Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project Mirai（初音ミク and Future Stars Project mirai）

Well here we are, a full year after the release of DIVA Extend, comes the first Hatsune Miku experience on the latest current gen technology. The future is finally here! Prepare for amazing immersive graphics with super sharp visuals and... oh it's the 3DS. Oh well, I'll get to Diva F one of these days. Now, on to some SD chibi rhythm action!

Yeah, I jacked this image online cause it's fucking Nintendo

This game actually has an in-game album feature where you can take a screenshot anytime so it's the rare occasion where it should have been fairly easy to upload some screenshots. But of course, we're talking fucking Nintendo here so I was too lazy to rip open the back of my console to surgically remove my SD card and of course Miiverse is already dead though it sucked ass anyways. Ok, I can go on about this all day so moving on...

Unfortunately, probably the biggest flaw in this game is the seriously small list of songs, even less than Diva F extend. You can clear all 21 songs on normal in probably less than a couple hours. Fortunately, at least all the songs are new to the series except Clover♣Club and Finder (DSLR remix). Finder was one of my fav songs from Diva 2nd but somehow I just didn't like it as much in Project Mirai. The long intro with no gameplay was kind of annoying when shooting for that higher score on repeated playthroughs.

Speaking of gameplay, this time, you press buttons that go around in circles and I was not a fan of this new system. The main problem is that the next circle is grayed out RIGHT until you're on it and that's a killer for rhythm games. As any rhythm game expert will tell you, you always look ahead and already have a rough idea of what's coming musically to be any good. It's not a good sign when most of my mistakes are at the beginning of each circle and has little to do with the difficulty of the rhythm. An interesting but ultimately failed experiment.

XXY hold ABBA... it's just blondes and brunettes to me

The biggest highlight for me surprisingly was the ability to watch the non-chibi PVs in 3D. While the 3D feature of the 3DS kinda gives me a migraine headache and some light vomiting, I still felt it was worth it. It is pretty darn cool to watch the video for Piano Girl where the ribbons and candy and other shit falling from the sky is in front of the screen, so to speak.

Imagine this but with shit JUMPING OUT OF THE SCREEN #theFuture #Fad
After I cleared all the songs and watched the ending credits, I couldn't figure out how to unlock the costumes. It turns out that you also have to watch the PVs, which is a weird requirement for unlocking stuff but ok. There's a few points in the song you can skip forward to in PV mode but I still spend a bit of time watching the last minute or so of each song. That will unlock all the characters and make all but 2 costumes available for purchase using the Mirapo you accrue by playing the game. The last two costumes are unlocked by buying a bunch of costumes and beating at least one song with SS perfect score. Let me tell you, getting SS on even the easiest song is a BITCH! After I finally managed to do it with many tries, I got tired of this game to even purchase the unlocked costume.

I just don't care and no it has nothing to do with the lack of panchira appeal

Score: 2.5 I can't even fap to this! Err... I mean the gameplay is flawed! out of 5 (10 hours played)

While I had some fun with Project Mirai, it definitely has some flaws, the primary one being that there's just not much content to make grinding fun to even unlock all the costumes. To give you a brief idea of the economy, clearing one song on hard nets you 1,500 Mirapo and each costume costs 5,000 Mirapo except for the last two which cost a whopping 20,000 Mirapo each. I won't do any fancy math to scare away you gamers but it means you'll be playing the same songs a LOT. Being able to change the Vocaloid for some songs added a bit of replay value but not much.

Also, while I don't mind chibi style, I actually preferred the songs with the Original PV. I actually considered buying mirai 2 because the deluxe version converted the OG PV songs to chibi dance. I probably would've bought it too if I liked this one more but I don't so I'm gonna save my money for um... retirement? Yeah, cause my CIB copy of lain is an INVESTMENT. #sucker

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely