Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX

Rhythm game fever seems to come to me in waves. I've ended up playing two completely different musical genres with the two rhythm games I decided to play. This first one stars Japan's number one vocaloid Hatsune Miku. Although she is not in her somewhat normal proportion and instead decided to trade it for a super cute SD form. Along with her other vocaloid pals Rin, Lin,Luka,Kaito and Gumi as they preform 48 different songs in total. Sure you will find plenty of Japanese pop presented here but it does have some variety of music like jazz, chiptunes, ballads and even some samba. It really has a lot more musical variety than I expected when I first booted it up.

Now what makes the rhythm part unique compared to similar games. First off it gives the player two different ways to tap buttons. Touch pad controls reminded me of fun times playing Elite Beat Agents. Since the line of notes goes all over the screen and even has sections where you need to spin for points you might see why it reminded me of it. Maybe because I'm used to playing a Miku game on a PlayStation device I preferred this type compared to the more traditional one. Which happens to be the XYBA buttons on the 3DS. Tapping notes, hold notes, and even spinning wildly on the dpad are all types of beats you'll be taping along with. So other than the constantly moving note chart this doesn't do anything new for this genre. That doesn't mean it isn't still fun to perfect a song after many attempts. Plus once you are ready to attempt hard it really does follow along with the song really well.

Other than the main rhythm game this also has a assortment of mini games including Puyo Puyo. PP is pretty much just a mini version of the full game. Matching up a cascade of puyos is fun and once you figure out how to stack them it is just as satisfying as playing the separate release. The other main mini game is a uh volcolid life simulator? Other than having a better mini game within one known as reversi this part of the game seems pretty lacking with any reason to even interact with it. At least in Project Diva series they gave a relationship meter to fill instead of absolutely nothing. So you can feed chibi Miku cake and then watch her eat it for no real reason. Other than if you like watching cute anime girls eating food. I wasn't interested in checking out the AR parts of this game either. Which just lets the player use the included AR cards to perform certain songs in the real world.

In the end the majority of my time with this game was spent playing along with the music. Which is the reason why you should play this game since it does have a large list of songs to play through and although you most likely won't like all of them it has so much variety that I think just about anyone will enjoy playing this game. Plus you even get a good puzzle game to go along with it too. If you don't mind the cutesy ascetics this seems like it would be a good introduction to the Mikuverse.