• Posted December 11th, 2012 at 16:57 EDT by Ernest Lin
• 4 Comments

UPDATE: The trademarks have been registered in the United States, also.

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE: Namco Bandai's recently filed trademarks in Europe hint at localization of its idol managing simulation game series The Idolm@ster. As shown in the picture below, one trademark is for the franchise name and the other is for the name "Shiny Festa" (short for "Shiny Festival"), a line of Idolm@ster PlayStation Portable rhythm games released in Japan this past October.

It is surprising to find Namco Bandai considering the idea of releasing the Idolm@ster series outside of Japan. The games have been around since 2005 with no hints given regarding localization. Perhaps they finally noticed the high interest of Japanese game fans abroad.

The Idolm@ster is a fairly major franchise in Japan, starting as an arcade game and originally being an Xbox 360 console exclusive. To this day, it has spawned manga, two anime series, a Nintendo DS game and several PSP games. The second major entry, The Idolm@ster 2, received a PlayStation 3 port last year.

Since the Idolm@ster Shiny Festa titles are PSP rhythm games, the time and cost for Namco Bandai to localize them is lower. The main games contain a heavy use of the visual novel format, thus containing a lot of dialogue that would need to be translated. Perhaps they will use the localized Shiny Festa games as a way to gauge foreign interest in the Idolm@ster.

Source: Siliconera