Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F

Well recently I was gifted a Vita, and being the huge rhythm game fan that I am, I had to pick this up pretty much straight away.

For anyone who may not know, Hatsune Miku is the mascot character for a piece of voice synthesising software called Vocaloid.  I've never used it but the way I understand it is that you write music in this program, and the robot voices will sing them for you.  Miku, along with the other vocaloid characters have become rather famous in Japan and you'll sometimes see them dotted around.  For example, there was a big Miku cutout in the Karaoke place near the place I was living in a few years ago, and this year Family Mart (or Lawson, don't remember) were selling Vocaloid themed Christmas Cards.

Anyway, Project Diva F is a rhythm game, and if you're not familiar with this genre by now, you must have been living under a rock during the whole Rock Band/Guitar Hero craze.  It's a good rhythm game too, it can be quite challenging on the Hard and Expert modes, which is something I find that western rhythm games tend to lack.  The game even makes use of the touch screen with "scratch" notes, that involve rubbing the screen once the icons match up so the Vita touch screen gets a bit of a workout.

There is another mode called the Diva Room, which is sort of like having a Vocaloid tamagotchi, but I'll go into detail about that in another post.  The game also features a shop where you can buy outfits and items of clothing so you can customise what they look like in the music videos.

All this is well and good, but the most important thing in a rhythm game is the music, right?  Well, embarrassingly, I'm a bit of a sucker for this kind of music and I find it really catchy, so for me the music goes down really well.  That said, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who will listen to this and be turned away so unless you're into Japanese techno-pop type stuff you probably won't enjoy the song list.

Still, it's an extremely solid rhythm game and I've not had a good console rhythm game to play for a long long time.  This will probably never see a western release so fire up those import websites if you want a copy for your Vita, but if this kind of stuff is your thing, you'll really like it.