Dream Festival!

» see dream-fes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dream Festival was sold in Japan as a 2.5-dimensional project, which is a real category there and not a marketing joke. The idea is that a character exists on both sides of the screen at once. Seven young men were drawn as idols for an anime, and the same seven were real performers signed to Amuse, the talent agency, who voiced those characters and then went out and played arenas as them. The two units were called DearDream and KUROFUNE.

The phone game arrived on 25 May 2016 from Bandai's card division, and the card part was the point. You bought physical Dorika cards out of a Carddass vending machine, the kind that sits in a Japanese supermarket aisle, and scanned them into the app to change what the idols wore on stage. It was a rhythm game underneath, but the thing being sold was a piece of printed cardboard that did something when you showed it to a phone.

That mechanism broke almost immediately. The scanning route for serial codes amounted to paying outside the App Store, and on 15 June 2016, three weeks after launch, Bandai switched the iOS version of it off and cancelled the card products attached to it. The game's central gimmick had a hole in it on one of the two platforms before it was a month old, and it was never restored.

In September 2017 the app was renamed Dream Festival! R, rebranded from 2.5 dimensions to five, and given a costume-battle mode. It was the same app and the same store listing, worth saying because the rename often gets written up as a sequel and it was not one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the fifth of march ~

On 5 March 2018 the official account posted at one minute past noon that the app would close. 4Gamer had the story filed by 14:26. The notice carried the usual two dates, service ending at 14:00 on 1 May and paid items going off sale at 14:00 on 30 March, thirty-two days earlier.

What made it different came that evening. At nine o'clock the seven cast members went live for an emergency broadcast, and on it Soma Ishihara said that the real-world half was finishing too. His phrasing was that they had decided to draw a line under their three-dimensional activities as well. The announcement that killed a rhythm game also ended two working idol groups, which is not a sentence most shutdown notices earn.

~ an orderly wind-up ~

The schedule that followed was unusually tidy for a product in collapse. The last in-game event ran on 16 March. The arcade card machine stopped on 28 March after its sixth wave. Paid items went on 30 March and the app on 1 May. A separate VR concert app outlived both of them, closing on 29 March the following year.

The project itself got a proper ending rather than a silence. Two nights at the Nippon Budokan on 20 and 21 October 2018, titled ALL FOR TOMORROW, drew about fifteen thousand people across the pair of them and ran thirty-two songs. Three years, closed on a stage. No first-party reason for any of it was ever published.

~ the simulcast and the storefront ~

Crunchyroll simulcast the anime internationally from 23 September 2016 and added the second season the following August, so the show moved on the ordinary licensing rails that carried everything else that season. The game did not move at all. It lived on Japanese storefronts and took Japanese money, and it depended on vending machines you had to physically stand in front of.

So the advertisement was exportable and the product was not. You could watch twenty-four episodes about seven idols from anywhere the simulcast reached and understand exactly what the cards were for, with no route at all to the thing itself.

The official project site stayed up long after the game, and closed on 31 March 2026 citing various circumstances. The anime pages are still posting.

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