Mobile Rhythm Game Bullshit

 

Recently I started playing a game on my phone called Project Sekai: Colorful Stage and despite the bile I'm about to dispense under this introduction, I'm having quite a good time with it.  It's a rhythm game sort of similar to Chunithm in the arcade but watered down and all of its songs are Vocaloid tunes.  Being the huge Vocaloid weeb boy that I am I downloaded it straight away and I'm actually quite pleased, for a game that I fiddle with for a couple of minutes at a time while dropping a log it's actually a lot of fun 

However there's something that Project Sekai does, as well as many other mobile rhythm games, that pisses me off to absolutely no end and that's song grading.  When you clear a song in basically any rhythm game the game spits out a results screen to tell you how did you, how many points you got and how accurate you were, things like that.  Usually taking front and center on these results screen is an overall grade for your performance.  For example in DDR if you fail a song you get an E and if you do nearly everything perfectly you get a AAA. While in every normal rhythm game this is based entirely on your skill as a player, in Project Sekai and many others it's based on something entirely different.

Like every mobile game and it's dog, Project Sekai has a "gatcha" system where you spend some in-game currency to get characters of varying rarity.  With those characters you build a team and in the context of a rhythm game like this they will have skills in order to boost your score or recover lost life bar under certain conditions.  Each of these characters also has a "power" level which increases as they level up and their power dictates how many points per note hit you get and I'm sure you can see at this point why this is a problem.

So when I play Project Sekai and I Full Combo a song on Expert or Master difficulty do you know what rank I get? A fucking B.  Not because I made any mistakes, not because my accuracy was off or anything like that, but I just haven't done the pre-requisite grinding for an S rank so I'm not allowed one.  While this doesn't seem like a big deal, in game rewards, especially timed event rewards, are tied to your song grading so I'm just missing out on a whole bunch of shit because my party just isn't generating the score I need for it.

Now you would think that this would only be a problem for new players, that after a while you'd build a team and start getting ranks no problem right? Well no, because of course there's a bunch of other bullshit that gives passive score buffs to certain characters or certain TYPES of character that you also need in order to get the grades that you actually deserve which of course means, more fucking grinding.

I know that complaining about grinding in a mobile game is akin to pissing in the ocean but there's something about its inclusion in a rhythm game of all thing that really irks me.  There's no reason it couldn't have just been a standard rhythm game and premium currency used to unlock songs or videos or other cosmetic features like note skins or whatever, I mean it's a Vocaloid game for mobile for fucks sake, it's basically a money printing machine in a market like Japan.

Anyway like I said, Project Sekai isn't the only game that has been guilty of this shit.  Idolmaster did it and Bang Dreamin' did it just to name two others.  Truth be told I'm actually sort of impressed at just how little Project Sekai seems to be pushing the premium currency side of things, they constantly shower you with it and the button for the premium store is a TINY thing in the bottom left of the main menu, much better than what I've seen for other titles.  Plus this game has the benefit of being 100% Vocaloid music which means that it could break down my door and murder my family and I'd still probably play it.

Moral of the story: Tie ranks to player skill, not to my fucking waifu collection, goddamn it!

RIP Wowaka

On April 5th the Japanese musician Wowaka passed away of heart failure, an extremely sad piece of news and considering his young age of 31 an extremely surprising piece of news too.

He did a lot of work with Vocaloid over the course of his career and has put out some of the most well known tracks, a lot of which have been featured in the Project Diva games.  Personally I have more plays of the song Unhappy Refrain than any other song in the entire series.

If your interested about the man himself, here's a link to his Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowaka

I will round of this post by leaving some of my favorite tunes of his for you to listen to.  The guy made a LOT of really good stuff and I recommend checking out his catalogue of work.

Kenishi Yonezu

Look at that sexy, sexy man, hanging out in a trolley by the ocean like Mancunian chav trying to get the perfect Instagram picture.  This is Kenishi Yonezu, a sort of Japan music sensation who's been around for a good while but has really started exploding big time in the last maybe year or so.

If Yonezu had to be compared to a sort of some kind of Western artist he's sort of like Ed Sheeran.  Obviously being from two different parts of the world their actual music sounds way different but they are both pop artists that write and perform their own music and somehow just pump out really good songs constantly.

Usually with the weird, twee, "moe" type shit that infests my playlists a lot my friends hate it when I have control over a music selection but I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't found at least one Yonezu song that they really like.  My personal favorites are Mad Head Love, Flamingo and Loser so go give those a Google, maybe let me know what you think and if you find any others drop a comment about a song you enjoy.

Anyway, why the fuck am I talking about this guy?  This is a video game blog, not some kind of music blog.  I know next to nothing about music so why am I even bothering to make a post about some kind of Japanese music sensation?

So I discovered Yonezu through my wife when she started listening to a song called "Lemon".  That sort of set me down a road of exploring his library and learning a few of his songs for Karaoke.  One evening I'm in a karaoke booth with my wife and her sister when he sister drops the fact that Yonezu used to make music on Nico Nico Douga (Japanese YouTube) under the name Hachi.

Where had I heard that name before?.....

Oh yeah! He'd just had a bunch of his music featured in the god damn Hatsune Miku games.  Open, Close, Demons and the Dead (結ンデ開イテ羅刹ト骸 ) is probably one of my most played songs of the entire franchise and it was written by the man himself. Before he really got going he would make songs with Vocaloid and upload them to Nico Nico which then got picked up by Sega and featured in a number of the Hatsune Miku rhythm games. So turns out I'd been a fan of Yonezu the whole time and just didn't know it! So go check him out, he's a cool guy. His songs have been stuck on my playlist since at least December and ever month or so I somehow manage to find a new really catchy track buried somewhere on YouTube. It's also inspired me to dig out my Vita and give those Project Diva games another play!

Hatsune Miku Project Diva F2nd

These games were basically the whole reason I bought a Vita, they really are THAT good!

For those that don't know, Hatsune Miku is the mascot character for a piece of software known as Vocaloid.  The way I understand it, you type Japanese into the software and then Miku will sing it back to you.  You can then use the software to fuck about with the sounds and make original songs.  People who make songs using this software upload their stuff to a website called Nico Nico Douga and from there Vocaloid and Hatsune Miku have gained massive popularity in Japan.

Project Diva F2nd is the second game in the Miku themed rhythm games and if you've ever played a rhythm game before then you should know what to expect from a title like this.  You pick a song and then press the buttons that appear on the screen in time with the music.  On top of that there is the Diva Room mode where you can creepily rub Miku's (and the other characters) faces to unlock various things.  As you play you get Diva Points to use in the games shop mode where you can buy things like skins for the interface and outfits for the characters.

It's hard to talk about this game at any length because it really is just a straight up rhythm game and the appeal comes from how much you like Vocaloid songs.  If you don't know any Vocaloid songs but you enjoy catchy J-Pop then this game still would be up your alley. 

The game still suffers from the really annoying bullshit where you have to play all the songs on Normal to unlock them on Hard and then again on Hard to unlock them for extreme.  It's annoying because Normal and Hard are a fucking cakewalk.  However after playing a few songs on the extreme setting I've found that this game seems to be considerably harder than any other Miku game that I've played previously.

If you have a Vita and you need a worthwhile addition to your library, then buy this.  It's well made, has catchy music and it's great for short bursts.

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.

Convenience stores and game merch

It doesn't matter if you come to Japan for a holiday or for an extended stay, it's pretty much guaranteed that at some point during your stay here you'll end up in a convenience store to buy something.

I've noticed during my time here an abundance of video game stuff being sold in these convenience stores and while its usually quite pricey stuff and I never buy it, it's interesting to see this stuff being sold as its something that would absolutely NEVER happen back home.

The above example is a bottle of drink called Dodecamin, which usually has this sort of brown label, but in order to promote the new Monster Hunter game on the horizon they've changed the label to this funky design.

Monster Hunter isn't the only thing that I've seen kicking about the convenience stores either.  A few weeks ago, I think to promote Persona 4 Golden on the Vita, these stores were selling all sorts of Persona 4 merchandise, such as posters and blindfolds with character designs on it, although it was all needlessly expensive.

Even Japan's greatest fake pop star Hatsune Miku has been in on the whole convenience store marketing thing with a merch campaign that ended a couple of months ago.  This thing was so big that it even had its own ad on TV, check it out!

So if your in Japan, checking your local corner shop is a surprisingly good way of getting your fix of nerd shit, and you can get some fried chicken with it all too.