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.

Wow great game I love it.

This is my first Hatsune Miku game and experience overall. It's been quite pleasant. The controls make a ton of sense and getting down hold combos feels fantastic. :>

The music and the accompanying videos is generally quite great as well. I still have a ton to go through but I am loving the variety not just in song style but in chart style. Some are very focused on fast button presses of the same type and others work in other techniques like slides or more complicated rhythms than 8ths and 16ths.

The game also does a good job of crediting the arrangers and producers on these songs. I really appreciate that and it's also just useful.

The load times are a bit excessive lmao (mainly for the menus) and I do kinda wish I had a story sequence or route to go through the songs with. Those are the main things I think would be nice to have.

anyways going to continue to play this. :>

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.

It's the most complete vocaloid game when it comes to quantity of songs because megamix have many songs of many eras, since the classic ones until the recent ones, but honestly that's the only special thing about this project diva.
The gameplay revolves around ranks(same as pdaft), everything cames unlocked (modules and songs) what makes the game sounds kinda boring, in the old project diva games we had to unlock all the modules, songs, difficulties by playing our selves, people used to play it not just to get ranks, but to unlock everything too, this game does not have the iconic elements from the classic diva games like the diva room. These models are also very f*cking ugly, they look plastic and to bright. The new rhythm gameplay add some unnecessary elements like the laser notes, what is kinda stressing. Overall: 2/10 it gets kinda boring by the time

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.