We discuss what makes a good Miku game before figuring out how Project Mirai DX stacks up on 3DS.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/hands-on-preview/41031/the-three-ingredients-of-a-good-hatsune-miku-game
In her third game since arriving overseas, Hatsune Miku makes her first appearance on 3DS in Western territories with Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX – following the Project DIVA games that both came out in the last year and a half on PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3. From playing all three English titles, I think there are three main criteria all Miku games should be judged by:
It’s a simple to control rhythm game that is very easy to learn and very hard to master.
It has a killer soundtrack with a large number of catchy Japanese pop and rock songs, featuring the vocaloid voices of Hatsune Miku and her friends.
It has cute anime girls being cute in happy, sometimes slightly bizarre music videos.
In Project Mirai DX, from the six hours I’ve played (clearing all 48 included songs and playing some of the other modes), it manages to hit the mark on all three of these aspects kind of, while missing the mark in other ways.
To explain how Hatsune Miku games work, they are rhythm games with simple controls. When controlling the game with buttons, you press the right face button or D-Pad direction at the right time (using button prompts on screen similar to Dance Dance Revolution). Sometimes you hold a button, sometimes you press both the D-Pad and a face button at the same time, and sometimes you don’t. In a special, secondary 3DS control method, you do the same thing using the Touch Screen. You press the right colored part of the touch screen at the right time using DDR-style prompts, and sometimes you hold, sometimes, you swipe, and sometimes you spin. The two styles have slightly different timing naturally, but they both work perfectly fine.
In Mirai, the rhythm game is played across three difficulties: Easy, Normal, and Hard. You are ranked using letter grades up to S+, you can fail songs, and you can use items to make songs harder and easier. The game nails all of this basic stuff perfectly, but it doesn’t fully nail it for one simple reason: the difficulty ceiling is a little too low. It’s worth noting there is no Extreme difficulty like in the PS3/Vita games, and the Hard difficulty in this game is just as relatively-but-not-too-cripplingly hard as the Hard difficulty in the other Miku games I’ve played. It’s a minor issue for most – maybe even a non-issue – but its lack of presence is missed.
The soundtrack also mostly hits the mark, with 48 songs that are all mostly different flavors of J-Pop. Some favorites like Melancholic and The World is Mine are featured, but my main issue with the song list is that most of the songs just aren’t that great. As someone who loved the music in Project DIVA f and liked the music in Project DIVA f 2nd, there are only maybe 5-10 memorable songs in the whole lineup. None of the songs are bad, but an enormous chunk of them are forgettable, and, dare I say, a little boring. Many of the song structures are so similar they bleed together, and while some are catchy, many of them just have nothing to say. As I play more leading up to the review of this game, my feelings could be changed, but I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed right now.
And moving on to the third ingredient of a good Hatsune Miku game, let’s talk cute anime girls. Though I don’t personally find any physical attraction to anime characters, it’s hard to play these games and not get in a good mood because of how nice and pleasant they are to look at. Project Mirai DX changes the art style of the game from realistically proportioned anime characters to a chibi style.
While chibi can be cute, I feel the style takes away some of their personality, and frankly, I just don’t think they look as good as their more realistic counterpart. This is certainly not helped by the visuals for stages, which are just the characters doing dance moves on different backgrounds, as opposed to the full music videos featured in other series games. There are some of those music videos here, but, at least to my taste, the visual style in Mirai is a huge step down from the DIVA games.
The game features other modes, including a Tomodachi Life-lite social mode and custom dance choreography, but I haven’t dug into these modes enough yet. Look out for more on these, as well as other modes, in the full review.
Topic: The Three Ingredients of a Good Hatsune Miku Game (Read 1134 times)
