It's still a decent value, but honestly, it would've been nice to just have it cost $60 and come with everything. $40 USD for 101 songs with $20 DLC, in comparison, seems like a step back. Future Tone had a similarly strange release, in that the title was essentially split in half and released in two $20-ish packages, but that was a bit more palatable with over 200 songs. The base game has 101 songs, which is nothing to sneeze at, but launching with content locked behind a paywall is a bad look. To wrap it all up, it’s not a particularly attractive game, with animations looking awkward in some places and downright eldritch in others.The immediate gut-punch, right out the gate, is that MegaMix will launch with 36 songs locked behind DLC. Also, the actual song performances, which are usually snazzy music videos, consist of little more than dancing through repetitious choreography.
On top of that, the gameplay feels more plodding and simplistic than other entries. Most of them aren’t even that memorable, either, with only a few standouts that I can recall. There are only thirty songs to choose from, compared to the usual 40-50. When a game makes me actively dislike the downright adorable Rin Kagamine, you know it’s doing something wrong.Īside from the progression system, the content in Hatsune Miku Project Diva X is incredibly scant. It’s slow, monotonous, and interspersed with obnoxious character interactions. This whole thing is made more tedious by having to be taken back to the main menu after each song, then reselecting your cloud, getting back to the song list, and then selecting your Vocaloid. Then you beat all of them, restore the Cloud’s Voltage and then you can play them on a higher difficulty level. In order to get new songs, you have to lock yourself into a Cloud, which has four to five songs. You can’t actually skip the story at all. All of it feels like a dull, skip-worthy affair.īut that’s the problem at the heart of this game. They just feel like forced fluff that doesn’t add anything meaningful to the experience. Bonus gimmicks, like giving your favorite Vocaloids gifts to raise their affection level, don’t help much. In execution, the hackneyed localization, which is half bad translation and half cringe-inducing internet lingo, sticks out way more than any memorable characterization. In theory, these would let you get a better sense of each character’s personality. Players yawn through virtual conversations with Miku and pals, with dialogue options that don’t really feel like options. The narrative component of Hatsune Miku Project Diva X is a complete bore. You’re their only hope, using your controller to make them perform and restore energy to the Clouds through collecting “Voltage.” The more Voltage you get, the more they can sing, and therefore they can restore the Clouds faster. All of the “Clouds” are losing their energy, which means the Vocaloids can’t sing. Now, players have to slog through a narrative to progress. And, in the case of the fantastic Project Mirai DX, there was a pretty compelling Tamagotchi-esque life sim surrounding the whole thing. It was simple, sure, but it was pretty traditional presentation for a rhythm game. Then you’d unlock the next song, and progress down the list, unlocking bonus content along the way.
You picked a song and played it until you got a good enough score to progress. Previous games gave you a list of songs to work through. The problems start at the aforementioned progression system. What’s left is a hollow and somewhat soulless husk of a game. Nothing else that’s endeared me or countless other fans to the franchise remains intact. In other words, this is Project Diva in name and basic mechanics only.
The method of progression has been eliminated, the scoring system is entirely different, and even the presentation of the music has been altered. Hatsune Miku Project Diva X fundamentally changes everything about the franchise outside of the core rhythm gameplay.