Review cover Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X (PlayStation Vita)
Official GBAtemp Review

Product Information:

  • Release Date (NA): August 30, 2016
  • Release Date (EU): August 30, 2016
  • Publisher: SEGA
  • Developer: SEGA
  • Genres: Rhythm
  • Also For: PlayStation 4

Game Features:

Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative
Hatsune Miku and co. make the jump to PS4 for the first time, and to the Vita once more. Let's check out SEGA's latest vocaloid rhythm game!

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SEGA’s iconic vocaloid rhythm series is back with a new title, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X. Diva X is the first game in the franchise to release on the Playstation 4, and eighth entry in the Project Diva series.

For those returning to the series, not much has changed in terms of gameplay. When you start a song, black and white symbols matching the PlayStation’s face buttons will appear on screen, while colorized symbols will float in from offscreen. The player’s job is to match these buttons as they overlap to the beat of the music. There are five different ratings you can get on each note; Cool, Good, Safe, Bad, and Miss, depending on how well you timed the button press. It’s the perfect example of easy to learn, difficult to master. The game starts out deceptively simple, but as you go up in difficulty, the game becomes a frantic rainbow juggle of trying to keep track of all the notes as they zoom by while trying to press the right buttons at the right times. Playing a track a few times over in order hit all the notes feels like an absolute blast, and is very satisfying.

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New to Diva X are “rush notes”, where you quickly mash the button on a single note to get lots of points. These rush notes take the place of the now removed double and link star notes from previous entry, Diva F2nd. Pressing a button in rapid succession and having to immediately jump back to playing regular notes afterwards can often get a little awkward, and it’s easy to get thrown off of the whole rhythm. They don’t really add anything of substance to the gameplay formula, either.

The game also offers a little “story mode”, in the form of “cloud requests”. In these cloud requests, it’s up to you to help Hatsune Miku and her friends bring vitality back to five worlds, each based on a different genre of music. These five zones consist of Cool, Cute, Elegant, Classic, and Quirky and contain songs corresponding to their respective genre. As you successfully complete songs in each “cloud”, short cutscenes will play out between the lead singers as they congratulate everyone on a job well done. It’s utterly cheesy, but cute at the same time.


In order to beat the songs in story mode, you must not only play the song with minimal mistakes, but you also have to max out a “voltage meter” in the corner of the screen. How does one do that? By dressing up stylishly, of course! As you replay songs in story mode, you will receive modules and accessories that you can equip to each of the game’s six main singers. Every item is defined by the same categories as the music, so if Hatsune Miku wears an elegant outfit while singing an elegant song, the voltage meter will have a multiplier added to it, making it raise much faster than if you had nothing equipped. There are over 300 different accessories and modules to unlock, and all of them have passive abilities, so there’s a massive amount of creativity and enjoyment to be had from customizing the perfect outfit for each vocaloid.

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You can also obtain "gifts" from playing songs in cloud request mode. These gift items range from foods, to musical instruments, to random pieces of furniture that you can give to the vocaloids to raise their friendship levels with the player. All of them have specific tastes, so you have to figure out which character likes what item the most, and give it to the right person. Some of the gifted items will appear on the main menu screen, and you can customize that, too. It's an interesting little feature, but it can be a bit time consuming to raise the friendship levels, for little more than a PSN trophy.

There is, of course, a standard “free play” option as well, where you can customize the singers and stage to your heart’s content. The only caveat is that you must complete the song in story mode before you can select it in free play. In this mode, there is no voltage meter, and you are instead graded purely on how accurate your timing is. Diva X offers 24 different songs and 6 medleys to choose from, as well as 4 difficulty levels, ranging from easy, normal, hard and extreme.

Another new change present in this game, is that instead of focusing on wacky music videos where the singers act out crazy stories like in past titles, Diva X opts to focus more on the choreography of the vocaloids moving to the music. Sometimes, there’s just too much movement going on onscreen, making it almost impossible to see where the notes are because of rapidly flashing lights and the camera zooming in and out, which leaves an odd sense of vertigo.

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A few notable features worth bringing up is that the game supports cross-saves between the PS4 and Vita versions, as well as offers support for the Playstation TV. Any and all DLC is cross-buy, though the initial game is not.

Though there are a few less songs than most previous entries in the series, and a few steps backwards have been taken in terms of gameplay, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X is a fun, addictive rhythm game that offers a ton of customization, and is more than worth your time.

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Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Fantastic gameplay
  • Immense amount of things to unlock and customize
What We Didn't Like ...
  • Raising character affection levels is often incredibly tedious
  • Sometimes there's just too much action on screen
8
Gameplay
The gameplay, as usual, is fluid and fun. With 4 difficulty levels, there's a lot of fun to be had from mastering the game's mechanics, and getting down note presses perfectly.
6
Presentation
While the modules and accessories have nicely rendered models, the characters themselves animate a bit awkwardly at times. Not to mention that the flashy visuals sometimes detract from the ability to play the songs, just because of how busy it all looks.
7
Lasting Appeal
Completing the initial "story mode" should take no more than 5 hours. Of course, the main appeal to rhythm games is replaying songs in order to perfect them, so with a 24 track list, players will have a good amount of songs to continually work through. There's also extra things to do, such as maxing out the friend meter with the singers, and getting all the accessories and modules.
8
out of 10

Overall

All in all, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X is a little bit of a downgrade from past Diva titles, but the core gameplay is still as great as ever. If you’re a fan of rhythm games, definitely give this a go
Nice review! Not gonna lie, I think the story mode thing is annoying. It was already annoying that you had to beat every song in normal and hard to unlock the extreme version in the previous PD's.

It costs almost twice as much as this game, but I guess after buying Future Tone (224 songs and 300+ modules) this game feels a bit underwhelming.
 
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Honestly, bleh. This game only has 24 songs and 6 medleys, which is a paltry amount for a full price rhythm game. The medleys are stitched together poorly most of the time, having weird pauses between songs and mediocre at best song transitions. There's like only one actually hard chart in the game too, which is a medley of previous hard songs from the series - so if you've played any of the previous games, you'll breeze through this - and that one requires beating the story mode TWICE to unlock. The story mode makes it even more annoying to unlock all the songs, and the module drop system means that you have to grind songs in story mode to get all costumes (since you can get duplicates!). Then there's the videos (PVs), which were one of my favorite things about the series. In the older games, there were many really cool and dynamic PVs, like Two-faced Lovers, Kagerou Daze and Rolling Girl. This game has none of that. Every single PV is just a dance routine on a mostly static stage (that may have some moving props, but nothing amazing).
If you're a fan of the series, do yourself a favor and get a Japanese PSN account with Future Tone instead. As @invaderyoyo said, it's a bunch more expensive, but it has literally 7.5 times as many songs and the higher difficulty levels are much more challenging. (of course it also has lower difficulties, like every other game in the series.) It's much, much better than this game.
 
@Arras Hahaha, I didn't wanna completely crap on this game in someone else's review, but yeah, I agree with everything you wrote.
I think it's the returning fans that will be most underwhelmed, though. If you're new to the series and you like rhythm games I think you'd enjoy this. If you're a long time fan you should definitely save up ¥8400 and get Future Tone.
 
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@Arras @invaderyoyo That's the impression I was getting from other veterans of the series. I've only played F2nd, but I thought Diva X was a great game, though not as good as F2nd. If we're not making comparisons, this is a pretty good game on it's own imo. If we're stacking it up to the (hopefully soon to be localized) competition of Future Tone, then yeah, X is blown out of the water it seems.
 
@Chary Hmm, do you really think Future Tone will get localized? It didn't even get a physical release in Japan. If it does, though, I'll definitely be buying it again.

It would probably even let you transfer Japanese save data like F2nd and X.
 
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@invaderyoyo i have to disagree with you. This game is better then any main series games I've played (all of them) I love the melodies and the song selection. Even if you're a returning player I would recommend you pick this up! The melodies and new songs at least for me add enough new content that I don't regret paying almost as much as future tone for this.
 
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@Chary Hmm, do you really think Future Tone will get localized? It didn't even get a physical release in Japan. If it does, though, I'll definitely be buying it again.

It would probably even let you transfer Japanese save data like F2nd and X.
The problem is licensing the songs for western use. That's going to cost Sega a lot of money they could be using on sonic 2017 :P
 
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@invaderyoyo That's why I said hopefully, haha. I would say that sales figures on Diva X in the west will influence the chances on Future Tone getting a localized release, though.

@BurningDesire Yeah, the press email from SEGA went on about all the legalities of so many songs from so many people being in one game. To quote one part of it " the individuals who created the songs not only get recognition, but they retain creator’s rights too! (Which is why Miku releases have suuuper long legal lines!)" I imagine that must be a pretty costly process.
 
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@BurningDesire That's great that you enjoyed this one! I don't think it's bad, but I guess Future Tone spoiled me. I played everything too, hmm well, except Dreamy Theater.
Future tone spolied me too. I felt my monitor was buggy when I tried the ps4 version of the game because the models looked like crap! But then I remembered... Man why can't everything be like future tone. That's such a good game!
 
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T
Sweet review! If I had a PS4 would probably give it a buy!
 
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I remember this game being the reason why I got a PSP in the first place, and now I couldn't care less, lol.
 
I dunno if anyone else has said this directly, but Diva X is NOT the first PS4 Project Diva. Future Tone is, and it's fun. I do want Diva X when it becomes available in a mere two days. Does Diva X on PS4 run at 60 FPS? FT has spoiled me with such and when I drop to 30 FPS on my Vita to play PjD anything I need to readjust. <_<
 
I dunno if anyone else has said this directly, but Diva X is NOT the first PS4 Project Diva. Future Tone is, and it's fun. I do want Diva X when it becomes available in a mere two days. Does Diva X on PS4 run at 60 FPS? FT has spoiled me with such and when I drop to 30 FPS on my Vita to play PjD anything I need to readjust. <_<
Based on Youtube footage, it seems to run at 60, yes. There's absolutely no excuse for it not to anyway.
 
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I dunno if anyone else has said this directly, but Diva X is NOT the first PS4 Project Diva. Future Tone is, and it's fun.
I meant this purely in terms for western official releases. As far as I could tell, the game ran at 60fps when I played it on my Vita TV.
 
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I meant this purely in terms for western official releases. As far as I could tell, the game ran at 60fps when I played it on my Vita TV.
It's also the first mainstream diva game. (I don't consider Arcade ports as mainstream) since they are only released in Japan.
 
Never understand how this game is fun other then the waifu eye candies. All I see is just synchronized button mashing. Only way I'll play this game is if you tempers create a nude patch/mod for it. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
 
Review cover
Product Information:
  • Release Date (NA): August 30, 2016
  • Release Date (EU): August 30, 2016
  • Publisher: SEGA
  • Developer: SEGA
  • Genres: Rhythm
  • Also For: PlayStation 4
Game Features:
Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative

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