Hololive Dreams Dev Team Explains Why It Built an RPG Around Rhythm

A Rhythm Game That Does Not Want to Be Just a Rhythm Game

Hololive Dreams launched on July 23, and from the outside it looks like a fairly standard rhythm title built around hololive, the wildly popular Japanese virtual talent agency whose digital influencers stream everything from competitive gaming sessions to full online concerts. Look a little closer, though, and the game is doing something more ambitious. According to IGN’s exclusive conversation with the game’s producer, who goes by Mr. O, and Mr. K, Head Supervisor of Gaming Business at COVER, the co-producer on the project, the rhythm mechanics are almost a secondary concern.

“We wanted this game to be larger in scale than what is generally known for rhythm games,” Mr. O told IGN. “If someone is not interested in the rhythm aspect of a mobile game, even if they like the IP, it’s not very engaging to play. That is why we want to excite people to a whole new level with that extra scale.”

The game, which the development team and community often abbreviate as “holodri,” places players on a virtual uninhabited island somewhere in the ocean. The goal is to build and expand a theme park, completing quests as you go. The rhythm portions are woven directly into that progression loop rather than sitting off to the side as an optional diversion.

“Rhythm games are implemented in the gameplay loop in such a way as to propel you forward and also continue to develop the park,” the team explained. “So it gives more purpose to the rhythm game aspect. Even people who are not specifically enthusiastic about rhythm games, we feel that they can be more motivated to play them within the larger gameplay loop.”

Fifty-Four Talents and 150 Songs

The music library in Hololive Dreams is the other thing that stands out. The game launched with more than 150 tracks, including both original hololive songs and covers. That number did not happen by accident.

Japan’s smartphone rhythm game market is, as Mr. O put it, “many, many rhythm games right now.” The team wanted the game to hold its own against established competition from day one, and a deep catalog was part of that strategy.

The math is also straightforward when you look at the roster. Hololive Dreams includes 54 hololive talents as playable characters. “Having just one song per talent would be a little too empty,” Mr. O said. “So we wanted to have two for each, which brings us up to 108. And we wanted to have ensemble songs. As we added more, the number went up to 150.”

Building a game with 54 protagonists comes with its own set of challenges, and the IGN interview touched on the rationale for tackling both an RPG structure and a rhythm game simultaneously rather than committing to one or the other.

Four Mini-Games and a Very Specific Card Game

Beyond the rhythm stages and the theme park builder, Hololive Dreams includes four additional mini-games covering entirely different genres. Mr. O described them as a rope-skipping game, a match-three food ingredient puzzle where touching three identical items clears them from the board, a multiplayer obstacle course that supports up to 16 players at once, and a card game the team characterized as a cross between poker and Mahjong.

That variety feels deliberate. If the goal is reaching players who might bounce off a traditional rhythm game, stacking in wildly different diversions gives the development team more hooks to work with.

The rope-skipping game in particular is a striking choice. It suggests the team was less interested in competing on the narrow axis of tap-timing precision and more interested in building something closer to a social playground, one that happens to have excellent music in it.

With more than 50 virtual performers, a substantial song library, and a design philosophy explicitly built around lowering the floor for casual players, Hololive Dreams is a bet that the hololive fanbase is broad enough to support a game that asks more from them than any single genre typically would.