Game review: Project Diva F for PS Vita
I mentioned in an earlier post that I picked up two PS Vita games while attending Lucca Comics and Games, one of which was based solely on me recognizing the character Hatsune Miku because I’d bought a bag with her likeness at a prior con the year before. I bought Project Diva F, and had barely unwrapped it before I thought I should get Assassin’s Creed: Liberation too, in case I didn’t like or couldn’t fully understand the import game.
Ha. I’ve played Assassin’s Creed three times total, and Project Diva F has dominated my game time even before I left Lucca. A rhythm game, the screen plays music videos with buttons prompts or star icons to indicate screen swipes. At higher skill levels, more button swaps and swiping gestures are needed to pass the same songs, a rather generous collection featuring a nicely balanced J-pop vocal cast.
A caveat. Do you like anime theme songs, or do you find them irritating? I LOVE anime theme songs, and for me, the best parts of some shows ARE the theme songs. I’ve also listened to J-pop and loved it, so this game is familiar ground for me, musically speaking. That helps draw me in, that I like the music and don’t mind seeing the same animated sequences over and over.
The other caveat to be aware of is, this game is HARD. Not hard to understand, mind you. In fact, I sorted out how to get to the tutorial and learned how to play the game knowing only hai, and iie. The tutorial has this quirky but infectious earworm song to start you off with, and then you go into the main game with five videos to choose from. Pass a song and you’ll unlock a new video.
At first, I couldn’t pass ANY song on any skill level. Symbols seem to rush at their targets too fast to keep up with, and even on Easy, when you only press the circle button and swipe the screen, it’s possible to fall behind the beat. Hitting each target dead on earns you one Cool point, while being slightly off center will earn a Fine. There are no points given for any other range, though there are Safe, Sad, and Worst scores for each beat. Missing a beat will also mute the singer’s voice, though there is a setting in the option to turn this off. Most beats are tapped, but to keep your thumb busy, so symbols have a trailing tail, meaning you have to press and hold the button, releasing at the end of the tail for another Cool or Fine point.
To pass a song, you fill up a score bar at the bottom with three white lines near the end. These lines are the goals for passing with a Standard score, or with Great or Excellent. There is of course one further passing grade, and I’ll get to it in a moment.
After unlocking all the songs on Easy mode, I began working with Normal mode levels. These are the same videos, but with more prompts for two face buttons, and for use of the d-pad in combination with the face buttons; and with different patterns than the Easy mode. Normal mode is a LOT faster, and falling behind can be devastating for a score. I’ve still got four songs on Normal that I still can’t pass even after 30 or so attempts. I can’t even get close to the speed needed, and thus I can’t unlock those songs in Hard mode. Which is a moot point, because Hard mode is insanely difficult. The few levels I have tried it on have sneered at me and smacked my thumbs around like…like little girls’ thumbs. And while those little girl thumbs were crying, the game kicks their puppy.
Or the game calls me Cheap. Which is like almost as bad as puppy kicking.
Despite this high difficultly level, the game has me hooked, and I’ve heard many of the songs twenty and thirty times now in my efforts to wring out another perfect score. I wouldn’t be this enamored of the game if I didn’t like the music or the anime videos, but I’m a big manga fan, and like I said, I’m a fan of this kind of music. Turning this into a game is like a form of digital drug, and long after I post this review, I’m going to be trying to unlock the rest of this game. And maybe once better translations come out, I can buy some of these helper items and cheat my way through Hard mode. (>_>)
I decided to see if I could go back to Easy mode and unlock a perfect score, with all beats hit on Fine or Cool. It is possible, and I’ve since passed seven songs with a glowing gold Perfect score. Keeping a chain going all the way through a song, even a short song, is a lot harder than you think. I’ve sunk whole nights into passing one song, only to bash my fingers hopelessly against another.
Supposedly, there are items I can buy to help my game, but I can’t find reliable translations for those menus, so for now the items are a mystery to me.
These scores all earn you Diva points, which are meant to be spent on the above mentioned helper items, or in the Diva rooms. This is like a virtual pet side game, but with idol singers. If the game has a weak spot, it’s this, and it’s because so little effort was put into animations. Everyone does the same motions for every gift they’re given. You have to give gifts to level up the idols to level 6. At this point, you unlock a trophy for spending a “year” with this idol, and there’s a cake you buy them to celebrate a birthday. A cake that costs 30,000 points. Leveling up ain’t cheap either, and aside from unlocking the trophies, it doesn’t add anything to the main game. It’s a dress up doll house, except most of the outfits kind of suck. (One character, Meiko, has a dress with a belt around her boobs. It doesn’t look comfy at all.)
The side game’s biggest flaw is all the “are you sure” menus that pop up, and all the loading screens in between every menu swap. SEGA went and put in some lovely loading screen art, enough so that the loading panels are rarely monotonous. But there’s a LOT of loading screens and “are you sure?” popups peppered throughout the virtual idol maintenance process. So it’s dull AND tedious.
And, the two male idol singers have the same body motions as the four females, so once you’ve leveled up one idol, you just click through the animations later because you’ve already seen them before. So the side game is only there for completists who want to get all the trophies. I really feel like this could have been more fun, if only the characters were all given their own distnct motions and personalities instead of all being stuck to the same polite girl animations.
Moving along, if ever there was a game to prove the Vita’s ruggedness, it’s Project Diva. I think I’ve gone through a million button presses in less than a month, and my thumbs are sore from all the manic workouts. What makes this game addictive is combining catchy J-pop singles with flashy, pretty music videos and tossing in a simple premise of hitting the right button at the right time. And let me talk about those video on this screen. The Vita’s screen is made for bright flashy colors, and this game video serve as a proud tech demonstration of how good the Vita screen is.
The music sounds good whether I use headphones or the Vita’s speakers, and there’s only one song where I didn’t feel the beat of the song ever matched the prompts. All the others have this natural rhythm that you can fall into and use to coast in combos. But the song Dye is badly out of phase with the music. It can also be argued that Dye is a terrible song, a mash up of English words that almost mean something, but don’t quite work as coherent lyrics. (The song is so bad, I blocked the lyrics out as a traumatic memory.) The backing track is all over the place without a steady beat, so you can’t trust the music to guide you like in the other songs.
In any case, with only one weak song to spoil the fun, I’m giving SEGA’s Project Diva F an enthusiastic five stars, but only on the condition that you’re a fan of this kind of anime game. If J-pop isn’t your thing, you could end up hating the game and thinking I’m crazy for loving it so much. But if you like J-pop and anime, this will be perfect for you. I’ve grabbed the Vita thinking “I’ll just play one song.” Then after I finally score a Perfect, I look up and it’s 4 AM. Yes, Project Diva is that addicting. It’s the kind of game that makes me glad that I got a Vita. Now, if only Sega would import these games, using the same music and voice tracks, but with English menus. Because that would be bad ass. If they imported Project Diva, I love the game so much, I’d buy it again.
I want to gush more, but I’ll just shut up and go back to playing. I’ve still got three other idol singers to level up. And unlike Portal, there’s a real cake this time. Bonus!
