New smartphone game lets you date real-life J-pop idols, but shockingly gives them 100 Boyfriends

Nogizaka 46 romance simulator is an odd mix of daydream fantasy and unintentional cynicism.

Marketing Japanese idol singers is a tricky business. The most profitable method is to cultivate an image and atmosphere that makes fans feel an emotional, often romantic attraction to them, and as such the ever-perky vocalists can’t be seen appearing standoffish or dismissive of such sentiments. At the same time, an idol who openly accepts and reciprocates such feelings of attraction by dating or having a steady boyfriend runs the risk of alienating the most obsessive and lucrative strata of her supporters.

As such, talent agencies usually have to walk a very fine line in how they manage their idols. The producers of a new mobile game starring the members of idol group Nogizaka 46, though, are jumping back and forth across that fine line with aplomb.

For starters, while idols’ contracts commonly restrict them from having romantic affairs, the smartphone game, titled Nogizaka~On That Day at the Bottom of the Street that Goes Up the Hill, I Fell in Love~ (Nogizaka~Sakamichi no Shita de, Ano Hi Boku ha Koi wo Shita~ in Japanese) is a dating simulator. The player takes on the role of a high school student at the fictitious Nogizaka Academy, which is attended by all 37 current members of Nogizaka 46.

That already sounds like a mathematical coincidence of staggering proportions, but the even bigger statistical anomaly is that while all of Nogizaka’s members are part of the school’s entertainment production course, the player is the only male student in the entire school who also opted to join that educational track. What’s more, he’s somehow assigned the role of talent manager for the girls as they put on concerts and handshake events. This probably has some people questioning why the designers even bothered to set the game in a school in the first place (the answer is, of course, schoolgirl outfits).

Through interactions with the idols, the player can deepen his bond with them, which can eventually approach a reciprocal romantic one. Eventually, a talented player will reach the somewhat cunningly named rank of “Under Boyfriend,” in which he and his favorite idol are so close to being a couple, but haven’t quite formalized their relationship.

And this is where Nogizaka~On That Day at the Bottom of the Street that Goes Up the Hill, I Fell in Love~ starts to get really strange.

In contrast to standard idol industry practices, the game does allow its idols to have full-fledged boyfriends. But in a suddenly realistic twist, once reaching Under Boyfriend status the player becomes just one of many suitors for the attractive young woman. The game’s administrators will be holding a series of limited-time in-game events, open only to Under Boyfriends, in which they’ll compete with other players for the prize of being promoted to Boyfriend level, which unlocks otherwise unviewable scenes of going on a date with his newly open digital girlfriend. What’s more, in the future the real-world Nogizaka 46 will be holding special events with admission limited only to players with Boyfriend status.

But the oddest thing of all? Following the competitions, boyfriend status will be given to 100 players. The designers haven’t clarified whether that means 100 gentlemen in total for Nogizaka’s 37 eligible maidens, or that each idol will have her own roster of 100 personal Boyfriends, but in either case, it means multiple guys for every girl.

It’s a puzzling aspect of the game, as it takes the real-world’s professed starting point of “My favorite idol only has love for her fans!” and runs from there within spitting distance of “She only has love for me!” only to take a sharp detour to “She only has love for me and somewhere between 1 and 99 other guys!”

Still, the unorthodox gameplay/reward system doesn’t seem to have hurt early enthusiasm for the title. With a projected late-April release, Nogizaka~On That Day at the Bottom of the Street that Goes Up the Hill, I Fell in Love~ already has over 95,000 pre-registered users, and if you’d like to add to that number, the “student application” for Nogizaka Academy can be found here.

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