Hatsune Miku Project Diva Mega Mix is my first entry into the franchise, and it's also the best impulse buy I've ever made. In fact, it's so good that I now live in fear that I've just given my brain positive reinforcement for stress spending, because this £50 game and dlc has not only entertained me for months, but become a coping strat.

The only reason the stars aren't higher is because it feels like kind of a rip off when you look at the other entries in the series, where they have modes where you can create and share your own charts, more songs, better charted songs, all for cheaper. This game is extremely expensive and seems to be lacking things that those games had.

But I've sunk months of my life into this bad boi and I'm not stopping now. If you ever had a vocaloid phase, or if you didn't but you just enjoy rhythm games, I'd highly recommend checking this out. The charts are fun, the difficulty is a fair curve, high level play is massively rewarding, and the customizable shirts you can create and put Miku in are a blessing. Whoever had that idea, I love you. I want to be your friend. Thank you for granting me this forbidden power.

A pretty fantastic rhythm game, arguably the best in the Project Diva series, but I removed a star and a half for two main reasons:

1) There are no Vocaloid rooms. I can't decorate their rooms and give the Vocaloids gifts or play little games with them. This was one of my favorite aspects of F2nd and X, and now it's gone. Pretty disappointing.

2) You no longer unlock new Modules mid-song by completing special note sections, as introduced in Project Diva X, instead, you just buy them outright. The special transformations that would happen mid-song were pretty fun, and they tickled that dopamine-addled-gacha-gland in the back of my lizard brain. I know this is TECHNICALLY better since there's no RNG to anything and you can get what Module you what WHEN you want, but I miss the transformations sequences still. I think they even tried to remedy this with some stages adding special/various effects when clearing a special note section, but some of them are pretty lackluster.

I think I've hit my skill ceiling for some extent for this game so I'm not going to grind it like I have been in the last month since I bought it. I now have excellents on my fav 9.5* songs (jigsaw puzzle, envy cat walk, and gaikotsu gakudan to riria) and have five 10* songs under my belt with none of the others seeming within reach. none of the dlc I don't have is very attractive to me and the only 9*s I haven't cleared are ones like nyanyanyan or rin-chan now that I don't like LOL.

this is the first arcade-quality rhythm game I've sunk a lot of time into, and it's pushed me to want to explore more games in this style that I can easily access at home thanks to the high difficulty curve and huge pool of songs. it's a good entry point for this style of rhythm game for those who have played the console entries especially thanks to the similarites in charts between the console and arcade versions, and I think with that experience it gave me a leg up even when adjusting to how brutal this game can be from 9* and up. this game emphasizes hand independence far more than the console games do, and it requires a whole new layer of muscle memory just to get to the point where sight reading even easier extreme charts is possible. the player is expected to recognize combinations of notes in doubles or even triples and press the right combinations, often at high speeds at upper difficulties. this was very frustrating to me when I first started playing, but with enough practice it eventually does become much easier to do... if you're willing to struggle for 10 or so hours. there's also an increased focus on fast alternating strings between two separate buttons than the console games, though this is a welcome addition to the difficulty, as it felt like an unexplored concept previously.

the song list is quite solid, especially if you get the season 1 dlc in a bundle like I did (especially when it's on sale). out of the pdmm-specific additions, the aforementioned jigsaw puzzle is a delightfully challenging song, along with the bouncy ooedo julianight. while project diva has always had good swing tunes (colorful x sexy and blackjack come to mind), the new track jitterbug takes a stab at a highly dense swung chart via electroswing, giving the beatmap a weird push and pull between a straight backbeat and jazzy horns. the rest of them are pretty solid additions, though deco*27's song hibana is offensively similar to his previous song ghost rule (and neither is very good!). a lot of these have 2D animated PVs, and many of them are anniversary songs as well, reflecting both the age and decline of the vocaloid brand as well as the 10th anniversary of the project diva series.

more broadly for project diva arcade/future tone's song list as a whole, it became pretty apparent to me that there's a sharp divide between the pre-future tone songs (mainly from the psp games) and the post-future tone songs in terms of chart design. older charts impart less visual information on the patterns and often rely too heavily on confusing note-spam, whereas newer songs reward dexterity and close adherance to the rhythmic quirks of the song. this is especially bad in more difficult songs such as saihate and po pi po, which are a nuisance to learn. thankfully, the extra extreme charts make up for this by providing modern reinterpretations of the charts, some of which are more legible than the original. others that had extremely bland charts originally (sound and musou sketch come to mind) get a much needed injection of creativity to the charts from their exex variations; it fixes that feeling of disappointment when a song you love ends up having a boring chart. the later and later the songs were added the more exciting their charts are, and the more they feel like the designers had an idea with each song and wanted to iterate them to their obvious conclusion rather than just attempting to confuse sight readers. not every chart is great of course, and some very good ones have bizarre or misaligned sections, but given the size of the song roster I can't go too hard on the developers.

what does hurt this game though is the lack of access to arcade peripherals to play it with, specifically in terms of their cost. controller is still a perfectly fine way to play this game, but it feels like endgame charts are only viable if each of the triggers/bumpers are mapped to an individual face button. this is due to several reasons: for one there are often doubles and singles interspersed in such a way that is very doable on the arcade controls but very tricky with only two thumbs, and secondly the arcade game strongly incentivizes a button-hold mechanic that is very difficult to do without extra fingers for assistance. with face buttons also mapped to the shoulder buttons, there's a lot of flexibilty that comes at the price of requiring the utmost coordination between six of your fingers, along with the difficulty in clearing 10* charts, the controller layout also affects the difficulty for getting excellents, which is tuned for arcade play where holds are much easier. these holds can add up to 5% onto your final score, which is rather significant when aiming for a 95% excellent. without them, you must rely on maintaining a large combo. older console pd games would generally have about 20-30 notes of leeway for a given song to get an excellent, while here it can sometimes be less than five. I can't say it's a design flaw, since this game was in arcades long before a console release ever happened, but it's something to consider if you're debating getting into this game.

even with the punishing difficulty, I think this is a top-notch rhythm game, and one that might be fun even if you don't have a background in music or the rhythm game genre. those wishing to relive their vocaloid memories have a wide swath of both classic and modern tracks to play, while those wishing to sink their teeth into higher-level play will have a steep but satisfying climb ahead of them. it's unquestionably sega flexing their arcade chops, and I really hope I get to try a proper arcade cabinet of it sometime in the near future.

This was on sale on Steam at like 60% off, and I hadn't bought anything else this sale and I was like "fuck it, I'm eating popcorn for breakfast, it's not like I have any dignity left to preserve, might as well buy the vocaloid rhytm game"

Anyhow I hate this trend of porting rhythm games from arcades by just dumping a bunch of songs on console and calling it a day. Let me go through a bare-bone "story mode" to unlock the song, please! Give my existence on this earth at least a semblance of meaning. I had the same problem with Voez, which is a game that I otherwise love, but I just lose interest in playing, without the game telling me which song should I play and when. Theathrytm is truly the only one that Gets It.

I'm s also not the biggest fan of how each song is structured to have a single huge difficulty spike near the end. Like, the first 2-3 minutes of each song kinda feel like a Dark Souls boss-run. It's kinda nerve-wrecking when you're trying to get perfect combos to have to wait so long before being able to re-try the Actually Difficult bit.

Aside from that, this is perfectly fine at doing what it's meant to do. It's bright and colourful and the music videos have some fun choreographies. Most of the music is a bit too quirky for me, but there's a couple of tracks even I can't help but appreciate.

i was really hyped about vocaloid finally getting on switch. especially when i dont have a ps4 to play future tone.

and thank god they added the option to change the buttons into the playstation ones. otherwise i would be so fucked q.q

anyway. why is this only a 3 star review?
the game itself is absolutely fine. of course the switch version had to downgrade the graphics, but on some mvs it looks even better to me.
what bothers me here is the pricing in general.

we got this "exclusive" game on steam now, where, if we wait long enough, we can buy the base game + all dlc for 30 bucks.
lets compare that to the switch version which was, lets remember, EXCLUSIVE.

you have to pay 60 bucks for the base game. its a full prize game with not having all the songs in it, that were already featured in future tone. now, what do the dlcs cost? we have several packs here, i think 3 or 4 in total. you can get to another 60 bucks here.

so, you're telling me i, as an original switch player, have to pay 120 to, lets say 80 dollars when it gets a sale every now and then, to get the full game and every song available? that is bullshit to me.

also the pricing does not seem fair to me as most of the mvs of the newly added songs were fanmade or just lazily put with the official music video.
seems like not that much work was put into it here.

what im missing since x is also the diva room. this game was always supposed to be a combination of rythm game and simulation. that aspect is completely gone now. i also miss unlocking stuff such as new frames for the game like in f and f2nd, new things for the diva room... so, so much. also im missing the loading screens feature fanart from fans. this has been a thing since the first diva game!! :(

im sad how this franchise is slowly dying.
its not a bad game if you're here for rythm game fun. but veterans will miss aspects that made that game project diva.

This was my first project diva game, after playing f 2nd and X, I was kinda shocked that this somehow has less features.

Don't get me wrong its a fun game but it would be nice if you could interact with the vocaloids and decorate their rooms or something. I don't really care much for being able to design your own t shirt.

The song selection is good there's 101 to choose from and some absolute bangers on there, I did end up buying one of the dlc packs as well.

I would wait for this game to go on sale before purchasing it.