Game review: Project Diva f 2nd for PS Vita
Project Diva f is one of my favorite PS Vita games and remains one of the few I keep going back to whenever I need something to do for a few minutes of quick distraction. It’s also one of the few games I own multiple copies of, as I bought the English language version as soon as it became available in Europe. It’s just loads of fun to play with a simple “Simon Says” premise, and I’ve logged in well over 200 hours at this point. In my original review, I said that I might never unlock Hard mode, but I’ve been able to pass 70%, leaving only Extreme mode untouched. (Well, I did give the songs I unlocked an effort, but it was a bit like trying to dodge machine gun bullets…while swimming in a pool of molasses. In December. With lead boots on.)
I say this because I was extremely happy to see that Project Diva f 2nd would be getting an English language release relatively quickly, so I skipped the Japanese import and waited patiently, only to discover that I very much HATE the new game. I want to love it for many of the reasons I love the first, but the game steadfastly refuses to let me have fun with it. In fact it hurts me to play and insults me for not being fast enough to keep up with its unforgiving pace.
What this second game still gets right is the graphics and sound. The music is nice and varied, and the videos are all bright and flashy, if a bit surreal at times. Playing through the game on Easy mode, I frequently marveled at the number of songs available and their diverse range. There’s not quite as much variety as in the first game, but I didn’t mind losing a few of the pop metal styles in favors of some lighter synth-pop fare.
The basic gameplay is still mostly the same with only a few new additions, which don’t show up often in the Easy mode. But Easy mode is really only pressing one button, so to me, it’s like a warm up stretch before moving on to the same song in Normal. And that’s where the game fails to be fun. This is because Normal mode now has a collection of prompts that feel borderline Extreme, making it painful for me to try to keep up. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I assure you, I am not. Within 10-20 seconds of each song in Normal mode, my hand is cramping up, making it all but impossible to put in even half of the prompts blurring by on the screen. These come in with no seeming correlation of the beats per minutes, and the formerly accurate star rating system is also equally useless in determining the difficulty of any song. They’re all fuck-all hard now as far as I’m concerned.
A typical combination in the first game at the same level might ask for two or three taps of each button with a delay between shifts to another button. This second time around, the two prompts are interchanged in ways that were reserved for Hard and Extreme modes in the first game. It doesn’t help that there’s a new double scratch star, requiring taking both thumbs off the controls for a precise swipe on both sides of the screen. Scratches were previously the one area of any song that I couldn’t fail, even on Extreme mode. But congratulations, Sega, you made it impossible for me to even do a basic screen swipe without hurting my thumbs. AND, since I have to remove my thumbs from the controls, you guarantee I’ll also miss the next 3-6 button prompts as well. So now I’m rage quitting a fucking musical game on what should be one of the more forgiving difficulty levels. This is a new low in my life as a gamer, let me tell you.
In theory, I could just play on Easy forever, but I can’t do it without being angry at how little chance I’ll ever have of unlocking any songs in Normal mode. And it isn’t like I haven’t tried. I’ve wrecked my thumbs for several long nights trying to even make a tiny dent in the song list, and with only a few exceptions, I’m growling and backing out of the song within thirty seconds. Sometimes I’ll drop the Vita and shake my hands to relieve the stabbing pains, the whole time forming a colorful collection of slurs and curses at the people who thought ruining this game was a good idea.
I feel extremely cheated by Project Diva f 2nd, and I feel like I wasted my money supporting people who don’t care if the game has balance issues. Adding new features is fine, but cranking up the difficulty to the point of pain makes the game no fun at all, and nothing else can make up for that. I have to give Project Diva f 2nd 2 stars, and if this is the trend Sega plans to take with future sequels, I can say I won’t be bothering to buy any more of this series. That’s a damn shame because I really do want to like the sequel as much as I did the first Vita release. I just can’t because it fails at the most basic requirement I have for any game, to have fun playing it.
