Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone

Since the release of PlayStation 4 there's not many rhythm game available to be played on the system, most of the game are either a dance game, or a multi platform game that even playable just using a smart TV. With the announced Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X for the PlayStation 4 still on its way, Japan and the Asian region of PlayStation Network has published a store listing page for a game named Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone, another series of Project Diva to add in the list. But what's the difference than the other Project Diva knowing that the Project Diva X is coming soon anyway.

Introduction

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone is the arcade port of the arcade game in Japan and Singapore with the same title Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Arcade Future Tone which is the arcade version of the original Hatsune Miku: Project Diva series. The game originally is played using 4 big buttons with a 27" Monitor right in front of you, later upgraded to have a touch panel where additional gameplay features is added on the game. Running in the new Sega Nu arcade board, the game boast the quality slightly better than PlayStation 3 making the game looks much better than the original Project Diva F 2nd which is released at a later date.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone is the true to arcade port released only digitally on the Japan and Asian PSN, the game released for free as Prelude version with 2 Downloadable Content to complete the music list up to 220 musics with each DLC valued for about 4000 yen. Included in the game is over 300 module costume and hundreds of accessories (with 2/3 of it need to be unlocked by buying the DLC), the same experience of the original Project Diva Arcade playable in both Online and Offline without any missing features, PV Viewer so you could watch your virtual diva dances to the beautifully crafted background video with the ability to take some pictures so you could print it if you want, Survival Course where you could challenge yourself in the nonstop playlists of musics, as well as some extra content like the Opening Movie for all Project Diva Arcade.

How does it play?

The game as featured is running in 1080p 60fps, which is really a sail smooth for the game, loading is pretty fast, and the graphics looks gorgeously smooth even with lot of things happening in the background. As previously said the game boast about 220 musics with all the DLC bought, all the music is curated from the combination of the old Project Diva musics from the PSP, PS3, and 3DS generation. Some arcade exclusive music are also available to be played, with some interesting music such as Magical Sound Shower from Outrun and LIKE THE WIND from Power Drift or the straight up After Burner remix is pretty fun to listen and play.

One of the interesting aspect in Future Tone was the difficulty of the game. If you ever played Project Diva previously you know that the game has some simple difficulty curve, with the difficulty spike on the Extreme difficulty that usually nobody even play. In Future Tone since designed for Arcade has some pretty good difficulty aspect on it. Both normal difficulty and Hard difficulty is slightly harder to play than the original one with the enhanced Hold button and Slide Note (some has original note charts) with Extreme is seriously hard to play without some good controller settings tweaking and some music have the special chart called Ex-Extreme which is more hard than the Extreme one (Noticeably combined with the new Slide Note)

Speaking of controller settings, the game is pretty good in designing the options on this game, upon opening Customize option you will be able to changes settings for your play with some serious tweak to button layout and button preview as well as some extra options to use the PS4 touch pad or the PS4 motion sensor.

Several features such as PV View is pretty interesting to do, player able to watch the game background video with their own choice of module costume which is basically a bunch of PV variation. you could customize your character from their clothing, hair, hat, mask and glasses, necklace, and backpack. Some looks really nice and cute, others looks horrifying to look at (which most came from the old fad Vocaloid fans had) The game features the usage of VP or Visual Point which is collected from playing the game itself. Depends on how good you are if you failed you will only get 10 VP, and getting a new high score will give you 1000 VP.

The game also feature some complete but cumbersome record list. In here player able to look at their progress on the game as well as how good they are with some music. Problem is that the list is hard to navigate and confusing at times especially the music list, the detail list are great to see how is your accuracy as well as your score and your modifier, but with over 220 music in the game, navigating to that one music in the middle is really time consuming, some game use the left or right button to jump pages in a list, in this one it just jumps the whole list to a different difficulty.

Lastly we have the newly added feature Survival Course, what this mode does is to let you play the music which is specified in some set of playlist. The music played however is a harder to play because the Life gauge you have is now hard to regain back and is carried over to the next music in the list (if you decided to play the next one or not). You also able to play whichever music you want in the list. I have yet to play the full list because of how hard it is, but there might be something for someone who finish the whole course.

Complaints (?)

So far stating the fact has some value of what you get in this 9000 yen game, one small problem I had (which is not gameplay wise) is the way the game treat recorded video. If you play rhythm game much, you wanted to share how good you play on youtube or anything else which is what the PS4 is featured for. However this game while it allows you to record your gameplay using the game share function, it did not record the music at all which is pretty much a waste since while you play you wanted the watcher to at least get what you listen right? Well this won't let you do at all. Another complaint might be with the lackluster list of trophy they had, with only 18 trophy which most of it just a tutorial challenge is not really hard to achieve but not fun to do at all.

Conclusion

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone might be the only Project Diva I'll be playing right now since I'm not really interested in Project Diva X, the game size is pretty big and one could at least spend 20 hours playing all the music with all the difficulty it offers, while others could spend lot of times snapping some shots on the PV View mode. Graphic wise it's arcade perfect and it loads pretty fast too. Overall an arcade port done right with player able to spend at least 4000 yen for a single pack that alone is probably enough to enjoy for numerous of hours.