SuperStar GFRIEND

This is going to be one of my weirdest reviews I'm sure, and likely a quite long one as well. For one, I expect most people here wouldn't be interested in this game (after all, it appears only one other person on Grouvee even has it in their collection) and I wouldn't really "recommend" it either, despite my rating. Further, a large part of what I want to talk about and why I'm enjoying the game so much, weirdly has much more to do about the context of the game's current existence than it does the game itself and I think my more interesting points have more to do with thoughts on gaming more generally rather than this particular game. Lastly, this game will not be available much longer anyway, so unless you're reading this within a month or two of me posting it, there's not really much sense in a recommendation anyway.

That last part probably raised some eyebrows, but this is and is not quite a typical "live service game canceled because of lack of interest" story and requires a brief kpop history lesson I'm sure everyone is dying to hear. So the Superstar games are a series of rhythm games by Dalcomsoft in collaboration with various kpop agencies, a sort of win-win partnership that gives the developer access to valuable licensing for songs with tons of obsessive fans while doubling as promotion for the various acts featured. A few of the games, like this one, are focused on a single group rather than an agency's entire catalogue when the group isn't part of an agency with a ton of well-known artists. These games follow a gacha format—more on that below—collecting cards of the various idols with rhythm gameplay as the core mechanic. Gfriend was a fairly popular group debuting in 2014 and growing organically before getting their own Superstar game in 2020. Sadly however, for reasons that are still speculated today, the group was suddenly disbanded in 2021 despite still being fairly popular. My favorite conspiracy theory involves a cult that demanded their disbandment to appease its evil deity. The game was then discontinued in 2022, given the awkwardness of maintaining and updating a game solely promoting a disbanded group and I assume by that point it wasn't getting a huge daily user count anyway.

Now, despite some ambivalence about the effort itself, Gfriend came back for a 10th anniversary release this January (2025) and Dalcomsoft announced that the game would go live again. But there's a catch: it would only be live for three months during the anniversary event. Because of this, the in-app purchases are completely disabled and—I expect—a lot of the more gacha mechanisms were lightened to make it a more casual and fun experience to celebrate and promote the reunion. I found this is a very bizarre context to play the game under, starting it knowing right away that it will be gone in a few months and further that I would be playing a game built on gacha premises, with most of those aspects totally removed. That said, the fact of those contexts is the only reason I'm rating this so positively and expect it likely was a much different game during its initial run.

The primary gameplay comes in the form of a very straight-forward mobile rhythm game with notes on a moving grid you have to press in time with the music across three difficulties, Easy, Normal, and Hard. While I was initially disappointed that there aren't further tiers of difficulty, a good number of songs are quite challenging on Hard and given the 3-star rating requires a full combo, that disappointment faded quickly. One of the best things about this is that the game contains Gfriend's entire Korean discography with 107 tracks across 16 albums, including the two new songs released this year. There is a caveat that the vast majority of these tracks in the game are not the full song, only playing about half of it before fading out. However, several major hits get alternate full versions and additional tracks covering the other half of the song to make up for this some. As well, while I don't like the song getting cut off on balance, it does at least make each song something you can pick up and put down more easily for a casual session. Anyway, this library is impressive and fantastic for anyone who likes the group's music (and I'm not sure why you'd be playing this if you didn't).

Now for the start of the gacha side. First of all, playing songs appears to be gated behind a regenerating resource you have to spend on each play. However, though I don't know for sure, having only played this toned-down version, I expect this was made significantly less strict for the re-release as while the resource maxes at 20 before it stops regenerating, the timer is like a minute and thirty seconds, meaning by the time you play a song you've got another play ready. The only way I could see you running out is if you just failed immediately over and over and over 30 times straight and even then, you'd be maxed out again in half an hour. I've never dipped below like 17. So thankfully, in this iteration at least, the core gameplay is not gated in any meaningful way and you can play essentially as much as you want. Further, the full library and all difficulties are available from the start, nothing has to be unlocked or earned.

The core of the gacha element is the card collecting. Not unlike physical photocards, you collect cards in the game with pictures of each of the members of Gfriend, generally set to the theme of a song off of one of the albums. You then build a line up with a card for each member for each of the 16 albums. With rarities from C-B-A-S-R, you collect a line-up of 6 cards of varying power to use on songs for that album, with a bonus for matching sets of all cards from a given song's set. So when playing each song off the Labryinth album, you can use cards from any of the sets associated with its songs, such as Crossroads, one of my personal favorites as this was a great photoshoot. Or you can mix and match with cards from other songs on Labryinth while forgoing the set bonus.

These cards will be shuffled into a random line-up when you start a song and you will get points from different cards at different points of a song, meaning RNG decides whether you will get your best card granting bonus points on runs with tons of notes, or your weakest. Buying packs and power-ups to level your cards is the primary source of the gacha element and I'm sure had tons of monetization originally, but now is all bought with in-game currency that's fairly generously handed out through events and playing songs.

That's the gist of the game and honestly, as simple as it is, I'm finding it super fun. There's a real joy in collecting cute cards and going for particular sets, especially with the temptation of gambling confined to only in-game currency. The gameplay is also deceptively simple but engaging and I find a real satisfaction in finally nailing a particular run. You also pick your favorite Gfriend member to narrate the game and talk to you in Korean while you're doing well or poorly on a song and they're plenty nice and encouraging. Though if you don't know any Korean, you can always be a gamer and just assume Eunha is telling you that you're garbage and to git gud or something. Okay, truthfully, Yuju does sound a touch too excited when announcing that I failed a mission, but I digress.

Further, the ranking system is pretty fun because while some of it is RNG and based on who got lucky card pulls, your score is definitely differentiated in the early leagues by how well you can do on a song as your ranking is defined by a combination of your 5 highest scores with only 1 score per album contributing—otherwise you would just invest in a single album's line-up and only do songs from it. Early on card strength matters, but not enough to overcome simply playing better. It's so much more fun competing when I feel like I just need to score a little higher and I can take the next rank, especially when it's a league of 20 or 30 people rather than the 100,000 in a game like Beat Saber where I just can't care. Further, I know everyone else is f2p, leveling the playing field in a way most gachas don't, further increasing my apathy in them.

Now, what is initially striking and perhaps unsurprising is just how much of this fun is simply because I'm playing a gacha game with the gacha stripped out. I have a lot of issues with gacha games but at least one of them is how frustrating it is when an otherwise perfectly good game is intentionally made worse to fit the gacha model and encourage money-spending (ie FF7: Ever Crisis). It's a perverse development strategy even apart from its psychological predation. But playing this game in this context just really illustrates it so much better because some of the mechanics that would be an incentive for spending money suddenly become way better when it's just not a gacha game. For instance, the league ranking I'm sure was initially dominated by whales willing to upgrade their cards to levels that you just can't compete with even if said whale was of mediocre skill. Now, while there's some RNG in what pulls you get and the per-song random line-up you draw, ranking is much more focused on skill and practice now that everyone is essentially forced into being f2p. As I said, this realization isn't that surprising, but it is painful how obvious it is when so clearly illustrated by the change in format.

What is perhaps more interesting is that bit I mentioned about getting into this game knowing it will only be around a few months. I can't say I've ever really had this experience with a game. Sure, games are shut down quite often these days and especially for live service games, we often assume in the back of our minds that one day they will go away. But I don't know that the deadline has ever been so clear from the beginning—at least the beginning for me, the original release was indefinite—especially with so short a timeframe as three months. If for some reason someone were planning such a project from the outset, I expect it would end up a half-assed game with few resources invested given the low ROI expected, though this one benefits from being a revival of a game developed to last, so dodges that issue. Regardless, this unique context just got me thinking about the assumptions and attachments I have toward games and how they have changed over the years.

I still remember quite well what was perhaps one of my first real bouts of depression, as silly as it sounds in retrospect. In Middle School, I had one of those third-party "mega memory cards" for the PS1, which had the storage space of 8 memory cards for the price of one, which seemed awesome since for accessories, memory cards were really expensive on a kid's budget and on PS1 they only held 15 saves with some games requiring multiple slots. However, after some time and filling up about half the card's total space, it decided it was time to delete everything on it...I was extremely distraught, thinking about all my precious saves and how they were lost. I would love to make an "all my Ape Escapes gone" joke, but I didn't actually play Ape Escape. More seriously though, I was devastated. I thought of my numerous saves from JRPGs with dozens of hours at the end of the game with all the side quests completed and abilities unlocked, characters named whatever stupid edgy name tween-me came up with or my Harvest Moon save where after months of flower-gathering on the way back from the mine, I'd finally gotten hitched. I felt like I'd lost a piece of myself. It took a while to overcome that loss and I was checked out of my #1 hobby for weeks.

And yet here I am, playing a game knowing that all my high scores, my leaderboards, whatever league I ultimately attain, my adorable card collection, and even if I hit my goal of getting 3 stars on every song on Hard mode (which Eclipse promises me won't happen), it will all go away, just a couple months from now on April 8th. And yet, that doesn't bother me at all. I really don't care that all of that will go away and that has very little effect on my incentive to play. I do want to play the game while I can, so there's a bit of urgency. But practically none of that attachment I felt to those saves as a kid is there anymore at least and that's a distinct concern. Similarly, these days I think pretty much all my saves are backed up on Steam or PSN clouds, but if something happened and those servers suddenly went under, I'd be annoyed at those service providers for the failure, but other than games I'm in the middle of, I'm not really too worried about the mere records of my hundreds of hours in The Witcher 3 or Dragonage being "lost." And I'm pretty happy to realize that lack of attachment.

There is a practice in some areas of Buddhism in which one uses colored sand to create a mandala, a beautiful geometric pattern full of symbolism, as a meditation on impermanence, among other things. A practitioner will painstakingly take days—or even weeks—carefully layering colored sand into incredibly intricate and beautiful designs that are quite detailed and striking to behold. Once complete, the practitioner then brushes the entire design over, gathering it into a pile and dropping it into a river to spread the blessing of the mandala, symbolizing (among other things) karmic interdependence, and stressing the nature of impermanence. I think most people's reaction on first hearing about or seeing this done is "I can't believe you just destroyed such a beautiful work." It almost seems like the practitioner must simply not care about any of the beauty they created in the effort or that harboring such apathy is the goal of the practice. A related gut reaction to first hearing about such detachment is that it sounds rather cold and stoic, but it really need not be. Realizing that things are impermanent, that our time with them is short in my experience tends to only strengthen our bonds with them and make us cherish and value them more. Detachment does not mean uncaring or unloving, it simply emphasizes learning to be okay with the fact that nothing lasts forever, even the things we love and adore.

I'm definitely not trying to say I think games should only be planned to be available for a short time and that that's a great idea or a good thing. I value game preservation and find it quite sad that this game in particular has some really fun rhythm maps for an artist's full catalogue that people will soon have no way of playing, likely ever again. So I do wish it were somehow preserved and I'm certainly not suggesting that I want it to go away. My point here is that at least with a lot of games, on a much more personal level, I'm finding that my experience with the game is enough for me to still cherish it for what it was, even if things like save data or leaderboards and records are gone. I do think it would be bad if, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 were suddenly not playable and people could no longer experience it. But considering I'm likely never going to play it again, I personally don't feel attachment to that data anything like I did those saves on that old memory card when I was younger. My playthrough there, like my scores and card collection in Superstar Gfriend, are my own mandala: beloved, cherished, and beautiful in their own right, but also fleeting.

Phew, this was long and meandering but if you made it this far, hopefully it was at least mildly interesting. Some of my favorite games are ones that get me thinking about emergent themes that are not apparent on their face and I'm a firm believer that we can learn a lot about ourselves even by reflecting on what may seem the silliest of things. And I certainly did not expect going in to have, well, any of these thoughts. In fact, I really wasn't initially planning to review this game at all. But I'm glad I did and that I was able to get some of these thoughts down, even if I still feel I could have stated some things better. Ah well, that's okay. Perfectionism is another thing I'd like to let go of—outside of getting those damn 3-star scores of course.

Anyway, apologies in advance for posting cringe, but thanks for reading and obligatory stan Gfriend and all that!