Ina, of all people, to join the fray.