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本周手游观察：BanG Dream! Our Notes 付费争议与 Azur Promilia 英文测试延至2027夏

This Week in Mobile Games - Our Notes to the Polls

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Animenewsnetwork 专栏梳理了 BanG Dream! Our Notes 分层付费引发议论、Azur Promilia 英语版开放测试目标为2027年夏、Naruto Mobile 确认全球发行等手游动态。Our Notes 被指内购繁重但非硬性付费墙，Azur Promilia 因中英区开发时间差延期引发英语玩家不满。

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原文归纳了多款手游的玩家反馈与行业背景，可对照长线运营与区服间隔的实际影响。

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This Week in Mobile Games is sponsored this week by action-packed mobile JRPG Grand Summoners and their crossover with fan favorite Studio Trigger title Kill la Kill. Find out more about the limited time in-game event further down in this week's column! 

Hello again, and welcome once more to the latest installment of the column! Besides being trapped deep in the Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave mines, I've just heard they're adding four more houses paths to the game sometime next year in the form of DLC. That's absurd considering that a thorough play of even the base game probably runs past 100 hours if you're quick about it. But that game is on Switch 2, and is thoroughly out of scope for the column, which is....

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BanG Dream! Our Notes is Buoyed by Music but Weighted by Layered Monetization

Bushiroad's BanG Dream! Our Notes launched globally a little under a month ago and looked to take the slightly long-in-the-tooth formula of BanG Dream! Girls Band Party and update it for a new wave of players, particularly those attracted by the SANZIGEN-produced anime series like BanG Dream! It's MyGo!!!!!, BanG Dream! Ave Mujica, and the latest, BanG Dream! Yume∞mita. And just as the biggest difference between the "classic" BanG Dream! Girls Band Party anime and the newer series is the latter's focus on intense character-focused drama over fluffier slice-of-life flavored interludes, Our Notes puts the story front and center, promoting the game not just as a channel for adapting the anime series, but an eventual avenue to expand on their stories. 

With the pitch well in hand, Our Notes is quite story-forward, leading players by the hand directly to the game's story tab, with cutscenes adapted from the anime that feature full voice acting and well-animated Live2D cutouts. It's a far cry from the comparatively static visual novel-style delivery of Girls Band Party. The home screen art and rhythm gameplay screens are also a step beyond in terms of presentation. Where Girls Band Party made liberal use of super-deformed chibi characters to deliver small character moments and put them up on stage during songs as backgrounds to the beatmaps, Our Notes keeps everyone fully proportioned. The home screens are lavishly-produced tableaux, lightly animated with Live2D elements that pop voice lines when you tap different characters in the scene. Meanwhile, during songs, the player's equipped band members are also shown on screen playing songs, or a fully animated music video sometimes plays instead. The gacha-obtainable "Snapshots" also feature great scenes, which, at least for the high-rarity varieties, feature a flourish of spiffy animation to go along with.

Though the stories of the bands in Our Notes tend to be heavier and less "happy" than those found in the more lighthearted Girls Band Party (which, it should be said, was full of its own brand of melodrama), it's not completely po-faced all the time. Humorous and lighter moments are plenty, and interactions spread through the different stories, character interludes, events, and in the art and side comics. It's just that keeping and staying in a band is sometimes treated like the most important thing in the world and the lives of the characters in It's MyGO!!!!! or Ave Mujica anime series, Our Notes, in its way, presents itself as a "serious business" version of its respectable forebear. 

But Our Notes doesn't skimp on the songs, either. The BanG Dream! project's main claim to fame, after all, is that the characters are played by working band members who perform on their own respective instruments, and each of the five bands puts in a respectable number of original songs and covers of popular pieces. The song list is fairly short compared to the nearly decade-old Girls Band Party, sure, but part of the draw here is that you're playing and listening to covers and songs from the specific bands involved. I might have a soft spot for Poppin' Party's cover of the opening song for Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, but I wouldn't play Our Notes if I wasn't interested in, say, Ave Mujica's take on Lady Gaga's "Abracadabra." Narrative elements aside, that's one of the ways BanG Dream! sets itself apart as a rhythm game series from, say, simply loading up Osu! with your favorite songs and beatmaps. Meanwhile, the stories also work more to keep players invested in playing outside the simpler gravity of seeing one's oshi on screen. It's a sort of gravity that works better to keep me interested than, say, for Hololive Dreams. Taking that into account alongside my admitted personal preference for rock band music over the more idol-adjacent fare found in HoloDreams, I find myself more willing to put time into Our Notes outside the period I spent playing with the game to write up my thoughts. 


Exactly how much time is more of an open question, though. As a traditional rhythm game, Our Notes is very much about score-chasing, with much of your band and character progression directly related to boosting the upper limits of the scores. In fact, Our Notes' signature "GEKISO Live" gameplay mode plays around with that expectation, with each song including GEKISO sections that vary up the scoring criteria by adding bonuses to specific qualities, like a JUST section rewarding accurately hitting notes, or a COMBO section rewarding hitting high uninterrupted note combos.

Getting as much enjoyment out of that is, like any rhythm game, dependent on one's skill at this sort of thing, and I'll freely admit to getting utterly destroyed by any difficulty above Normal. I'm still in the early stages of just chasing song unlocks and stories, but from discussions with more advanced players, it seems the grind can really kick in as you begin chasing the high-score high.

That's also where the game's rather heavy monetization steps in. Besides the expected regular cadence of gacha banners and events introducing new snapshots and member variants to roll for, the in-game store is stuffed with bundles and cosmetic add-ons adding things like flourishes to the in-game text chat (featuring messages between the characters) or stamps for interacting with other players in lobbies and during multiplayer matches. The game also includes multiple battle pass-style reward ladders to pay for and progressively unlock, including the long-term "TGW card" (a running joke about the game's resident zaibatsu, the Togawa Group) offering essentially a purchasable set of account upgrades that effectively amounts to a progression accelerator for dedicated players.

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On top of all this, the ad gacha also makes a return from Girls Band Party, offering goodies in exchange for watching ads played in the app. Though not an original idea of Our Notes or even exclusive to these games (ad-supported tiers are all over mobile gaming, like them or not), the scraping for cash can cheapen the impact of wanting to play and watch all these band girls sort through their emotional baggage. At the very least, it doesn't feel like one is getting a lesser experience for not wanting to shell out. The monetization options are mainly attractive to players already deep into the progression or heavily committed otherwise, so it hasn't felt to me like they're paywalling any specific part of the game (at least not so far).

These woes aside, Our Notes comes across as a confident and polished entry in the expanding BanG Dream! ecosystem, and a worthwhile container for the story of all these fictional girls with problems (and good songs).

Azur Promilia Targets a Summer 2027 Date for its English Open Test Window

Azur Lane developer Manjuu released an update regarding the status of Azur Promilia, its upcoming free-to-play creature collector. First announced in 2024, the game is slated for an initial launch in China sometime in 2026 on mobile, PC, and PS5. Now, according to a press release, the company is targeting "Summer 2027" as its window to begin open beta tests for the English-language version of the game. In a Twitter post, Manjuu explained that the months-long gap between the Chinese and English releases was due to different regional development timelines and could change based on progress.

The announcement hasn't gone over terribly well with English-language players who'd been looking forward to a new title from Azur Lane's parent studio (though it's not actually related directly to Azur Lane). It's commonly accepted wisdom these days that a simultaneous release (or a short gap) is better for cross-regional live service games, since long gaps between regions reduce the amount of unfulfilled anticipation affecting players who live in the "delayed" territories. And for market-leading f2p games, that much has proven true.

That said, there may be other reasons behind the apparent delay. For one, the gacha and f2p market in general is cooling off, even in traditional strongholds like China and Japan. Players everywhere are tightening their belts and cutting back on entertainment spending, and the scenes are also heavily saturated. Almost anyone willing to put big money into a gacha game or similar probably already has a "main" they're dedicated to, and won't put much into a new title lightly. Further, the increasing development costs and graphical fidelity of many mobile and cross-platform live games are making it more expensive to produce international versions of games, as well as making flops potentially costlier. Publishers, particularly in China, are less willing to risk a rough launch period ruining a game's long-term prospects, and are more willing to let early Chinese players take up the brunt of those "growing pains," and launch global versions in an improved state, or perhaps cut losses and not release at all if things go poorly enough (look at how it went for the mobile edition of Final Fantasy XIV).

Of course, none of this is said explicitly by Manjuu in Azur Promilia's case, so it's anyone's guess why they'd opt to delay the English-language version. At the very least, the English edition is (eventually) coming, so one could hope that when it does arrive it'll step in on its best foot.

Naruto Mobile Global Release Confirmed After a Decade in China

Speaking of global delays, a game many had long ago given up hope for is actually making it overseas. During the New York Comic Con, MoreFun Studios announced that Naruto Mobile, a free-to-play fighting game, will get a global release. The game first launched in China way back in 2016, putting the gap between its initial launch and overseas release at more than ten years. The global release is part of what's called "Project Rasengan," a three-year cross-media Naruto promotional plan that includes a new Naruto manga penned by series creator Masashi Kishimoto. More details are expected to be announced at Jump Festa 2027, which is scheduled to take place in late December this year.

While one might wonder why they'd release a 10-year-old mobile game overseas, it's worth noting that Naruto Mobile is absurdly popular, with Chinese revenue estimates alone reportedly second only to Genshin Impact's entire global take. Figures like that would make any media executive want to chance a global release, no matter how old or crusty the game might look. And, to be fair, Naruto Mobile doesn't look crusty at all, boasting slick 2D/3D renditions of Boruto's Dad Naruto and Boruto characters duking it out across the small screen. Naruto Mobile's longevity has also produced quite a lot of flash Chinese promotional animation, including this excellent cyberpunk-themed sequence celebrating its 10th anniversary.

No one knows when Naruto Mobile will be released globally, or if it'll even be mobile exclusive when it does come out (PC ports seem to be customary for notable free-to-plays these days), but it'll be interesting to see if the massive gap will help or hurt its prospects.

Zenless Zone Zero 3.3 Sends Proxies Skyward and Adds a Mecha Mode on October 21st

The next version update for Zenless Zone Zero launches just a couple of days from when you read this, and on October 21, it's set to continue the ongoing story of players' adventures in Roscaelifer, through a new skyport called Quietude Isle. There, players will be forced to mediate between the bickering Judge Phoenix and Commissioner Severian (who just so happen to be the banner characters) as they aim to break a lockdown on the island of Booastrum.

The update will add a new mecha combat gameplay mode that allows players to swap between ranged and melee fighting as they infiltrate enemy bases in disguise. Other events also include a Halloween-themed "Night of Supernatural Tricks" that includes rewards like an outfit for the Angels of Delusion.

Other planned additions include quality-of-life updates like team lineup recommendations suited to whatever mission players are tackling, as well as the beginnings of an ongoing project to create bespoke tutorial videos for specific agents to make mastering them less of a process of trial and error for players.

Let's close out the column with a few tidbits:

  • Cookie Run Kingdom will launch a crossover adventure with The Amazing Digital Circus on October 21. Players will be able to nab Pomni and Jax Cookies and use them in combat, with guest cookies based on Kinger, Ragatha, Caine, Gangle, and Zooble.
  • Honey Parade Games has a new promo out for Shinobi Nexus: Senran Kagura, its new live-service RPG spin-off of the venerable Senran Kagura series. The promo shows off some of the story and introduces new characters, with more gameplay-focused details promised in a November livestream.
  • Arknights Endfield's latest major update, Sanctuary of Ink, launched on October 15th, bringing the new characters Si and Argent Flow, and adding a new area based in one of Si's mystic paintings (in keeping with the long Arknights tradition of introducing dragon women capable of doing just about anything to you).

And that'll be it from me this week. Despite another heat wave and other associated weather weirdness, things are beginning to cool down again, finally. Keep yourselves safe and healthy, and I'll see you next time.

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