The Idolmaster 2

The Idolmaster 2 is a raising simulation game in which the player assumes the role of a producer who works at 765 Production (765 Pro), a talent agency that represents twelve pop idols who made their debuts half a year before the beginning of the story. At the beginning of the game, the player meets Junjirō Takagi, 765 Pro's president, and is tasked with creating a unit of three idols—a leader and two members—from nine of the agency's members: Haruka Amami, Miki Hoshii, Chihaya Kisaragi, Yukiho Hagiwara, Yayoi Takatsuki, Makoto Kikuchi, Mami Futami, Hibiki Ganaha, and Takane Shijō. The player and the selected idols are also tasked by Takagi to become nominated to the Idol Academy music awards festival and win awards within 52 weeks; the prerequisite of receiving an invitation from the academy is to attain a ranking of 20th or above in the singles sales chart by the 36th week of the year. Also working toward this goal are 765 Pro's Ryūgū Komachi and 961 Pro's all-male unit Jupiter. The unit's vocal, dance, and visual competency is represented by three statistic points called image points, and their overall ability is generalized as their image level, which increases as the idols train in the three image categories.

The game depicts the idols' activities of each in-game week in a single day. At the beginning of each day, the player first greets one of the unit's idols, and is given multiple responses that he or she may respond to the idol's reaction with. Depending on the player's response, the idols' affection for the producer and intimacy with each other may change. The player is only given a few seconds to make a selection, and if no decision is made, a random response will be selected.

The Idolmaster 2 was developed by a team within Bandai Namco Games, and was directed by Akihiro Ishihara and Masataka Katō. From the project's beginnings, the team had intended to again develop a major, high-definition quality Idolmaster title. At the same time, they also decided to recreate the game from scratch in a similar fashion to the original arcade game's development process, and made it a goal that the game would have the potential to earn the support of fans for another two to three years. The staff began the game's production by first designing the game's setting, and this was finalized soon after development of The Idolmaster SP had ended and before The Idolmaster Dearly Stars was unveiled to the public.

As the voice actresses had already been playing their characters in Idolmaster for a long period of time, the development staff asked the actresses whether they would continue their long-term support for the franchise. While the other voice actresses reaffirmed their support and reprised their roles, Yurina Hase did not reprise her role as Yukiho Hagiwara. The development team held an audition for the character's role in 2010, but they could not find a satisfactory replacement. Instead, Ishihara reviewed the audio recordings of previous auditions, and thought auditionee Azumi Asakura's singing voice was a fit for the character.