BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! — Character Information Database and Tableau Analysis
The time I decided to raid the Bandori Wikia to make my own character database.
Hello! This article is part two of my guide to use my Bandori Event Card Tracker and Character Database spreadsheet, as well as my experiences from making and analyzing it. Part one goes into the event card tracker, and can be found here: BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! — Event Card Tracker
Before you continue, do open the spreadsheet and refer to it while reading this article as the embedded CSV tables in this article might be a little bit unwieldy to view since the table is quite big. Additionally, I have created a Tableau workbook showing the visualizations used in this article: Bandori and ARGONAVIS Character Information Do view the workbook for easier interaction with the data!
For readers who don’t play BanG Dream (also known as Bandori):
- Bandori is a rhythm game where you tap notes to the beat of Japanese songs to score points. If you do well enough, you get a shiny pink Full Combo star for your efforts. For a more technical look at choosing the best songs for scoring, check another one of my articles out: BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! Song Meta Exploratory Analysis using Tableau
- As of October 2020, the game consists of 25 characters in 5 bands (35 in 7 bands if you’re playing the Japanese version of the game which is a year ahead in content). Cards in the game are characterized by rarity, character and attribute, making for a lot of combinations which affect your band power and score. In general you’ll want a high-rarity team in the same band with the same attributes if you prioritize raw band power.
- The game regularly runs events which come with prizes such as resources for upgrading items and new cards (sometimes really pretty-looking cards) for your collection. Cards from previous events can be found in the Michelle Sticker Exchange and obtained using Michelle stickers. For more about deciding which card to get, check out my article for part 1!
- Fans of the franchise don’t just love the game, they love the characters too! All 35 Bandori girls have distinct personalities and quirky interactions with each other, while the 25 boys from the newer ARGONAVIS series have potential to grow and develop to be as well-loved as Bandori’s characters.
Let’s begin!
Character Information
Here’s what you’ll see if you open the Character Information sheet of the Google Sheets workbook:
The table is pretty overwhelming, so I’ll break it down first.
I probably should explain why the table is so huge: I included the 25 characters from Bandori’s spinoff, ARGONAVIS by BanG Dream. To prevent confusion, ARGONAVIS (all caps) refers to the entire Bandori spinoff while Argonavis refers to the band. This distinction is also used officially, so I’ll stick to it here. Short explanation of ARGONAVIS:
- They’re all male compared to Bandori’s all-female cast.
- So far, the characters from both franchises have zero contact with other. ARGONAVIS is pretty new though, so this might change in the future.
- On average, ARGONAVIS’ characters are older than Bandori’s (mostly university students instead of high school) and the series is supposed to have a slightly more mature tone. However, the basic premise of characters forming a band as well as the whole anime + game + live bands concept still remains the same.
- Essentially: Bandori but with boys instead.
Other than my analysis, I wanted to make an information repository which could be used by other fans. To collect the data, I scraped the profile information from the Wikia pages for all 60 characters in both Bandori and ARGONAVIS. A typical profile looks like this:
There’s a lot more detail than what I took, but I prioritized traits which could be grouped and compared with the help of Tableau. These are the variables I scraped:
- Name: Quite obvious why.
- Band: Quite obvious why since Bandori and ARGONAVIS are about bands.
- Instrument: Specific roles within each band. I didn’t use the specific models since that wouldn’t let me group characters together because everyone has a unique instrument.
- School: Used to estimate age. Affects who characters might interact with.
- Year: Used to estimate age.
- Class: For future analyses, perhaps. Quite a few of Bandori’s bands are classmates too, and it’s interesting how some of ARGONAVIS’ characters are in the same faculty.)
- Birthday (Used to estimate age, also affects gameplay as special prizes are given during characters’ birthdays.)
- Zodiac (For fun, also because it was already there in the page.)
- Height (The more data, the more fun I’ll have…)
- Image Color (Every character and band has a unique color assigned to them as a signature of sorts. I collated the hex color codes to make my Tableau experience less painful and more relevant to the bands/characters.)
- Epithet (Bandori only, these are just one-liners describing the character. Thought they were fun to have for fans but otherwise of not much use in my analysis.)
- Weight (ARGONAVIS only, unfortunately no weights given for the Bandori characters.)
Other variables which weren’t directly from the profiles:
- Franchise (Equivalent to gender in this case, decided to do this so I would have more filtering options.)
- Eye color/Hair color: I just roughly estimated the colors from pictures and Wikia descriptions (which weren’t available all the time). Anime hair and eyes come in a lot of shades, but I “rounded them off” to the nearest basic color to prevent the giant mess I had to deal with in the superhero dataset.
- Age: This was surprisingly tricky. Bandori never gave the ages of any of the characters, and it wasn’t until I saw the ARGONAVIS data that I managed to find an estimate. One of the ARGONAVIS boys is 12 years old (youngest in that show), and he’s in the first year of middle school. Going by my knowledge that Japanese middle and high schools last for 3 years each, and that university is right after high school with no break for army enlistment (which is the case for some countries), I was almost able to estimate the ages for everyone. However, I found out that the Japanese school year starts in April, not January, which meant that everyone who was born from January to March is technically a year younger than most of their academic year. A fair bit of panicking and editing later, I managed to get a reasonably accurate estimate of everyone’s ages. YAY!
Note about appellations: The Japanese have a lot of ways to say “I” or to address another person. This variation is pretty fascinating, but somebody else already did an amazing chart for Bandori’s original 25 characters. Furthermore, the ARGONAVIS Wikia lacked information about this (and a lot of other things), so I decided not to focus on this.
Time for the analysis! I grouped my visualizations into dashboards before making a short Tableau story out of them in order to highlight trends among the character lineup.
1. The Basics
Treemaps were my weapon of choice here as they allowed me to group everyone nicely while being able to display details as labels. The colors helped too.
Characters by band: A simple introduction to everyone and their roles in their bands. And yes, there really is someone who does double duty as trombonist and keyboardist.
Instruments: The previous chart, but sorted differently. Most bands follow the standard format of vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard and drums, but some mix it up with double guitars, a violin, DJ or even vocals and a saxophone at the same time!
School/Work/Organization: A stalker’s guide to everyone. Almost everyone in Bandori is in high school (majority are either in Hanasakigawa High or Haneoka High), while ARGONAVIS has a wide range of ages from middle schoolers to working adults! I’m not very sure why the ARGONAVIS college kids are in the same school even though they are supposed to hail from different regions of Japan… probably part of the game plot which I’m not too familiar with…
2. Sizing everyone up
Please note that the axes don’t start at zero because I wanted a better view of the graph, and because it’s a bit useless to find a 0-year old who’s 0 cm tall and weighs 0 kg.
Height against Age: Not a very high R-squared value of 0.23 (makes sense since we stop growing at a certain age). Using the power of filters, We can see that the average height for Bandori is 157.78 cm while the average height for ARGONAVIS is 174.84 cm. In real life:
The average height of 17-year old Japanese men is 170.7cm (5’6”) and 157.8cm (5’1”) for women. When it comes to weight, men weigh in with 62.5kg (137.7lbs) and women with 52.9kg (116.6lbs). (Source)
We can see that despite the unrealistic look of the anime cast, their relative sizes are actually pretty close to reality! If the character’s data point is above/below the trendline, it means that they’re taller/shorter than what their age would suggest! Of course, the lack of data points for many of the ages messes with the trendline’s accuracy.
Height against Weight: R-squared value of 0.75, so a reasonably decent positive correlation which fits with what we know in real life… Looks like the tallest and heaviest person is also one of the oldest (he’s 32)! Interestingly enough, the other person who’s also 32 years old is shorter and lighter than almost half the ARGONAVIS cast. Average weight is 63.84 kg, which is also pretty close to real life! Characters which have data points above/below their trendline would be taller/shorter than expected given their weight, and this shows in the character’s build (skinny/buff).
Age: From what’ve seen in the Basic Information sheet, the vast majority of the cast are teenagers, and the average is thrown off by the 5 working adults (they’re in one band). The oldest person (32 years old) is almost thrice the age of the youngest person (12 years old)! It can also be seen that ARGONAVIS’ age range is much larger than Bandori’s, but the average of its characters are college-age instead of Bandori’s high school age.
Height: Whoa, not a lot of overlap between the genders… The tallest girl is the height as Argonavis’ vocalist, and he’s one of the shorter ones in his band. The shortest boy is 12-years-old, and it isn’t too surprising that he’s shorter than the girl who’s his age because that girl is abnormally tall. She also wears 6 cm (I think it’s that high) platforms regularly which gives an even larger height boost. The shortest character overall is a 14-year-old who’s 140cm tall. Funnily, she’s always placed next to her band’s vocalist who’s the tallest Bandori character at 172 cm tall, and that height difference is pretty amazing to look at…
3. Hair/Eye Colors
Do note that the colors are approximate and based on what I saw, which might not be completely 100% accurate even though I’m quite sure that my eyesight isn’t that bad. Different shades are lumped into the same color for simpler grouping.
From the Color Combinations chart, we can see that blond hair and brown eyes is the most common combination with 5 characters. The next most common combination is green hair and green eyes with 3 characters, but note that 2 of them (they happen to be twins) have hair that’s more teal than green. Pink hair and pink eyes also have 3 characters possessing the combination.
Even though black hair and blue eyes are separately the most commonly occurring colors, when put together they only appear in 2 characters. Couldn’t find too many trends here since anime colors tend to defy nature… hence orange hair and eyes…
4. Best character’s birthday!
Remember, the two franchises are separate so you’ll only be able to reap the joys of June 16’s triple birthdays if you play both games… June 15 and March 20 happen to be the birthdays for each franchise’s set of twins.
It’s interesting to see how their zodiac signs hint to them being twins: Pisces has two fish in its symbol while Gemini is the twin symbol. Please note that I don’t know anything about zodiacs and found everything from Google, so I don’t know enough to go in-depth. What I do know is that Hagumi, Kokoro, Misaki Goto and Yuto are very impulsive and seem like good fits for Leo. Misaki Okusawa, Kenta and Rinko tend to be rather level-headed and organised, which I suppose fits the Libra stereotype… now I’m wondering if this was deliberate on Bandori’s part.
As for gameplay and birthdays, October is the best month overall and the best month for Bandori, with the end of the month feeling like Christmas came early. March is also not too bad thanks to the Hikawa twins’ birthday. ARGONAVIS has a remarkably even birthday distribution with 2 birthdays a month except for June which gets a bonus birthday thanks to the Nijo twins…
5. Signature Colors
HTML Color Codes: This is a color palette for every single Bandori/ARGONAVIS character and band. It’s not used for any direct analysis, but I made this with the hopes that other Bandori fans would find this helpful or at the very least nice to look at. I found it pretty interesting how both franchises had quite an even spread of colors across the spectrum of colors, even though the franchises themselves follow many gender tropes.
With that, this concludes my analysis of both franchises’ character information. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you haven’t checked it out, here’s part one of my spreadsheet guide! If you have any feedback for this visualization and article, do let me know here!
