The Bonkurasu Brigade

I’ve spent five days being addicted to this game. I play it on the train ride to school, often missing my stop, and I play it during lunch break, and forget to eat.

This review will take a look at Project Diva’s gameplay and interface. All images used come from the visual library in the game.

Gameplay

The first thing that struck me was the high difficulty in obtaining a combo. The judgement is rather strict, and pressing too early will cause a break. I’ve noticed that pressing a split second later than you usually would would allow you to combo better.

Aside from the free-play mode, there is also Miku’s room, in which you control a camera and follow Miku around her room as she interacts with the various objects you unlock. It’s rather interesting (Much like watching someone play The Sims), and you get to take screencaps and do weird things to them like in Luka Days 8D.

The Bad

Starting off with the negative. There are some pretty strange things about the interface that makes you wonder what Sega is doing with their beta-testers and debugging team.

First off, and probably the most important: The lack of an auto-save function. I spent two hours clearing song after song and made the mistake of switching off my PSP.

It’s not surprising, given that music games like DJMax and Taiko no Tatsujin have an auto-save function you can enable, and because I was so used to that, I didn’t bother saving the first time round. It’ll be more convenient if Project Diva (hereafter referred to as PD) had this so I won’t have to worry about saving each time I obtain a high score.

Secondly, the two-step confirmation before the start of each game in free-play mode. There are two screens which prompt you to select ‘Yes’ before you start a song. The second screen is for one to turn off the beat sound, but that could have been integrated into another menu in the selection screen. It is also a chore to keep switching off the sounds, because I prefer to play without it.

Another fairly major gripe I have with the game: It is completely dependent on one thumb. Sure, the inclusion of all four buttons on hard mode may up the difficulty a notch, but it gets rather boring when you only need one hand to play. I’ve seen some reviews draw comparisons with PD’s gameplay to Beats, and Beats utilises both the D-pad and right-hand buttons.

Lastly, the wait time during the intro, before the beats start to appear gets annoying, especially if you are trying for perfect. An Ouendan-style implementation would have been better, to skip right to where the first beat falls. The Retry/Return buttons should be tweaked, too. Retry is the default selection, and is only helpful when you fail a song. It gets irritating when you try to skip the score/ranking scroll and press Retry instead. The ED is also too long for its own good, and you can’t skip it.

The Good

The song unlocking sequence! I suppose many a supercell tard went straight for the tab ryo’s songs were under. It’s a nice way to unlock the songs you want to play first. The rhythm (Or beatmaps, to use osu terms) is easy to pick up, especially so if you’ve heard the song before.

Next, the screencap function, which can be used anywhere in-game except the loading screens and when you are in free-play mode. To screencap, just press the right shoulder button and save. It can be used to capture images in your visual library, and is thus a roundabout way to get loading screens and PV images on your memory stick.

Which brings us to item interaction. In Miku’s room, Miku does a lot of strange things which leads to my spamming of the right shoulder button. Things like air-karaoke, and trying to balance a book on her head, and doing stiff leaps in front of posters. It’s all very cute to observe.

Lastly, the edit mode. In edit mode, you can create new beatmaps to the music library in PD (Which includes awesome music like Luka’s Double Lariet, and Miku’s Saihate), or import your own music to create beatmaps from (Just press the shoulder button to access the music in your PSP memory card). There are many options to choose from after that, like camera angles, poses, scenes and even a real-time beat allocation function. The file can be saved and edited, or shared.

Some maps are up over at the Project Diva atwiki uploader. This function makes up for the disappointing lack of Black Rock Shooter, and many other songs, and will probably keep fans playing for a longer time. I’ve tried a few maps so far, but some aren’t very good yet, probably because they need time to familiarize themselves with the edit interface. Nevertheless, give these a try (You just need to extract the file to the savefile folder in your PSP memory stick, and put the accompanying music file in your Music folder).

To end off, if you enjoyed the songs in PD, an album has been announced today. Titled “Hatsune Miku ‐Project DIVA‐Original Song Collection”, the album will retail for 3000円 on the 22nd of July, and will include a total of 13 tracks (Tracklist over at Famitsu).