Act! Addict! Actors! — Information Compilation and Analysis
A3! x Data Part 1: Raiding the Wiki so I didn’t need to torture my computer with 20+ browser tabs open at once.
Hello! This will be Part 1 of my A3! x Data series, and we’ll be focusing on Character Information compilation! Before we continue, please open the full spreadsheet and Tableau workbook to check them out while reading this guide to navigating the table!
A few points to set the context:
- Act! Addict! Actors! (A3!) is a Japanese card-collecting mobile game which was created by Liber Entertainment and CYBIRD. Players collect cards and form teams to clear objectives during events, which offer cards (such as this one) as event rewards. The English version of the game, which I play, was released in late 2019 while the Japanese version was released in early 2017, meaning that EN players can find out more about up to 3 years’ worth of future events. This gives plenty of data to work with! For a more detailed explanation of A3!, check out the prologue to this series and the A3! Yaycupcake Wiki, which is my main data source.
- In many ways, the A3! x Data series is both a sequel and spinoff to my original BanG Dream x Data series. I initially started the A3! x Data series by adapting my BanG Dream (Bandori) work for A3! before expanding the A3! series to fit the game’s specific features. Over time as my spreadsheet skills improved, I returned to my Bandori spreadsheets and applied my newly unlocked skills to improve them. By the way, this article will largely follow the structure of its Bandori counterpart!
- A3! and BanG Dream share the card-collecting aspect of gameplay and both games have decently large rosters of well-developed characters, but there’s where the similarities end. Unlike Bandori, A3! isn’t a rhythm game, and outside of team-building the game plays itself most of the time. The main appeal of A3! is that the story is especially well-written, which makes the information compilation more useful in terms of remembering who’s who!
Without further ado, let’s begin!
Gathering the Data
A3’s relatively small fanbase means that I only really have the wiki for information, and platforms such as the r/A3ActorsInTraining subreddit for clarifications. Nevertheless, the people who run the wiki have done an excellent job in comprehensively including as much detail and many translations of JP content, which made data compilation much easier. Here’s what a typical wiki character profile looks like:
Initially, I only focused on metrics which were quantifiable and hence easier to process, such as age, height and birthday. Grouped metrics such as blood type and occupation were included too, and since the motif flower and image colours were particularly useful to fan content creators I added them to the table as well. Eventually, I expanded the table to include almost everything listed in the above profile. Here’s what the table looks like on Github which only supports the raw values, please check the spreadsheet for the prettier version, part of which is shown below!
Analysing and hunting for patterns
Here’s most of my results summarised into two Tableau dashboards. Pretty, but a lot of the data is obscured thanks to cropping so I’ll take a closer look at the sheets in a bit. The first dashboard (left) is a simple who’s who in Mankai Company, organised by troupe, as well as a scatter plot which shows everybody’s (backstage crew and ensemble cast included) heights, ages and blood types. Using this dashboard, you probably can get an idea of how diverse A3’s cast is. The second dashboard (right) takes a closer look at the qualitative results such as appearance and occupation, and reveals how quite a lot of Mankai’s members know each other outside of theater (well, this is also established in the story so it’s not such a big surprise).
Sizing Mankai up
Note about the chart: We’re missing two actors from the Winter Troupe, Azuma Yukishiro and Guy, because their ages are canonically unknown even up to now. Looking at how the points are scattered, age isn’t very correlated to height with an R-squared value of 0.28, although there is a general trend of growing taller with age (if this didn’t show I’ll be worried, honestly). Makes sense, seeing that 15-year-old Azami (the unlabeled orange cross in the top left quadrant) is 1 cm taller than Sakyo, who’s more than twice his age. A few interesting observations:
- Looking at the actors’ age range, you can very clearly see that A3! is marketed towards youths, but the age range is surprisingly large for an anime game, spanning nearly 20 years from middle school to near-middle age. (Kidding, Sakyo is technically a millennial even though he acts nothing like what the stereotype would suggest.)
- The points are coloured by troupe, and it’s pretty interesting to see how each troupe forms relatively distinct clusters: Summer Troupe (bottom left quadrant) are Mankai’s babies and are relatively small statures befitting of their youthful image. Autumn Troupe has a large age range but all of them are rather tall, thus situating them firmly in the top half of the chart (makes sense, almost all of them have some kind of delinquent history). Meanwhile, Winter Troupe is wholly made of adults (whether they’re mature adults remains debatable) and reside in the right half of the chart with a rather large height range (15 cm height difference between Hisoka and Tasuku).
- The Japanese have an interesting fascination with associating blood types to personality traits, but we can see here that it doesn’t affect height.
- You might have noticed that the backstage crew (grey points) are relatively older, which makes sense since most of them have links to the Mankai Company’s first generation.
The above treemaps show the relative spread of hair/eye colours within Mankai. To make my life easier, I used the dominant hair colour and merged all shades of a certain colour into that colour’s category. As expected of an anime series, a diverse mix of unusual hair and eye colours such as green and purple appear. Please note that the hair and eye colours were determined by me squinting at the images for about an hour, so they might not be completely accurate.
Looking at the first chart, you’ll see that brown haired characters are the most common. However, upon closer inspection I realised that 8 out of 13 of the brown-haired characters (including Itaru as the blond parts of his hair are dyed) are not in the Main Cast and instead serve in the Ensemble Cast or backstage crew. Hence, it might be suggested that brown hair is generally used for background characters, and I can use how Tsuzuru Minagi is often referred as “Villager C” (read: undistinctive) even though he’s in the Main Cast and is Mankai’s only playwright as evidence. Funnily enough, quite a few of the green-haired members have a rather… distinctive way of offending people with words.
The Eye Colour chart shows that relatively natural eye colours (blue, brown and green) are the most common, but note that some of the shades very much resemble coloured contact lenses. It seems like blue eyes are the most common in Mankai Company, with quite a few Main Cast members sporting them. Perhaps this is because striking blue eyes tend to contrast well with most eye colours? Not a lot of trends to see amongst the less natural eye colours, but I should note that Juza and Kumon Hyodo are brothers, which explains their matching purple hair and yellow eyes. Also interesting to see is how the eccentric poet Homare Arisugawa has the exact same hair and eye colours as Kaoru Seta from BanG Dream, a flamboyant guitarist who’s also a Shakespeare-obsessed actress…
I also made an edit which compared everybody’s heights, just so you can see what Yuki’s (165 cm) and Omi’s (190 cm) height difference looks like. Do note that some of the sprite poses make the heights look different!
I also created another version which includes the ensemble cast members, because they deserve more love… after adding them, we can see that the shortest Mankai actor is Miki Asakura, and 13-year-old who’s 160 cm tall. Honestly… that’s pretty tall for his age.
Next, I took a look at everybody’s occupations and affiliated institutions. Warning: Story spoilers for the Institution charts, so be careful before zooming in!
We can see from the Occupation chart that Mankai Company has two distinctive blocs of students and freeters (unemployed people/part-time workers), while the rest of the company hold a wide variety of jobs, from salarymen to fortune tellers and even a few Yakuza members. Interestingly enough, outside of acting at Mankai Company, only two members list acting as their professional occupation (it should be noted that two of the freeters, Sakuya and Tsumugi, are known to accept guest roles at other theaters as part-time jobs).
Looking at the institutions, we can see that quite a few of the characters already knew each other from school (St. Flora, Hanasaki, Ouka etc.), and that later on quite a few of the high schoolers ended up in Yosei University. The Previous Institution chart also contains some information from the Mankai Playback series of cards, revealing some of the characters’ shared history and some unexpected links, such as Kumon and Misumi sharing a high school even though they never studied there at the same time. Working adults without a known affiliation form the bulk of the Institution charts, making analysis past the student group a bit difficult.
This table takes a look at everybody’s family relations, as I was curious to see if Mankai Company had a lot of only children, and whether being an older brother could really be considered as Tsuzuru Minagi’s defining trait. This table was compiled pretty quickly, and it sums up the number of siblings per Main Cast character, per troupe and in total, with conditional formatting to make pinpointing the largest values easier. The table also specifies if the character in question is an older, younger or middle child, as well as the sibling(s)’ names if they’re known.
To my surprise, Mankai actually doesn’t have a lot of only children, and my previous impression was probably because the game’s stories don’t go too deeply into many of the characters’ family lives with the exception of the Minagi clan’s 10 brothers and the Hyodo brothers since both of them are in the Main Cast. If you expand the definition of family to include found family, I would need to say that everyone has 23 other brothers since Mankai is practically one big family. However, I did add the family which was part of Hisoka and Chikage’s shared history, and included step-siblings in the count (Sakyo and Citron).
In total, there are 32 Mankai siblings, which adds up to a lot of side characters. Brothers are more common to sisters (unsurprising considering the all-male cast at Mankai as well as the game’s audience), and the Minagis give Spring Troupe the honour of having the largest extended family. Summer and Autumn Troupes have a pretty high average number of siblings while Winter Troupe doesn’t have a lot (only 2 biological brothers). All in all, I can conclude that my friend was right: The number of siblings in Mankai Company can be described as 1/2/3/Minagi…
Omi’s Menu
Omi Fushimi is the indisputable head chef in Mankai Company, and these two charts describe what you’ll see often and what you’ll see less often on the dining table! Everyone has a very wide range of favourite and least favourite foods, which makes it amazing that Omi can cook food which appeases everyone (not counting the Director’s one-track mind for curry).
The Least Favourite Food chart has a pair of caviar haters (it’s even a link skill for stat boosts in the game), a pair of saints which don’t mind eating anything, a few varieties of vegetable haters, someone who judges food based on their triangularity and the oddly specific “pineapple in sweet-and-sour pork”. Oh, and pig’s feet. To summarise, all hail Chef Fushimi…
Lastly, here’s a handy dashboard of the troupe and image colours for anyone who might need them! This concludes the Character Information compilation and Part 1 of A3! x Data, stay tuned for the next part! Before you go, here’s more Chef Fushimi:
As thanks for bearing with me for the entire article, here’s the Instagram-friendly version of this article, which also served as an earlier draft that didn’t have the Tableau analysis! You can find the full Instagram series here!
