Hi I need like a baseline faq on team composition and leveling characters and such since I don't really understand what's happening. What's with the area items, when do they trigger? I'm used to love live and feeding girls to other girls to make them stronger...
There are four Types: Happy, Cool, Pure, and Powerful. Ryuseido and the Cafe will be where you should be pouring your (ingame) money into, into the respective area items of whatever Type is currently an event boost. Persona's is Cool for example, so you can upgrade Cool items to get big boosts. The next Event 'What a Wonderful World' (
https://bandori.party/events/) is also Cool, so yeah, upgrading Cool right now will help a lot in the short term. As for when boosts "kick in", they're just passive. You have a 5% boost for Cool from Area Items and have five Cool members? Each card's power towards your Band Power (what let's you get into the different rooms) is just automatically 5% stronger.
In general, aim for having a team of the same Type. It doesn't matter if they all come from different bands. The only time this isn't true is if you can either use a 3*/4* of a different Type, or a 2*. 2* really should never be used once you have five 3*. That said, Area Items are the real boosts here, a 3* only team can get some pretty crazy numbers (enough for Master Room) just from Area Items.
Band Area Items are for each specific band, obviously. Just buy the first level in these, basically. At least for now. Set your item to whichever band you have more members of in your party.
Use Auto-Set to speed things up a lot. It lets you select a Type and Band, and will set everything up (that it can from what you own).
NEVER BUY THE CHOCO CORNET OR BED OF FLOWER. The percentage gain is garbage no matter what.
You can still feed cards to other cards to raise Skill levels, but that's not necessary unless you want to tier or just wanna do so. I'd suggest not doing it until later/you understand what's going on, because these are serious sinks for Skills worth leveling.
With the above mentioned, you should at least know that each card has a Skill, and these proc when you hit the yellow notes you see ingame. You can view it from Members or Edit Team, just holdpress on a card to pull up their menu. Only your center Card has its skill proc when playing Multi Live, so try and put a "Scorer" center. That is, whichever card gets you a bigger score boost.