Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX Review - The World Is Still Miku’s

Following the success of Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F and Project DIVA F 2^nd, Sega has now brought yet another Miku game to the West in Hatusne Miku: Project Mirai DX, otherwise known as Project Mirai 2 in Japan. Rather than follow the tradition set by the DIVA games, Project Mirai changes things up quite a bit, utilizing the 3DS platform choice as much as possible.

To begin with, the first and most glaringly obvious difference in Project Mirai is the character appearances, as they are modeled after Nendoroids – an SD style with big heads and a disproportionate body. The entire game uses this style, and it fits the 3DS platform well, especially for the use of the 3D effects.

Project Mirai also makes some adjustments that players of the DIVA games will be really happy to see, mostly ones that remove the abundance of loading screens that plagued the two games. For starters, the main menu of Mirai actually incorporates the characters’ room. With the menu on the touch screen and whatever partner Vocaloid you’ve chosen wandering around their room on the top screen. It’s a fairly small thing, but it makes each part of the game easier to access.

Right from the main menu, you can of course go straight to the rhythm game which is the focus, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Other options straight from the main menu include “Hang Out Mode”, “Dress Up”, “Alarm”, “Remodel”, “Change Partner”, “PuyoPyuo39!”, “Photos”, “Profiles”, “Stamps”, “Options”, “Piano”, and “Go Out”. The majority of the game is access straight through the main menu, unlike the DIVA games, which required players to hop through several loading screens to get anywhere.

Let’s talk about the “Hang Out” mode first. It takes the place of the old DIVA Room, where you can interact with your Vocaloid partner. From here you can give them treats that you’ve bought, give them an allowance, or play a minigame. The allowance option is actually a really neat option, where you give the Vocaloid some of the Mirai Points (MP) you’ve gotten and allow them to spend it how they want. They can go and buy new outfits (for less than it’d cost you!) or spend it on dance classes and other things, which they’ll keep a cute little log of.

The minigame available here is also a neat addition. As opposed to the Janken (Rock/Paper/Scissors) from the DIVA games, in Mirai you can play Reversi with your partner. The game will take place on the bottom screen, and you’ll get to see your partner play against you on the top screen. It’s a really small little thing, but with various animations for thinking and placing pieces, it’s really rather adorable. Oh, and you’ll get MP for playing, too, so it’s not just a waste of time, either.

Other options are all pretty self-explanatory. PuyoPuyo39 is a Tetris-like game for you to play and it even offers an ad-hoc mode. Profiles lists all the players that you’ve come across through StreetPass. Stamps function the same way that achievements and trophies do.

The alarm function also has a neat ability – it allows you to put Miku to sleep. This will turn the screen darker and turn off background music, allowing you to use the 3DS as an actual alarm if you want. Of course, it needs to be open to work, though, so there’s that.

The Piano option, aside from allowing you to just play the piano with your partner’s voice, also allows you to write a small tune for your partner to sing. There are limitations, unfortunately, like you can’t make a chord, but you can set your tune to play for your StreetPass card, as well as be the tune that wakes you up if you use the alarm. Again – silly little things that make the extras here awesome.

Now, with all that discussed, let’s talk about the meat of the game – the Rhythm Game.

First off, the game has a list of 47 songs total compared to DIVA F’s 44 and F 2^nd’s 40. You can also have other Vocaloids sing a number of the songs, which if you count different singers as songs, it bumps the list up to 78! Not bad at all for a portable Miku game, right?

The rhythm game allows two different play styles. First is the traditional Button Mode, which will have you playing with the A, B, X, and Y buttons as well as the D-pad for double presses and the Circle Pad for spins. The second option is to use the touch screen, which will have a few colored areas that you’ll need to tap in, as well as swipes and drawing circles. It’s different, but a really neat way to play that breaks away from the more traditional rhythm games.

The song selection menu also has the costume select built into it as well as the song and difficulty options, which eliminates two (or more) entire loading screens that were present in the DIVA games. It makes picking songs, difficulties and everything else infinitely easier – once you select a song, you go straight to it, and the two loading screens that were present in between in the DIVA games were one of my biggest gripes with them.

The gameplay itself functions very similarly to other Miku games, with buttons coming at you that you’ll need to press in time with the music. Duh. However, the game adopts a track that the buttons will be placed on instead of them just appearing on screen.

I think it was a great design choice and it definitely helps with understanding what is coming next. The game also does some neat things with the tracks, like drawing shapes and letters involved with the song’s theme – like drawing an LOL for LOL -Lots of Laugh-.

There are, however, a number of small issues that I’ve come across in the gameplay.

First, the difficulty just isn’t there. Even playing on Hard (there’s no Extreme) offers very little challenge to experienced players in comparison to the other games. I expected this to some degree with the lack of Extreme, but there just isn’t nearly as much challenge as I’d like. On the other hand, though, the barrier for entry is much lower thanks to it, so it’s a double edged sword here.

Secondly, there’s no offset option. While this isn’t really an issue for delay between the picture and the sound, it’s more of a personal option. For example, I have a bad habit of hitting buttons earlier than the game wants according to the visuals, but an offset option allows me to set a personal offset so I don’t screw up. It’s a small thing, but it may affect some people.

Third, the touch controls seem to be spotty at times. While it doesn’t really affect Easy or Normal, in Hard when there’s more notes coming at you at once, there seem to be some times where the touch screen doesn’t respond and you’ll miss a note that you’re positive you hit. It’s not really a big deal in most cases, but it’s really infuriating to lose that 200+ note streak to a missed note that you actually hit.

But, really that’s it. There’s not really much to complain about beyond personal gripes and taste, honestly. Just like I’m sure many people (myself included) would prefer the full sized cast with the more intense choreography. But again, that’s all on personal taste.

The game is a fantastic 3DS game, and definitely a worthy addition to any Vocaloid fan’s library. On top of that, the game’s lower difficulty also makes it a great point of entry for people who like the music but haven’t had much luck with the harder DIVA games. Plus, the addition of the tap mode makes for some fun gameplay variation for experienced players…even if you do really prefer the button mode like most.

Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX was reviewed on the Nintendo 3DS using a code provided by Sega. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.

Overall – 9

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