Hololive Dreams: A Sleepless Dream

mmgfrcs — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:26:00 GMT

In my attempt to find a gacha rhythm game, I once see this game popped up on my search results. While I was expecting games like Kancolle or Idolmaster (which, funnily enough, I ended up playing the non-rhythm game on the series instead: Gakuen Idolmaster, more on that later), I did not expect hololive, of all people, having a rhythm game. With some interest in Hololive in general, with the existence of a fellow countryman (Hololive ID), and because I have played Gakuen Idolmaster for a bit, I decided to try it out.

The developer of this game is not hololive themselves (it would honestly be impressive if they were), but QualiArts, known for Idoly Pride (abbreviated as IdolP) and Gakuen Idolmaster (abbreviated as Gakumas). I have an experience with both of these - I played IdolP years ago, and I'm playing Gakumas as I typed this. So, I was pretty familiar with the quality of their games.

Idoly Pride and Gakuen Idolmaster, both made by QualiArts.

QualiArts is known to have some of the best 3D Visual Novel experience you'll ever see, and I say this without exaggeration. They know how to make Visual Novel... exciting. Their graphical quality is also top-notch for the kind of game it was on a mobile device, even against games like Genshin and co. Their story and VA choice was also top-notch (with a few misses), which gives the few characters that these games have (about 20 for IdolP and 13 for Gakumas) a lot more character than many games with a wide cast.

Look at those!

You'll notice that I've been singing praises for the devs, but I haven't even talked about the game itself. How was the game? Well, as you'll find out, I said this upfront because I find their decision for this game... baffling in a way, both for the fan of the devs and hololive fans. It has the potential to be a great game like Umamusume and Gakumas - which ironically has the same concept - but these baffling decisions hindered the game from becoming the great game that it should be.

So What Exactly Is It?

Well, as mentioned above, this is a rhythm game, where you tap blocks - that either fall towards you or flashes in-place - as accurately as possible with the music. This game is also a classic rhythm game, which is a rhythm game where blocks are falling towards you and you needing to tap the blocks when it reached the judgement line - the line where the song's beat will land on.

The game's gameplay. Notice the score on the top left and life on the top right.

But unlike most rhythm games, and like most gacha rhythm games, you are not judged by your accuracy (although you'll still fail if you aren't accurate enough), but by an arbitrary scoring system. This is because the score is the primary progression system for these games.

In Voez and most Rhythm games, their judgement is by accuracy; in this case the accuracy is 93.8982%

The rhythm game also feature co-op multiplayer, where you play the same song together in order to collectively get the highest score.

Apart from being a rhythm game, what makes this game unique with other gacha rhythm games is the existence of the overworld map. Most of the game's functions can be accessed by just walking around the map. There's a bit of exploration baked into it by having treasure chests to collect and quests to do.

The main UI with the overworld gameplay

The game also features a few minigames to play solo or multiplayer. You'll start off with rope skipping - jumping as much as possible until everyone loses, and then you'll unlock more as you advance the main story, including a Fall Guys copy (Mega Circuit) and a Poker-esque copy (Pokajan).

Characters... from Hololive

It is not a gacha game without its characters, and as the game's name suggests, all of the characters are current talents of hololive, with a sprinkle of some of its former talents. Because of the fluidity of the conditions of each talent (new talents, graduations, controversies, etc), this game is unique in that it acts as if the cast is fixed (and thus incorporate elements of fixed-cast gacha games like costume/alt gacha) but then reserves the ability to introduce new characters and "delete" characters which graduated from hololive.

Now, technically there are 2 types of "characters" in the game. One are holomems, which is what the characters themselves are called in this game, and what the chibi version of the character in the overworld is called. The other are Members, which are merely photos of the character. If you think this naming is confusing, you are not alone.

Each character is labeled by the hololive generation it's from, and this game is where I found out that hololive generations are somewhat... weird. Some are actual numerical generations (JP Gen 0-5, ID Gen 1-3, etc.)*, but then we got HoloX, Advent, Myth, and Gamers. Anyway, their generation would be important later on.

* P.S As of writing this very statement, hololive announced a merger that merged Hololive EN and ID to just Hololive, and killed the ID numerical generations - they're now AREA15, holoro, and holoh3ro. The game has not followed suit yet.

Members. Notice the generation label

And how do you obtain them? For Members, that will be the gacha. You are basically pulling for the characters' photo - with their own costumes and poses, with the better looking costumes and poses reserved for rarer tiers. Rarer tiers also give higher scores - and that is how they entice you to pull. For holomems, however, you can get them for free by doing holomem quests, which are basically just a 5-minute intro quest to the character, ending with playing the rhythm game of that character's solo song. You can do this twice per day randomly, and the game would sometimes give you a ticket so you can run the quest for the character that you want.

The characters would then be used to form a group called a Unit. A Unit consists of a Leader holomem and 5 Members. The Members have skills that can activate in the rhythm game for more points or extra convenience, and the Leader holomem give bonuses that increases these skills' effectiveness.

Now, regarding having all characters be from hololive, or any IRL source for that matter, I actually see this as mostly bad. I just so happened to play Umamusume, where all of its characters are real-life horses, and while that makes the dev's job easier since they don't really have to make a character from scratch (after all, the hardest part of making a character is giving them a name and a personality - both readily available with the horses themselves), they are also restricted from doing anything novel with the characters.

But that will be the least of this game's problems...

A Detail About The Rhythm Game

The rhythm game itself is nothing to write home about. This game follows Voez, where it has the standard tap notes (though with multiple colors: blue, yellow, and brown), hold notes (green), and flick notes (red). The hold notes are dynamic and movable, requiring you to track it. Other notes are static.

The song selection feature songs that the talents have sung before. There are 2 types of songs: Original - where hololive or the talent themselves made it, and Covers - where they cover other people's songs. Within these types, there's quite a variety, but you can divide it into 3 categories:

Hololive-made

Simply made by Hololive themselves. Sounds the most idol-y out of everything else. All credited to Hololive IDOL PROJECT.

Group

The songs for generations and groups, featuring generation members (which credits the generation) or non-generational group members (temporary or named, which credits the group or individual talents). Theme is about 50:50 - EN are themed, ID are not, JP are in the middle.

Solo

The songs sung by the talents themselves. There isn't really much of a theme for most of them but some do... notably, again, the EN.

The in-game song is cut down to less than 3 minutes, with 2 minutes being the average. It's fairly standard all things considered, but it's on the short side. Deemo, for example, leans more on 3 minutes than 2.

The game has 5 Judgements: Perfect, Great, Good, Bad, and Miss. Getting a Bad equals a Miss (half-Miss but it's still a miss), and getting a Great will still count for Full Combo but doesn't for All Perfect. Judgement is thankfully loose, unlike Voez. You can miss by quite a bit before the game drops you down to Great, and you can miss quite a bit more before the game drops you down to Good, making getting All Perfect and Full Combo much easier. Not that it's easy, just easi-er. Hold notes are not scored on its release, so osu!mania players can rejoice.

The Judgements - Perfect, Great, Good, Bad, and Miss

All songs are divided into 4 difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert, each with its own difficulty level that roughly tell you how difficult the map of the song is, ranging from 1 to 30. Difficulties are logarithmically related, with levels 1-9 being equally easy, level 10-16 being equally medium, level 17-19 being equally hard, and 20 and above being individually insane... roughly. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, such as:

Yukino Hana (Expert) is level 22 when it is comically easier than the level suggests
High Tide (Hard) is level 18 and it's harder than the level suggests
Save Our Hearts (Hard, Expert) is level 18 and 26 respectively and it is harder than the level suggests, with the Expert difficulty being almost 2 levels harder
Most of the off-time songs (ALICE&u, GHOST, Myth or Treat, etc) are also underleveled since it's more technical.

The Difficulty levels for Here I Am - Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert, with their levels

Of course all rhythm games suffer from under/overleveling their songs (Someone made a list for DEEMO), but the difficulty spread of 1-30 (why not 1-10?) didn't help matters.

As explained above already, the game uses an arbitrary scoring system that will differ each song based on its length and your Unit Power. All songs are ranked (and that's where the incentive comes from for the gacha), but to post a ranked score, you need the song's singer as the Leader holomem. Easy enough, since you can get holomems easily, but you won't score high unless you upgrade the holomems... which is the game's primary grind. If the song has multiple singers (prominent in Group songs), you can choose one of them. On a rare instance where a talent is in multiple groups (like Fubuki who is both JP Gen 1 and Gamers), they count on all of them. The game also has a Life system, with any misses (including Bad) dropping it down, and running out of Life means that the whole run would be unscored. Holomem upgrades can add more Life and recover Life mid-run.

On the gacha side, a play requires stamina. Though you can actually play with 0 stamina, you can only select a minimum of 1. Rewards scale with the number of stamina consumed up to 10, though with diminishing returns after 3 stamina. The game tells you in advance how much you'll gain as a multiplier, called "Rewards Draw". If you have 0 stamina, the multiplier is x1, and just 1 stamina is x7

There is no free play or classic mode that focuses on the rhythm game side without the gamification the game adds. Not a big deal, but it's a shame.

The (Notable) Good

Well, let's start off with the good stuff first before the bad.

UI & UX

It's obvious the amount of effort done to make the game. The UI is immaculate. For a game about dreams, the UI clearly reflects that, with a fluid bubbly design that are fairly typical for dreams. The UI are also designed with the color scheme and the theme of each hololive character in mind.

Notice that both designs have a different color and a different icon for the Announcements menu that correlates with each member's central theme

This applies in the rhythm game segment as well. Each character also has their own UI theme that you can choose, though you'll have to buy them with a token currency... which will be talked about later. You do get a chance to try it out for each character through their holomem quest, which is why I can show you the UI below.

The Rhythm portion UI design for Himemori Luna. Notice her knightly theme on the combo text, the keychain on the score bar, and the press highlight on the bottom, as well as Luna's pink theme

Beatmaps

A rhythm game is not without its beatmaps, and they did a good job at creating the maps for the game. I know, it's the most basic tenet of any rhythm game to have good beatmaps, but I've seen some of the worst maps, with random f-you notes that will unexpectedly strike and all you can do is to memorize them (looking at osu). That still exists in this game, but it's rare and are only a thing on really high difficulties (24+).

There's a lot of classic beatmaps: Check out Nightbreak by Mori Calliope, or Save our Hearts by ID Gen 3*. But I would have to give it to Here I Am by Airani Iofifteen for my favorite, both on the song itself and its beatmap.

* As of writing this, it's holoh3ro now

Some of the beatmaps are also artworks, which is really cool.

Onigiri-shaped hold notes on Mogu Mogu YUMMY!

Minigames

Now, I have never exactly think that much when it comes to minigames in games. But since minigames are one of the 2 only gameplay in this game, it better be good. Thankfully, it is. One of the minigames even arguably transcends the game itself: Pokajan. It's a great game to destroy friendships and test your luck.

Fubuki Pokajan Video

The rest are fine enough. Mega Circuit (the Fall Guys-like minigame) is good, and they just added an Among Us/Dead by Daylight minigame that is interesting as well. The first two (Hoppin' Rope and Collect Cooking) are okay, though I have no idea why they didn't just start with Mega Circuit and Pokajan instead of the first two.

Storytelling

QualiArts has one of the best storytelling in the 2-2.5D space, and this game is no exception. The Live2D sprites move very smoothly, almost as if the actual talent is the one that moves them. The 3D chibi is also excellently made, and they pack with them great poses and expressions that elevates the story it featured.

Sometimes, when the story align, the game has this gem

While the story is another matter entirely (TBD below), props to the animation department for getting it right, as they should be.

The Middling, or the Controversial

This section is mostly going to be the not-good-but-not-bad decisions they made - thus the most controversial - and I'll start with the multilingual "issues".

Multilingual "Issues"

Hololive has 3 voice languages: JP, EN and ID, and they decided that instead of letting the players choose, they decided to just mix-and-match them at random: The JP members speaks JP, the EN speaks EN and JP, and the ID speaks all three, and you have zero control of which language they speak at any given time. Some would say it's good to have such variety, but I would like an option to set which language they speak.

If you want variety, Arknights: Endfield has one good example (shown below). And the funniest thing is that the game already did this in the story... more on that later.

Arknights: Endfield speaks Italian

It's especially egregious when you play as one of the ID members, since they speak JP, EN, and ID. One play they'll speak ID, then another they'll speak EN, then another in JP. It's practically guaranteed that someone wouldn't understand what they're saying half the time.

Inconsistent Artstyle

Bound to happen, and it makes certain characters jarring - like Shiranui Flare - watercolor, Ouro Kronii - harsh lines, Juufuutei Raden - more to realism, and Shirogane Noel - looks like old drawing.

A disaster in artstyle consistency

The chibi version has no issues with this, and funnily enough the CG and the anime also has no issue. Almost like they could re-draw the Live2D characters to fit the game's artstyle.

No issue with the CG. Noel looks as good as everyone else in the image

Missing Members and Generations

Not every generation is in the game. Justice is notably missing when their counterpart generation (Advent) is in-game. If you're a fan of Gigi, tough luck.

The game is also inconsistent in including or excluding talents. Members and holomems-wise, all of the graduated talents are missing. However, in the story and minigames, Graduated talents are also there - Fauna, Mumei, and Gura are all in the story.

Fauna and Mumei is in the story, with their Live2D models and all...

...but are missing as holomems

And poor Rushia for not existing at all

No idea why that is... it's a first-party game, no? But it is what it is.

The Bad

So, what's the problem with this game? The story is probably the most obvious flaw.

The Story

Well, the game expects you to follow a series of main quests involving the hololive members finding and building upon a deserted island. The first few chapters follow mostly the JP hololive members (Sora, Fubuki, etc) with some EN (Kronii) trying to establish themselves on the new island, and the rest follow other generations trying to build their own "hangout places" on the island. In the middle of these quests, you are expected to engage with the other game features like the rhythm game, the mini-games, and the map interaction.

And the very first problem that'll become obvious early on is that the game didn't even try to introduce these characters. You, as a player, need to already know these characters before you even start the game, and you need to know pretty much all of them since they can pick and choose characters at random for the quests. Furthermore, The characters are already familiar with one another, which means you need to know their relationships too. This wall of prior knowledge are going to filter a lot of players from even caring about the story and the characters. With most features locked behind them, including the better minigames, the game feels worse than what it is.

Because of that, the main quests themselves are some of the most banal quests I've ever seen. You're basically playing the quests in skits like you're watching a sitcom. There's no character development, no drama, nothing to root for from these characters. They're just there to pad out your playtime... and to see their schenanigans with each other. Ironically, all of the characters have their own backstory that you can read, but the game didn't even use these established backstories to do anything material. For example, Mori Calliope is basically the personification of death with the nickname of the Grim Reaper, but you'll never figure that out if you have no idea about it unless you looked at her profile or her songs... which has such an explicit title and image that you'll connect the dots the instant you see it. Or I guess you connect the name Mori to the Latin word that means die, idk.

Well, let me give an example. Here is Gakumas:

Notice that you, with just this 1 minute and 18 seconds video, can have a feel for Gakumas characters' personalities, just by watching this video. And here is this game in comparison:

Did you get a feel for any of their personalities? Did you know that Mori Calliope is a personification of the Grim Reaper? Yeah. This is what's baffling to me. QualiArts have done great stories in 2 games, and for some reason they missed the ball so hard in this game.

And notice that I played Hololive Dreams' story at 1.5x speed, while I played Gakumas at normal speed. Yes, that clip is actually longer. Thanks for the skip button. Very useful button.

The easiest fix to this is to just answer some basic questions on the game's own premise:

Where did they find out about the island? News? Discovery from a group (maybe Advent or Myth)?
Why did they even go to the island? Holiday? Refuge?
What drives the individual holomems to go?

...Which are questions usually asked on session zero in TTRPGs.

The Group Dynamics

The other consequence of the rather inconsequential main story is that there's a certain lack of group (or, well, generation) dynamics. The most you'll get is holoX with La+ being the leader and everyone else follows along, and Advent with Nerissa and Shiori being the "big sis" for Fuwawa & Mococo, with Bijou being a wildcard. I asked the AI for the theme of each hololive generation and I am astounded by the complete lack of any mention of it in-game, apart from the two above.

For example, Advent:

Advent is a group of criminals that escaped from The Cell.

It consists of Shiori Novella, Nerissa Ravencroft, Koseki Bijou, Fuwawa Abyssgard, and Mococo Abyssgard, who were all imprisoned for various reasons.

However, they escaped from The Cell to achieve one shared goal: to rebel against the world, their destinies, and their monotonous lives.

Advent PV

Yup, none of these are really relevant-in game... their chapter on the Main Story being the only exception, and even then it's mentioned in passing only. The easiest question the game can attempt to answer, just on Advent alone:

WTF is The Cell?
Why were they imprisoned?
Why did they need to rebel?

And then go from there. Do this Q&A for every generation and the story can get somewhere. Literally, hololive has a treasure trove of these, and they just need to use it.

Missing Voice

The main story has another problem: it is unvoiced apart from grunts and soundbites. I have no idea who thinks this is any good. Surely in a game that is explicitly about promoting hololive and its talents, you would make damn sure to put voices in the stories so people can hear them and not just see them. Instead the voices are relegated into... an in-game broadcast announcement. Why? They even took the effort to sync the soundbites' languages with each other, falling back to JP soundbites for everyone when they gather together, otherwise they use EN for EN and ID members only gathering, or ID for exclusively ID members. It's maddening.

The Overworld

Next, the Overworld. Beautiful, but honestly rather pointless. You only interact with it when required (quests, Holowork - the expedition mode of the game, and gifts). I mean, I guess it's a photo moment, but the photo tools are abysmal, only having Focus and Zoom. You can't even put more holomems! Insane. And what if you want to capture the Live2D sprites? Well, you're out of luck on that one.

Arknights: Endfield Photo Mode is much better than Hololive Dreams' own

The overworld brings with it some severe performance implications as well. Stutters are fairly likely on older hardware, especially on harder songs. Unacceptable for a rhythm game which requires high precision.

It would be better to make it optional, like what Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond did. Players can then choose whether to go directly to the overworld (for those who liked it) or to the main menu UI. There's no reason to default to the overworld.

Gacha

And then, the gacha. Well it is a gacha game, so it does have a mechanic for people to miss out.

But the game's pull income has been terrible. A banner runs for about 2 weeks, and in those weeks you're lucky to get even a single 10-pull. The 5-star rate may be 5%, but the rate-up rate is just 1%, meaning that the game has a 20/80.

Events are samey and boring - just score more or set a high score, which... you guessed it: requires pulling for those sweet bonuses. Not only that, some Members also require you to pull for their genmates, so good luck with that.

Progress is also gated by the Main Story - and it's quite long before you can even try to uncap the Members' level, which is required to get a better score.

The scoring also has another problem: Not only is scoring based on feels, you are not even "guaranteed" to get a high score, even with the required Members, because they decided to bring the RNG skills from Idoly Pride here. You can score high on one run, then score absolute dirt the very next run, and all you can do about it is to run it more... which does track with the events they put out. It's fairly normal in Gacha Rhythm games, I guess, but the devs could've done more, like piling it up to Fever mode that already exists, or having a trigger condition.

Conclusion

Decisions made by the devs for Hololive Dreams has been quite baffling, but it's undeniable that they paid a lot of attention to detail in the game. Even with all its problems, I still play the game as the only rhythm game I played today. The game is absolutely fine to play in its current state, it's just like 2020 Genshin - a good game with a whole lot of missing potential. If I were the devs, I would recommend the following to improve the game:

Start with the story. Scrap it. Try to write a better one, that gives the characters... character. Mori Calliope should be doing something resembling a Grim Reaper. Moona Hoshinova should be doing something that a Moon Goddess do. Advent members should be escaping from some sort of a jail.
Write lore too. The island, the buildings, the initial concert. What are these? It doesn't even need to be all that serious. A Gintama-like slice of life stupidity can just be as compelling, as long as the character matters. There's no need to explain them in detail, they just need to exist.

And maybe, just maybe, the game could be much better than it currently is.

The Game Review