It seems like every season there’s a new mixed media project promoting a tie-in idol/music group with an app and an anime to jump start or adapt the story. As a self-described resident of what the masses call Idol Hell, I’ve sampled and enjoyed a couple of them. Often, however, these games have a tendency to fall into the same established, familiar patterns in terms of the story points, the character arcs, and how they speak vaguely about whatever the gimmick is. There is one recent series, however, that manages to go against this sparkly mobile game grain.
While it started out as another franchise building off of the foundation that Bushiroad’s BanG Dream built, D4DJ has managed to craft its own identity by pushing the boundaries of what is expected from a mixed media music franchise—particularly in how it integrates canonical queerness and themes of gender identity within the text, D4DJ manages to go places that very few franchises in its peer group manage to do. This makes it stand out as one of the most inclusive, earnest, and affirming music franchises that I’ve experienced.
D4DJ is a mixed media project started by Bushiroad that follows the adventures of various DJ units. The series was launched with an anime, D4DJ First Mix, in 2020, and as is commonplace across mixed-media properties of this type, the voice actresses also serve as pseudo-idols who represent their DJ units IRL.
While it has a large cast, the franchise’s story centers around Aimoto Rinku, a high schooler who returns to Japan after living abroad and gets inspired to start a unit of her own, dragging friends she meets along the way into her dream. While the anime is charming in its own right, what I want to focus on within this piece is the mobile game D4DJ Groovy Mix and how it pushes the envelope and raises the bar for what to expect from these franchises.