Review: "Hatsune Miku: Project Diva"

Finally, a Hatsune Miku game has been released (over a week ago) on the PSP. Although it is in japanese, everything on the main menu is relatively easy to navigate (just click and try). In other words, you don't need to know japanese to play the game.

Project Diva is yet another rhythm game (duh!). PSP buttons like triangle, circle, square or cross will fly from outside the screen to an allocated destination on the screen itself. It's pretty self explanatory. Press the corresponding button when it hits the destination. Like most rhythm game, such visuals are only meant to be a guide. What and how you press (ie the rhythm of pressing) will be mostly based on the song itself like most rhythm games.

But to me, that game itself is just a sidetrack from the real deal. When you play the music game itself, the background will actually be the PV of the song (think MTV). Unlike most rhythm games, in Project Diva, you actually want to see the background more than the game itself. To unlock the clean PV (without the notes flying all about), you must score rather high on the song itself, which a large portion comes from "Chance Time". While playing a song, you will come upon a "Chance Time" section of the song, where the more you chain, the score you get will exponentially increase. I repeat: Exponentially. So if you break your chain, especially in the middle, your Chance Time score will be crap. This makes the rest of the game rather redundant; olher than to survive the song, there's no real bonus for chains.

The PVs that were created were actually very good. Hatsune really feels alive in all the songs. Her dance moves are great, her flow is smooth, and they even got the detail down to her facial expressions. Just like the really good youtube.com Hatsune Miku videos.

Since this game is ALL about Hatsune (ultimately), you get to dress her up, customize her room, and alot of misc stuff I probably haven't explored yet (still busy unlocking PVs and songs lol). There are even popular Hatsune Miku songs like Melt.

This game is definitely for Hatsune Miku fans.