K-pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut

I've reached the end of the game after 4 hours of gameplay. Is this a joke? Should have known it was called "road to debut" for a reason, after debuting and the first award ceremony we have reached the end. This feels like an early access, I played the demo which was promising and less frustrating. Also the trainees just stand there for the group first concert/release, they don't do any dance moves. This game has potential but sadly in its current state is disappointing.

Can't really say anything bad about this game, but WTH is with that ending? Instead of scratching a management itch that in the past only Idol Manager could, this one just ends at the part where it should start... The experience is more frustrating than fun because of that single decision. Perhaps there can be some continuation in DLC or future updates, but as of the day writing this review, I'm more frustrated with how the game is handled, because it has amazing potential. Great visual and audio design with interesting characters that add flavor, but all that is smothered by an abrupt ending that feels like the developers ran out of money midway through the game.

I really wanted to love this game. I've been waiting for it to come out for weeks, and I did have fun playing it, but there were a few things that kept me from really enjoying it. My biggest issue is that once you debut, the game shows you all these different activities you can do and I finally had MONEY, which made me think I was just getting started. Then after the first week, I got a message saying the game was over. That was really disappointing. It feels like the game ends right when it's opening up. I'd love to see a continuation instead of it ending there. A few other things I struggled with: -I couldn't make sense of the pass/fail system for activities. Sometimes I'd get what sounded like positive feedback, but then it would still say "Too bad." -The minigames got repetitive pretty quickly. I also never really understood what I was getting from doing them. A skip option, or even the ability to turn them off, would be nice. After pouring my 4th shot I wanted to scream. -The different manager styles didn't have descriptions in my game like they did in the demo, so I had no idea which one I should pick. -I also couldn't figure out how to improve my chances of getting hired for extra roles and other jobs. Seeing a 10% chance is fine, but it would be helpful if the game explained how to increase those odds. -Album building mechanics were not good -Save option would not work Overall, I wanted to love this game because I think it has a lot of potential. It has good bones, but it's missing a few things that would have made it a much better and complete experience for me. Right now I cannot recommend the game when it doesn't give a full experience like other small developer games I have played: (Magical Princess, Volcano Princess).

As of now the game is incredible. Starting from the whole vibe.. music.. visuals.. the whole process of managing. Just feels satisfying. I expected to be a good game. But its a great game at this point. The game deserves more spotlight, that's for sure. So far extremely fun and enjoyable. i will follow with an update upon finishing.

This is not a management simulator, it's a raising simulator. The positive reviews are written by people who like raising simulators. The negative reviews are from people who like management simulators. Play the demo. Understand that the full game is more of the same: navigating a maze of options, and finding out which ones work, which ones fail, and starting again. If you're an obsessive perfectionist who is always restarting a game because "Now I know what I should have been doing at the beginning" then you (like me) can love this game. If you're not that kind of person, then treat this recommendation as a warning.

I really loved playing this game but after finishing it, I came away more frustrated than anything else. First of all, the game is incredibly easy. Nothing ever felt particularly challenging, and everything seemed to go smoothly from beginning to end. Despite that, I was actually having a great time. The art style is great, the overall presentation is charming, and I genuinely enjoyed managing my group. Unfortunately, that's where the positives start to fade. One of my biggest complaints is the trainee system. There are only eight trainees in the entire game. At one point, the game even encourages you to let one of them go, and then immediately tells you that you'll never be able to recruit them again. Fine... except after my next audition, the only trainee available was the exact person I'd already dismissed. Once you've seen those eight characters, that's it. There are no new faces, no variety, and no real replay value when it comes to building different groups. The ending was easily the most disappointing part. After about six hours of playing, my game suddenly ended because of some issue involving the stage lights. I got a game over with almost no explanation. I have no idea what I did wrong, no warning that I was heading toward failure, and no indication of what I could have done differently. My company had plenty of money, my trainees were highly trained, and everything seemed to be going perfectly. Then... game over. Even worse, there's no way to reload an earlier save or go back a few weeks to try to fix whatever caused it. Your only option is to restart the entire game from the beginning. Why would I want to do that? I'd be replaying the exact same story with the exact same trainees, making mostly the same choices, without even knowing what caused my failure in the first place. If the game doesn't tell me what I did wrong, how am I supposed to avoid the same ending? A lot of the random events and schedule activities have this same problem. Sometimes you'll get told something went badly or that someone failed at an activity, but it often feels completely random. There's very little feedback or explanation, so it's hard to understand whether your decisions actually matter or if you're just at the mercy of luck. The scheduling system also feels strangely designed. There are loads of activities and events that can supposedly unlock, but your weekly schedule is so limited that you barely have enough time to manage training, stamina, and happiness. Many of the unlockable events have such a low chance of appearing that you'll probably never even see them before the game ends. It feels like there's a huge amount of content that players simply don't get to experience. And speaking of endings, I've since heard that even if you successfully debut, the game ends not long after that anyway. That's honestly baffling. The debut should feel like the beginning of the real management experience, not the finish line. I wanted to continue promoting my group, releasing music, managing their careers, and seeing them grow. Instead, the game just stops. After waiting over a year for this game, I can't help but feel disappointed. There's definitely a solid foundation here. The visuals are lovely, and I genuinely enjoyed my time with it while it lasted. But the lack of trainee variety, unexplained fail states, inability to reload previous saves, random-feeling mechanics, and incredibly abrupt ending leave the whole experience feeling unfinished. I had fun while I was playing, but the way it all ended completely soured the experience. Unless future updates add more content, better explanations, and a proper post-debut gameplay loop, I don't see much reason to replay it.

It plays. Technically. The Setup There aren't many idol-management games out there — really just this and Idol Manager, which remains the better (if imbalanced) option. So when a new entrant shows up promising a fresher angle — building a group from scratch through a survival-show-style road to debut — it's worth a look on premise alone. I played the demo first and I enjoyed it. Then I put about six hours into the full release and came away with a flat, tired "meh". The kind where you're not even mad, just disappointed enough that $5 is probably the ceiling for what I'd advise anyone pay for this. The gap between demo and release nags at me, and I think I've landed on why: this plays like a game that was scoped bigger at some point, then cut down — except nobody went back and removed the leftover scaffolding from the original plan. Half-built systems, told-not-shown plot threads, an activity tree three times the size of what you have time to use. It's not that any one piece is broken beyond repair. It's that the whole thing feels unfinished. The Good The premise is genuinely interesting. An idol survival show, played from the manager's seat, is a good hook in a genre with almost no competition. The music is legitimately good — a genuine high point, undercut only by there not being enough of it woven through the actual playtime. I was left bopping in my chair, wanting more. The art is fine. Not a personal favorite style, not especially charming, but inoffensive and consistent. It's short. Normally I'd list this as neutral. Here it edges negative, because a New Game+ mode exists but forces you back through every tutorial regardless, so the short runtime doesn't buy you replayability, it just buys you more of the same scenes and laggy, hit-but-mostly-miss, tutorials. The Bad The structural problems start with the core loop itself: you spend the whole game building toward your idols' debut, and then the game ends right as things get good. Managing an active idol group — after the pressure of debut, into the part where personalities and rivalries and real stakes could unfold — is the fun part, and it's the part you don't get. The ending itself arrives with almost no warning, closing on a line implying your girls are just on a break — not that the game is over. I reloaded expecting more content and just landed back at my last autosave. Compounding this: there are only eight hireable idols total, so multiple playthroughs mean re-meeting the same eight girls — including the ones who are simply bad at their jobs — over and over. The characters deserved better than they got. Personal storylines are rare and resolve with whiplash — a parent's death handled in a single line of dialogue, a daughter's academic failure is a repeated issue that you can throw unlimited money at without any real consequence either way. If the game is committed to a small, tight cast, the writing needed to be much tighter (and with more of it). The survival-show angle — arguably the game's best idea — is the most wasted. Rivalries, sabotage, bribery, phone polls, the messier and more dramatic parts of the premise: these are described happening in a sentence or two, never played. The evaluation and battle segments that should showcase all of this instead throw you into an unexplained type-matchup system and quiz questions that assume music knowledge the game never bothers to teach you — I ended up googling answers mid-playthrough. The questions also repeat across sessions. The activity tree is a mess of good intentions: more than half stays locked for the entire game, and what does unlock outpaces the time you actually have to use it. There's no search, sort, or filter, and no way to compare two activities that raise the same stat — so you spend more time hunting through clutter than engaging with any of it. What does unlock feels arbitrary too — I spent an entire playthrough watching low-odds activities stay locked while higher-friction ones popped freely. The economy doesn't help: no legible sense of what's driving income up or down, just long stretches near bankruptcy followed by sudden windfalls with no clear cause. The Ugly This is where the "alpha product" feeling really sets in. The UI is slow and laggy, with tutorial pop-ups that either nag you every single time or never show up at all, depending on the system. Several minigames are simply broken as games — one is a Simon Says-style dance sequence that alternates between a fair opening pattern and an unreasonable eight-step memorization test, forces keyboard input so you're stuck looking away from the pattern on screen, and buries the actual start behind distracting flashing lights, all while occasionally lagging. Others go the opposite direction and offer no challenge at all — turning a crank on a gacha machine, or sorting change with no penalty or reward for doing it well or badly. I ended up avoiding entire recruitment paths just to dodge the janky minigames gating them. Basic quality-of-life is missing, too: there's a save function and an autosave, but no in-game load option — you have to quit to the main menu and reload from there. You also can't keep multiple saves within a single playthrough. For a visual novel, that's a serious problem, especially since advancing dialogue with the keyboard can accidentally auto-select choices with no way to undo them. Then there's the bug that best sums up the whole experience: a plot thread involving [spoiler]a falling stage light fires weeks late, well after the awards ceremony that should have closed it out — so a woman shows up out of nowhere demanding money over an incident the game never properly resolved, while you're still riding high from the ceremony.[/spoiler] It's not an isolated hiccup, either — a separate thread has your old CEO [spoiler]accused of fraud and embezzlement, only for the plot to wave it away with a sudden windfall, followed by your own arrest and off-handed release with no clear grounds given for either.[/spoiler] None of this is played for laughs. It's presented completely straight, which makes it read less like intentional absurdism and more like threads nobody finished writing. Verdict 4/10. There's a real idea in here — an underserved genre, a survival-show hook with actual dramatic potential, music that's better than the game around it deserves. But it plays like a first pass that shipped: half-built systems, unresolved plot threads, and enough technical rough edges to be abrasive in a genre where things need to work correctly for the story to land.

I spent a long time thinking about what rating to give this game. In the end, I decided to leave a negative review, despite the fact that there are quite a few things it does well. There were two main reasons for this: The save system. Why can't you go back several weeks? If the game uses autosaves, why not keep saves from the past few weeks and let the player choose which one to return to? The lack of proper visual novel segments. The game seems to have plenty of events, and each girl has her own story arcs, but what's the point if every event appears and gets resolved in two or three sentences? [spoiler] A girl finds out that her father has died. This could have been an emotional scene and an important moment in her character arc. Instead, she simply says in one sentence that she's lost her motivation, and you get a debuff. [/spoiler] This is where I can't help but think of Idol Manager. That game had its own problems, but at least it had a story you could follow. It was short, sure, but the story actually developed over time. On the positive side, the visuals are excellent and fit the theme of the game perfectly. The sprites, CGs, and backgrounds are all colorful and pleasant to look at. The music is also quite enjoyable, and the single tracks turned out pretty good as well. Overall, the game captures a lot of aspects of K-pop culture, which is a huge plus. Anyway, I don't regret spending the money, and I had a good time with the game, but when it comes to the story, it completely failed to live up to my expectations.

found this game a year ago as a demo version and liked it before the official release! now it's more perfect than i expected. the plot, the consequences of all choices you do is making game more interesting and involve you in the whole managment system. kinda ruined my first save by losing the release date but it didn't upset me kkk i'll just start again since i understand how it works all now. wish for future costume/shop items updates to see new content (i hope it will happen). thanks for the game~it worth the waiting

I was extremely excited for this game to come out and while i love the gameplay i would not tell anyone to buy this with how little content we get, the game just ending without us being able to do what idol manage did and continue the groups career feels off and like the game isnt finished, I'm not sure if they plan to add that later but it feels like its lacking in gameplay if all you do is debut a group, yes there are different endings but thats not a lot of content still, even forming relationships feels pointless unless your going for a specific ending, while i enjoyed the gameplay i hope theres more content to be added in the future like other kpop games have done.