Dohna Dohna : A Colorful Ethical Paradox

AliceSoft is a company which always found itself in an interesting paradoxical crossroad when it comes to tackling heavy subject matter and putting it under the lens of morality. Being a eroge company and not the kind to half-ass the erotic side of their production like most Eroge seems to do out of convention (and for the most part to sell to a niche audience while bypassing censorship on more touchy subject matters) but embracing that aspect as part of their core identity puts them under a pretty unflattering light in the eyes of the general public. But AliceSoft being enjoyed mostly by a niche community of people on which its western side is the size of a small Italian mountain village means there’s not really any further or widespread discussions about the company and their works even within the fringe community of “Visual Novel fans” (I don’t like the etiquette but this is off-topic).

Usually the conversation ends as soon as it starts : AliceSoft is a porn game company, they make porn games for weirdoe otakus to jack-off to. And while we could end the discussion there, trying to be reasonable and actually explain why AliceSoft titles are more than the sum of is part is like explaining that there’s a difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, like it exists, but it’s really hard to explain the subtle difference without sounding like a pedophile yourself and in the case of Alicesoft without sounding like a porn addicted weirdoe (which I absolutely am btw… anyway where was I ?).

And this is where yours truly chooses to bite the bullet and actually defend the idea that while being a porn game company, AliceSoft's entire existence is fascinatingly paradoxical. On one hand, Alicesoft is an eroge company and one that owns the mantle and wears it with pride, the people working at Alicesoft define themselves as “eroge makers” which can even be found on their logo and it’s not like they’re shy about it. In fact, Alicesoft has always been very transparent about their main goal when making these games : They love eroge and they want to make eroge and thus they put a sisyphean amount of effort into delivering on the erotic front, not because they wanted to sell to a niche market, not because they want to be edgy but because they genuinely enjoy and have a clear passions for the act of drawing naked women doing the deeds and then contextualize them within a thinly veiled plot with characters and complex gameplay systems to accompany said drawings.

Just one look at the Alice Mansion which is this super cool Dev Room feature present in almost every single of their titles will show you how transparent they are about that fact. They are a bunch of goofy hornballs that likes to make goofy lewd shit to please a crowd of people already averted to that type of writing or find an appeal in eroticism and pornography. Porn artists at the end of the day are still artists, they vibe with different shit, they bond over their weird quirky love for superficial details like girls in glasses and the “moe” side of their misery, there’s a lot of thought that’s put behind these elements and it’s impossible to remove that aspect of their catalog because it would just result in a different somewhat truncated experience.

So you think that something like this can only approached through an ironic lens and appreciated only by complete sociopath especially since a lot of the fetishes displayed in those games ranges from pretty extreme to downright criminal (may I remind the RanSill audience that our boy Rance isn’t an UWU soft boy but an honest to god criminal AND a rapist ?) but if it was that simple of course, the company wouldn’t have any sort of following.
Because on the other hand, Alicesoft also wants to tell good stories and more times than not, stories which actually challenge the view and the morals of the people they are trying to cater to. Being founded in the 80’s where most erotic game developers were making a quick bucks selling cheap strip poker, mahjong, shifumi or quizz games without much thought behind it, they wanted from the outset to create interesting scenarios, worlds and characters to contextualize the action. Suffice to say that in my opinion it serves the purpose of rendering the erotic situations even hotter, goofier and/or horrifying depending on what the games are aiming for and help them make more memorable in the long run because you end up having something to attach yourself to beyond the typical plumbers and stepmom scenarios.

And while that’s fine and all, I don’t think this exaggerated attention to detail and care alone would’ve made people stuck with series like Rance or their other less popular productions and they would’ve most likely died to the general indifference of many. As soon as Rance 1, the game present Rance as an awful criminal that you don’t and should not relate to or sympathize with in any capacity but that doesn’t change that he is the hero and he has to face adversaries and he alone isn’t what’s wrong with the world at large and that if people like Rance are able to exist and succeed within such a setting it’s mostly because of deeper problem with the way the world around him works, which in Rance 1 is portrayed by Lavender, the ghost of a girl who was killed by Lia, the princess of the Leazas Kingdom to quench her twisted desires and which Rance promptly punishes in his huh… own kind of way.

Very early on, AliceSoft was already toying the line between indulgence and the criticism of certain moral failings that may lead people to sincerely engage and create this type of content in the first place. Toushin Toushi 2 all the way back in 1994 did the whole “Sans Undertale judging you for your sins'' thing a lil bit more than 20 years before it was cool by including within its game mechanics a morality system which affected certain parameters in your games as well as changing the outcome of some scenes with a very obtuse way of absolving your sins if you so desired.

It’s a game where the protagonist is very different from Rance or even Kuma the character we’ll focus about in a bit, he’s a dude with a girlfriend who sadly finds himself in a pretty shitty situation regarding her well-being and his own deeper desire to progress that relationship to the next level followed by a second half so brilliant and so thought provoking that I really don’t want to spoil it for you or analyze it in details here (maybe some other day ?). Suffice to say that a morality system works with the type of story TT2 wants to tell but the nature of the game being an eroge and thus feeling the need to cater to an audience who genuinely enjoys and likes that type of content is a bit of an awkward position to find yourselves in.

Mind you, I think part of the reason this came to come through for the most part is because Alicesoft is pretty mixed in terms of gender ratio within the company, and a lot of the hard hitting and brutal scenes from these games were written by a female writer by the name of Torii who did her damn best to add her personal female leaning vision in the core DNA of these burly sex stories mostly consumed by a male audience, to the point that the modern western Rance fandom is surprisingly left-leaning and feminist at their core because they could pick apart the more subtle thinly veiled themes that these games had to offer.
In fact, when Torii doesn’t work on a game, you can instantly feel it in the level of indulgence and a lack of subtlety in regards to thing she had previously installed like that cynical biting edge that comes through when shouting into the void that the world is complex and the winds of change can come from the most unlikely and at times unlikable people. I’ve already talked about this in my review on Rance IX if you care enough to check it and give you a proper idea of what I think Rance under a new author might look and sound like (spoiler : I’m mixed on a lot of narrative choices in that game despite enjoying it in the end) but that’s not why I wrote this lengthy introduction.

I wanted to show you that deeply, Alicesoft never forgot about consequences, they may be fetishizing stuff like sexual assault and everything but it’s only a filter through which they can tell stories about the deeper implications of said actions and the multiple consequences that can be born from them and how people explore their own insecurities about sex while still keeping a mostly fun and lighthearted tone to disorientated the distracted players. Kichikuou Rance, one of their most popular and widely acclaimed titles is a game entirely built on a push and pull gameplay loop based on facing the consequences of your actions, making tough decisions and having to adapt to them and accept them as they come. And while a lot of this was lost after Torii’s departure from the company, I believe one writer took the mantle of what she once wanted to accomplish with her works, and that writer is known as Dice Korogashi.

Dice Korogashi was part of a newly formed team of developers at Alicesoft that I will now refer to as “Team Dohna” for the sake of simplicity. When the question of remaking Rance 01 for a modern audience was brought up by TADA who initially wasn’t fond of the idea. He thought that if it had to happen it should be done under the same condition the original game was made in : by a fresh team of young developers, a risky bet for what will eventually become the newest best entry point into the series but a bet that paid off significantly in the end, since Rance 01 is considered by many as one of the best titles in the series and the other remake they worked on, Rance 03 saw even more praise by the general public which faith were starting to dwindle during the few dry years of the company after the release of Sengoku Rance.

Dice and team Dohna perfectly captured the feeling of the franchise and what made it work in the first place, and with a material as shallow and honestly not that great as Rance 1 they managed to pull a lot of its best quality while reinventing the game for a new audience, coupled with a lot of retroactive continuity stuff, a more fleshed out adventure and generally better more witty writing which reminded people of the good days where Torii was at the office.

It is no surprise then than Dice was brought onto Rance X to take the role of main writer replacing Yoroide Dragon who only served a minor co-writing role this time around, the guy understood his stuff and Team Dohna were perhaps even more passionate and talented than their mentors when it came to making fun games which pleased a grand majority of people.

Soon, Team Dohna will start working on their own original IP, a game that will shake the world with a stunning artstyle and a level of presentation never seen before for the company.
Is it all style and no substance ? Or is there more to it ? Let’s see for ourselves.
Dohna Dohna was originally announced in 2016 and went onto a long development period of 4 years after its announcement after the scope and technical aspect of the project found itself to be too big for Alicesoft and Team Dohna to handle in a timely manner especially with the addition of guest artist joining the fray to design all of the unique heroines of the game and of course COVID, anyway the game was eventually released in 2020 to celebrate 1 year too late the 30th anniversary of the company. It wasn’t director Ittenchiroku first title within the universe as there exist a sort of prototype of Dohna Dohna called Haruurare which was a small mini-game in the Alice 2010 compilation, although no english version of it is available, the main premise is roughly similar with an heavy emphasis on kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution which is what Dohna Dohna is mostly (but not entirely, we’ll get there) about.

The game takes place in the fictitious Asougi City, a modern Japanese metropole controlled by a big corporate conglomerate called “Asougi” who managed to claim its independence from the rest of world and establish a sort of cult of personality fascist regime with all the bells and whistles that come along with it such an heavily armed police force, propaganda everywhere, surveillance, “cleaning” drones and forced labor for anyone who steps too out of line with the system in place. To oppose the oppressive regime a couple of gangs whose goal is to trample on the establishment were founded, these gangs known as “Anti-Asou” clan engage in illegal activities such as property damage, stealing but most importantly the dangerous business of “hustling” which can be roughly translated by the act of kidnapping innocent women and selling their bodies to illegal prostitution.

You take control of Kuma, member of an anti-Aso clan by the name of “Nayuta” and the one managing the hustling business. he’s accompanied by other members such as Zappa the clan’s leader, Torataro the milf enjoyer, KiraKira your chainsaw wielding gyaru childhood friend, Porno the hypersexual loli and a slew of colorful characters joining the party as you progress through the game. Your goal on top of following the story is going to go inside various dungeons in order to “hunt” for potential new “talents” , bring them to your hideout and “train” them to perform well and bring you lots of cash during the “hustling” hours.

Let’s get something out of the way first before going in detail about this very peculiar premise. The game is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, it’s something that many people, even those of the mainstream gaming sphere who don't know about the concept behind the game have said. I would go as far as to say that out of all of Alicesoft’s 30 year old catalog of great games, this one easily has the best presentation of them all. Alicesoft being an eroge company means that they are of a relatively humble size and their games are relatively low budget compared to even low-profile indie games and thus are mostly carried by their sprite art and CG’s as it is tradition in that field. But here the game is just fucking popping, the illustrator Gyokai did more than an amazing job giving life to this game, the colours are flashy in a certain pop-way, the character design are ultra solid and most of all, the game has actual battle animation and those wouldn’t have to envy those of productions commonly found on Steam.

Many people say that Dohna Dohna feels like the “Persona 5” of Eroge and from an aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to deny, everything is so fluid, the UI is really nice, it feels like a proper professional game release and is far above the standards of these kinds of production, as far as the art go, the game is freaking gorgeous and I personally love it ! Even the H-Scenes are… well not to be a gooner but the art pops even in those.
One quick look at the Alice Mansion section of the game informs us that the team went for this sort of Hip-Hop, World End With You artstyle because they felt that telling a story in a modern city would make the visuals of the game rather dull and they wanted to contrast with the heavier subject matter of the game and that was a more than excellent choice, in fact I would even dare to say that some of the more… let’s say harsher and hardcore scene wouldn’t work nearly as well with an artstyle less detailed and with less flair, I gotta admit that I rarely praise H-Scenes but some of the H-Scenes in this game really made me stop to take care of important business if you know what I’m saying.

When I said earlier that the game was considered to be the “Persona 5” of Eroge, I also meant it a bit more literally as a lot of the main criticism people have towards the game because of this poppy artstyle combined to quite a dark premise meant the game was supposedly all style and no substance, that it’s just a fun game with fun mechanics and that the stories failed at delivering any thoughtful deeper commentary about the subject matter it was trying to tackle, I must admit, that was a bit of my impression at first. Like I said, it’s really hard to release an Eroge who very obviously indulges in some crass stuff while trying to sell and please to an audience of jerkers who are only there to appreciate the “art” and the game general tone didn’t really indicate at first that the story was going to take that whole “hustling” thing all that seriously and put it as an excuse to be primordially fun first and a bit needlessly edgy second. I was actually wary about this throughout my playthrough but then I remember that the person who recommended this game to me had a lot to say positively about the game’s handling of said topic and the deeper political themes the game tries to explore.

But to talk about these, we first need to understand how the game works. The game is divided in multiple phases, you have a hideout phase where you can buy items, manage your party, participate in character events to further your relationship with your party members and manage your “talents” (more on that later). After that, you have two choices, either spend the day “hustling” which will trigger the Hustling phase of the game or go on a “hunt” which initiates the Hunting Phase of the game AKA Dungeon exploration. We’ll focus on the hunting phases first as it is the more “video gamey” aspect of the game.

After selecting a dungeon, you move your characters on a series of linear branching paths which sometimes leads to an icon triggering a fight, giving you an item or triggering an event. The battle system of the game is actually pretty fun, it’s a less hardcore version of “Darkest Dungeon”, if you ever played that game, your characters and the opposite party are placed in a round of 4 and you have to slide them left or right before using their abilities, you have to consider placement because some of your abilities only work within a certain radius or only hit a certain row (which can be seen by a line connecting to where the attack will land) and also to avoid damages yourself, as some of the more fragile units could potentially get killed easily if they’re misplaced. While Dohna Dohna, doesn’t really have the same level of complexity of Darkest Dungeons with its permadeath system and various amounts of status effects (here most of them are just stats debuffs), it does have a few “puzzle” fights when it comes to recruiting talents ! Sometimes when on the field, you’ll hit a case with a girl icon, this triggers a fight with a talent on it and if you want to recruit it, you will need to defeat that girl last and so you need to time and use your techniques right as to clear all enemies before dealing with the talent who always die in one hit ! It’s a nice change of pace on top of the bosses which are also pretty damn fun and well designed.
The game’s difficulty on a first playthrough is “just right” and the character variety of your party is pretty damn solid, it’s also nice that you can swap party members at any time in battle and an unlimited amount of time to as to keep the general flow of battle intact and not punish the players too much for harsh decisions. Fights are usually not all that hard but there were some that took me by surprises with how challenging they were, combined with the entire resource management aspect of dungeon exploration. I have a few complaints with the game's systems however : for one, only the active party members at the end of a battle get any XP which is pretty annoying to keep everyone evenly leveled by the end of the game and two the enemy variety isn’t super high. I understand this was done because animating hand drawn sprites for every characters probably was already a huge time commitment as is but It wouldn’t have killed to at least have swap colored version with different aptitudes instead of just pulling from the same pool of generic soldier troopers with more HP for new zones, that’s no to say it’s always these types of enemies as some story dungeons switch things up when the other gangs are involved but still.

Another thing that I didn’t really enjoy was the weapon upgrade system, for some reasons, Alicesoft weapon systems have always been obtuse and RNG heavy for no reasons and Dohna Dohna is no exception. To get new gear, you need to first find the material and then buy it at the shop, problem is the game doesn’t tell you where to find these past Rank 2 and even if you figure it out somehow, you need to be lucky to be able to find said material in a dungeon during an hunting phase, it makes the endgame unnecessarily grindy if you want the most optimal gear to tackle the last few challenges of the game unless you want to spend a lifetime killing one tanky enemies in one of the late game areas while making sure they don’t send your ass to the shadow realm.

Speaking of buying items, the main means of collecting money in this game is through the “hustling” part which is where the game hides its true ludo-narrative experience. One thing that I’ve noticed when playing through the game is that this aspect of the game was pretty secondary, you need it to gain money and gain more resources but aside from the time the story requires it, the hustling is something almost entirely optional and even when you are forced to interact with it the requirement to progress to the next stage of the story is usually not that high.

At first, I thought this design decision was a bit odd. Why would the secondary mechanic of the game, arguably the one the marketing of the game was centered around and one of the main sources of inner conflict for our protagonist, be left being so optional ? The main answer one could arrive at is that much like the RPG aspect of the game, they wanted this part to not be too much of a weight on the players, especially the ones that were more familiar with RPG mechanics but not nearly enough with management simulators. After all, the Alice Mansion section of the game talks about how they wanted the game to remain easy and accessible in order to sell it to a larger audience as this big bright and colorful game celebrating 30 years of the company’s history.

But by actually investing myself deeper within that part of the game out of my own volition and also mostly so I could gather enough resources to mitigate the end-game grind, I think that I was understanding why they decided to do it this way as it says a lot about you the player and how you start naturally fitting in the shoes of the main character Kuma, experiencing a similar level of cold detachment as you invest more time in those mechanics.

Kuma is an interesting protagonist as far as the wider range of Alicesoft protagonist goes, unlike Rance he isn’t some lust and ego-driven asshole looking to dominate the screen time and the world while hiding his weaker side behind a veil of macho man behavior, unlike Seed from Toushin Toshi II, he isn’t an innocent constantly struggling with the morality of his actions and the vow he gave to his S.O. Kuma is a bit like Walter White from the Breaking Bad series, a man who after losing everything turns himself to a shady business and has grown colder and more indifferent in order to protect his own psyche from the harsh reality of the acts he’s committing. Kuma lost his family after they were used as experiments for Asougi which led him to a life of crime and joining the Nayuta clan. Nayuta, initially wasn’t fond of “hustling” as a business but Kuma began introducing it to the clan under the suggestion of “Mistress” a shop owner who gives out weapons and items to other clans around the city as “hustling” is shown to him to be the most optimal way to found Nayuta’s illegal and revolutionary activities.

Kuma sees hustling as just a means to an end, just something that he absolutely needs and has to do in order to avenge his family and further his goals within Nayuta. Kuma is a young man, still going to school during the events of the story even if his presence in class isn’t the most consistent, he even embarks his childhood friend KiraKira into that business which he probably didn’t want to do in the first place but much like anything in his life, dealing with a life of crime had terrible effects on his mind. Kuma being responsible for such a business had to grow distant and cold when dealing with “talents” and usually, he wants to deal with the hustling alone, not letting the other members of Nayuta handle that side of the clan activities and only focusing on the hunt. Of course, the other members interact with him throughout the course of the game, but they don’t really question him on that subject for more than a few seconds and it’s only when Kuma is gone from the team for a short while during the campaign that another member by the name of Joker takes the mantle temporarily and say something “well that was fucked up” and not much else.

As the story progresses, Kuma kinda loses himself in his job, leaving aside his humanity in order to perform well and grow the numbers even larger, he lost himself in the sauce and it’s not even sure that he could even escape from it, he’s not even sure of why he was doing in the first place and why he’s continuing. This is why the hustling part of the game is very light and not too player demanding in my opinion, just like Kuma, you can just treat it literally like a side-hustle that you need to participate in even a little bit to progress in the game but if you want to perform better, you need more money, you need more numbers, you need better talents, with better stats and thus any further implication within that side of the game is only greed from the players perpetuating the cycle of violence and cruelty for his gains.

In the game, you manage your talents through the uses of a tablet showing different stats like their looks (how likely they’ll get picked up by clients), their techniques (how much money they’ll bring) and their mental health stat which is akin to HP in other game and when that reaches zero, the talent “breaks” and thus cannot perform as well and is a wasted asset that you need to dispose of. Talents also comes with a series of attributes which give bonuses during hustling for example by giving a “sexy” talent to a client that demands it means you’ll get more money out of them but in return they can also add attributes to them some beneficial and some not like making them blind or disabled, these attributes have different effects on the talent stat growth and stat decrease every time they participate in sexual activities with mental health almost always systematically dropping down each time.

Of course in order to keep your talent in check, you can feed them different training items which increases their stats so they can either perform better and for longer, you also need to make sure they stay on the pill so they don’t end up getting pregnant which is about as bad as them being broken and making them discardable. It’s in this aspect that I found my mind was starting to look at these talents like just replaceable assets, things that you can just break and replace by the next talent with better stats and initially, the game actually encourages such a playstyle because it’s more efficient to discard your broken talent and replacing them with newer, better ones than keeping them for too long.

This is encouraged by something called the “Hustle Appreciation/Desperation Day” : while you can hustle at any point during your playthrough, it is preferable to keep your girls for these special day which give more money and dedicate the other days to hunting in dungeons and progressing the story. Desperation day in particular is pretty good for your wallet, as the clients give way more money per hustle but in exchange sadly are rougher with your talents which reduce your talents mental health to mush, faster than it took me to write this review and give them a lot of bad attributes !

Realizing the reality of this situation, I started trying to invest more in my talents mental health, showering them with goods to boost their moods and I realized that it was kind of harder to do than just discard them but I didn’t wanna lose some of my best talents as they were a great asset to my business and I grew attached to them. It’s upon this realization that something clicked in my head, I asked the friend who recommended the game to me about tips on how to get more mental health items to keep my talents happy and not leaving them to which they responded that “Yes indeed, it is hard to take care of their mental health, but think about it, isn’t it worse to feed them lies in order to cope with their situation ? It’s not really ethically better to subject them to continuous trauma like that instead of letting them go” and suddenly it clicked, the true horrors of hustling were coming to me. I didn’t treat these poor women as people, I treated these poor women as assets…

I was turning into Kuma, colder, harsher, more disinterested, only caring about the well-being of my talents because I profited off of their pain. I thought that I was mitigating their suffering but truly, I wasn’t. Every Time one of my “talent” mental health started dropping, I was afraid to lose those I called “My best earner” (or “bottom bitch” like that one South Park episode about Butters turning into a pimp). And the complete irony of my line of thinking was put right in front of me when the last tier of mental health training item was literally making my “talents” read the fucking “Myth of Sissyphus” which is a touch of humor on behalves the developers but made me realized how much of an ass I really was when it comes to understanding what the game wanted to say. I was feeding these girls lies to make them feel like their work here was not as bad as it actually was and in the middle of all this, I forgot that this was a game about kidnapping innocent bystanders and forcing them into a life of trauma.

And the downward spiral of awful shit that I was committing naturally without question didn’t stop there. See in this game, there are “special talents” that you can recruit after passing certain points in the story. They usually come with better stats and a unique design provided by the many guest artists who worked on the game but that’s not all. Because these are unique heroines, they have stories attached to them that you can experience by unlocking events by meeting certain conditions, usually involving hustling them to specific people.
When this happens, an ero-scene plays, with a CG and everything and it’s there that the horrors buried deep inside this colorful game starts to show themselves in a much more “in your face” kind of way. See, one of the most interesting narrative decision when it comes to the game story is that the game is told only through dialogues, it’s not an unusual style for Alicesoft of course but the absence of 3rd person narration during the story was purposefully done as to not to embellish or hide the intents of the characters during the regular story sections. Every thought and every action that Kuma or other characters take or have is presented bluntly to you without flourish as to keep the flow of the story intact and the intent of the narrative clear with the exception of two cases scenarios : The Unique Heroine Ero-Events and the “humiliation” scenes that I’ll cover later down this essay.

Here the narration flips the POV from the players, to the victims depicted in the scene because let’s not mince any words, these are harsh, sexual assault scene and the “talents” that you set to the gutter are victims in this specific scenario. During these moments, you can clearly, hear, see and read every deeper thoughts of the story at large, heck one of the CG’s in the game also happens to be in first person view, giving you a frontal look at what it means to be in these people's shoes. Notice how I said “people” and “victims” and not “talent” here because in these circumstances, with the absence of the filters provided by the fluid UI and gameplay mechanics, you can only perceive them as human beings, being progressively destroyed by your actions. You could’ve avoided this, you could’ve just ignored the event requirements for these heroines, but you likely did so out of morbid curiosity or an empty goal minded interest in completing the game CG collection and now you are granted with your “reward” which is these intensely hardcore scenes of psychologically horrific abuse.

There are over 13 unique heroines that are this way and what I do actually enjoy about them is that while their fate is equally as horrible for each, they’re all on a different spot on the spectrum of trauma. Some girls, who lived in Asougi city, who believed in the good of the people living there and the system working for their own benefits, suddenly saw their entire world crumble in front of their eyes. Some of them, whose regular lives were already not enviable before you kidnapped them, see this activity as an escape from the far harsher reality that awaits them in the outside world as being sent to prostitution is marginally better than their previous life. Some of them, who never received or understood the concept of love and are receiving praises for the first time, finally feel values in this body of work. Some of them revel in this situation, as they were already inclined to work with you even if you didn’t force them too.

You might even think that some girl’s situation is “not that bad” until it becomes worse. One of the girls is a pompom girl who gets specifically requested by her childhood friend on behalf of his father buying a prostitute for him to lose her virginity. But after the sighs of relief from realizing that she only has to deal with someone she knows and can trust, it’s immediately followed by the second event where the guy breaks that trust to get out of a bad situation by offering her to his bullies. Feeling guilt over this fact, he starts menacing Kuma, who responds with a cold demeanor that he chose this, that he has his information and that if he attempted to do anything against him, he will expose him and that he need to find another solution and the best solution was simply to buy off the girl to be his private property, removing her freedom for good, just to be the one exclusive to her and give himself a good conscience.

Just like every road leads to Rome, the fate of these girls all end up in the deepest, darkest, places regardless of their circumstances or if they find new meaning in this wretched parody of what they call “their new life”. Whether you keep them around for longer because you wanna keep using their good stats to further your gain, or tire them until they can’t move and break them to replace them with others, in the end, you are always in the wrong, you are always doing bad things ! Your eyes were bigger than your stomach, you can and should’ve avoided this, you could’ve just participated “a little” but you went all in and even then you still participated anyway. Because while these heroines could express themselves directly to you as they were designed as such by the game, how about the slew of generic, interchangeable NPC talents that you sent to the gutter ? You probably only saw them as numbers on a tablet and nothing else.

This is what it means to be Kuma, this is what it means to lose yourself in something that you can’t control anymore. In the end, you’re no better than him, in the end the game molded you into what he become and it’s in this moment that you realize that much like Joker when Kuma leaves the party that the reality of hustling is much more fucked up and that you could probably never do it yourself and yet you did !

There are also other observations one could make of such a system, like how the game seems to privilege younger looking characters when it comes to distributing the beauty stat (with the more child-like ones systematically being S-tier and in high demand) or the fact that talking to your talents is yet another, pointless attempt at trying to sympathize with the victim of your crime and all of this starts to paint an interesting ludo-narrative tapestry that viciously hits where it needs to.

But see, this is where my praise for the game kinda comes to an end, because, the thing that is unfortunate about Dohna Dohna, is that this “style over substance” reputation isn’t entirely invented out of the blue. A lot of the systems that I did mention are secondary and we did see how it was an intentional choice but the problem is that the game expects you to play it in a certain way in order to get the most juice out of what it’s trying to do and this way is pretty counter-intuitive. I guess I haven’t talked about the main story but it’s because my thoughts on it are a bit of a mix bag. I think the cast is charming and the writing can be funny at times and yes, sometimes it can be thoughtful but it feels like it spectacularly ignores all of the narrative potential of the story told by the hustling mechanics.

It’s like Dohna Dohna is two facet of a coin, on the surface, if you play normally and doing the minimum to progress through the game, you realize that the story is a bit of standard and not that entertaining gang-war story with tints of themes of revolution and fighting against oppression, you’ve likely stories like these before and you’ve likely seen them done better. Heck, the game actually has heroines that are not tied to the hustling mechanic but are regular party members and the way the game writes and treats them is a bit… strange ?

When doing a regular playthrough of Dohna Dohna, you can participate in events with your party members to get closer to them and gather affinity points, they’ve become quite popular in JRPG’s these days but this mechanic took its origin from the dating sim genre to which Dohna Dohna is clearly a derivative of. Because this is an eroge, most of the events are for the most part erotic but in the end they all serve the purpose of getting Kuma closer to the girls and the rest of the gang and getting to know them better.

These are called “feelings” event and they’re all sorts of your typical romantic, weird and wacky sex scenario that you come to see from your average eroge with the character arc of said characters usually involving them discovering what sex is and the joy of having healthy regular intercourse with a respectful partner (who just happens to be a freaking criminal on the verge of psychopathy) and eventually falling in love with them or something. Of course, I am vastly exaggerating and there is some variation and some more complex arcs thrown in there but it’s in these moments that the game drops any pretends of being a deep commentary on the commodification of abuse, the cycle of violence and a character study on the fall of a broken man to dive head first into the typical kind of indulgent content meant to titillate the player’s noodlestick.

Combined with the main story itself barely acknowledging the hustling part of the game as an afterthought and you get quite a strange whiplash that might confirm initial expectations. It’s also not helped that the story itself doesn’t really care to explore a bit more deeply the conflicts that exist within its settings. There are 2 other clans that confronts you during the game, they are also Anti-Aso, also participate in similar shady business that you sometimes get to see but most often not but they never really expand on why these gangs who seemingly aiming for the same goal of taking down Asougi don’t actually work together. Is it because they have other methods that don’t fit with Nayuta’s mindset, or they’re using means that they don’t agree with ? It seems like the only reason these gangs fight each other is because it’s traditionally what happens in these types of stories instead of some more deeply rooted reasons.

This sadly has the unfortunate result of making the story go around in circle, never really progressing from hours on end and hinging on similarly repeated conflicts to create intrigues, drama and tension and while it can be entertaining and sometimes fun thanks to the writing being charming, it’s far too shallow to be able to tell an impactful story through the main mean in which the game communicates with you which are the characters, their dialogues and interactions. While there’s definitely some moments, they’re not really reflective of the main conflicts that exist within the world and what our characters are led to do in order to survive in it. The game does try to mitigate this by some neat twist near the end of the game, where it is revealed that in order to maintain the illusion of peace within its system, it had to create, manage and control the Anti-Aso clans from the shadow, manipulating them in order to create a criminal underworld where the more “problematic” citizens can give in to their deeper twisted desires. This reveal should’ve shook Kuma to his core especially when it turns out that Mistress, the shopkeep who led him to this life of crime in the first place, worked in tandem with Asougi’s CEO to maintain this masquerade.

During the final moments of the game, there’s a betrayal arc that ends as soon as it starts because of some friendship speech, there’s a big team-up of all the Anti-Aso clans working together and they try to attack and dethrone the wretched capitalist overlord and their big giant robot of doom. This ending while conceptually interesting concludes in a bit of a wet fart in my opinion, with the characters triumphantly exposing Asougi’s crime to the general public without actually dismantling the company and their influences and most importantly, without facing any real consequences for their action. It was in this moment that Kuma should’ve been punished for his crimes, and face his ultimate fate after realizing that all he did was for nothing and he can only bear guilt on his conscience for the rest of his life or face death but there’s none of that shit and it kinda throw me off a little bit.

You can definitely feel that perhaps, Team Dohna was planning to continue the story and expand on its world, characters and conflicts in a sequel and the multiple endings of the game is definitely opened to it, but with Team Dohna leaving Alicesoft to move on to greener pastures and Dohna Dohna being one of the last high profile games of their catalog that isn’t an exploitative gacha mobile game, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

And it’s a shame because this story in all of its classicism and in all of its shortcoming and lack of completeness and ludo-narrative consistency is the Dohna Dohna that most people who didn’t push the game further than the credits and the basic requirement to progress through the game will experience and it’s a fun story don’t get me wrong ! But, I wouldn’t blame anyone for getting out of Dohna Dohna feeling unsatisfied by its promising premise that ends up being nothing more than a gimmick at first glance !

The thing is that the game has a very counter-intuitive way to push you towards a deeper, more impactful experience which hinges on you being bad at the game. See, when I’ve talked about the heroine's events earlier, I didn’t mention that all of these feeling events have a “variant B” to them which completely flips the script on its head to deliver on some hard hitting confrontation of Kuma’s action and their consequences. To access these alternate events, you have to not participate in any events with the girl (and thus not furthering their relationship and rendering them less useful in battle) until a certain point in the scenario where they get kidnapped. If you fail to save them in a reasonable amount of time, you will witness something called an “humiliation scene” which is, you guessed it, them getting treated similarly to how the unique heroine in the hustling mode gets. While it does offer another H-Scene to complete your gallery, the deeper, long-lasting effect however is changing every subsequent “feeling events” you’ll do with them to have additional dialogues to reflect the traumatic events they went through !

This is a brilliant idea on paper, most of these variant B scenes are actually miles more interesting conceptually than their regular counterparts. One of them is literally Antenna, the goofy autistic hacker girl having some sort of an existential crisis when she realizes that Kuma might actually be as much of a monster as her aggressor and Kuma retorquing that it’s indeed true and that he doesn’t want to feed her lies by pretending the contrary. Or KiraKira trying to convince Kuma from stopping all this madness and trying to go back to a regular school-life as girlfriend and boyfriend with Kuma sadly refusing as he is in too deep to back down no matter how irrational it may be and how uncomfortable it makes KiraKira.

I say on paper, because, getting to the conclusion that the heroines are “more interesting with traumas than without” is a bit of an awkward statement to make as factually true as it may be. Some of them like Porno and Medico, still have solid enough arc regularly especially Porno since her relationship to Kuma is deeply tied to her troubled past and how she’s learning to cope with it in a very unhealthy way but for the grand majority, you’re better off reaching for the heroine bad endings, if you want the game’s tone to fit the harsh subject matters brought up by its gameplay mechanics and Kuma’s inner conflict. It’s also just kind of badly handled in execution, the requirements to even access these bad endings are so specific, and so hard to miss due to the game treating them as punishments for not playing the game right that it kinda misses the point and is where it would’ve helped if the game was just a tad bit more challenging and tad bit less forgiving when it comes to managing your time and your ressources.

Because as it stands, these bad ending variants feel like rewards rather than punishment because you need to actively seek them in order to make the story more engaging and the point the story wants to get at clearer. And unlike Rance IX, where its bad endings were kind of pointlessly edgy to please to a certain demographic without any meaningful addiction to the game story and what it wanted to accomplish, here you’ll actually want to get to them because otherwise, you just end up with a shallower experience and less completion percentage on your save file.

And isn’t it all a bit ass-backward ?

By treating that side of the game as just an optional, easily missable part of the experience, you ultimately sabotage the potential the story could’ve had in the long run and I don’t think that as it stands, Dohna Dohna can hold its ground naturally as a great entry in Alicesoft’s catalog without these pointless detour. But on the other hand, Alicesoft loves their replay value and also loves their generosity and providing their players with tons of contents to satisfy their craving for erotic gaming.

This is where the philosophical dilemma lies with Alicesoft production and more specifically with Dohna Dohna. It’s clear that the reason all of the story’s depth lied semi-hidden behind obtuse condition was only made this way to turn that darker side of the game into something that players are actively seeking and while the scenes in question can be very heavy in terms of atmosphere and content, I’m not a fool to suggest that to some people, these scenes actually feels like a reward regardless of the writers best effort to accomplish the contrary. Because of the way the game leads the player to that content but also because simply, some folks are just “into that shit” and there’s nothing we can really do about that unless turning the game into a family friendly RPG where these subject matters could barely even be brought up in the first place.

But for those who can set aside their fantasies to read between the lines and really absorbing where the game is trying to lead them, they will certainly find what they were looking for story-wise and learn a valuable lesson with this cautionary tale of a broken man, breaking a lot of woman in his path for what he believed was the right thing to do in order to survive and overthrow the system. Alas, I also hoped that the actual main storyline supported that line of thinking.

As a man in my mid-20’s playing eroge I can only admire and scrutinize the story from a media analyst perspective. I can also empathize with the subject matter and the characters interacting with it and also enjoy the game for simply being a fun game to pass the time. Unfortunately, I could never entirely relate to the pleas and the struggles of these victims because I am not one myself and thus perhaps my review might be just as shallow and disinterested as the story itself was to its deeper narrative elements.

With that out of the way however, I think that while Dohna Dohna is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I still think it’s one of Alicesoft strongest title and that while the attempt was a bit messy, I can only appreciate that they’ve tried and create a story that might connect to someone out there who will find more value in it that I have. However I have one last thing to share before finishing up this essay.

I’ve mentioned countless times during this review that the game was recommended to me by a certain person that I had yet to mention : My good friend Kitty, mostly known by its pen-name of “Antenna” or “.Farside”. if my review made you curious about the game or if you simply want a more thorough and engaged analysis of the work by someone with more insight on it as it unfortunately has a first-hand experience with the subject matter and felt deeply touched by it, you can check what its article on the game has to say about the game here :

https://fuwanovel.net/2023/08/why-dohna-dohna-matters/

I highly recommend it personally, it’s better written than anything I could come up with myself and I consider this to be an essential companion piece to a first hand experience with the game.

it's been nearly two years since I closed the book on Project Diva Future Tone. my old roommate's now ex-girlfriend ran off with a 19 year-old mechanic at a go-karting place. whoops :( we haven't played project diva together in a while

I wrote that review under the impression that beatmania iidx was gonna take over my rhythm game grind, and for all intents and purposes it has. both future tone and megamix have unfortunately been uninstalled in order to make way for other titles, while I'll still sit down for iidx sessions at least once a week. however, around the time that review dropped, our local arcade began branching into imported rhythm games. I had been frequenting the place for a couple years by that point (also that same old roommate used to work with the arcade's owners at a barcade down the street back when we were in undergrad; small world!), and the owners had granted my request of kicking off their rhythm game selection with a real project diva cabinet. unfortunately my declining interest in the game had already taken hold, and I never really worked on transferring my skills over to the arcade version as I had initially hoped.

it wasn't until a chance meeting later that year that my interest was reignited. while visiting the arcade with friends from out-of-town and trying out a newly acquired jubeat cabinet, I cycled onto project diva to run a quick set after a girl who had been working on some hard charts. she stood beside me, enraptured in my skill, and quickly introduced herself afterwards. she was a local arts student and miku aficionado who had stumbled upon the switch game and began sinking countless hours into it, propelled even further by her later discovery that we had an arcade cabinet for the game locally. we talked for nearly an hour that day, leaning against pinball tables in this humid shop backroom, discussing our favorite songs while she asked endless questions on hand placement, chart details, and various other strategies.

arcade rhythm games pose significant barriers to those looking to excel at them. each cabinet prides itself on its foreign, sometimes unintuitive interface, all completely divorced from the dual analog and keyboard+mouse conventions we've grown accustomed to. practicing regularly requires either dumping money into a local cabinet, which may be hours away at best, or purchasing an expensive custom controller to play at home, which may require procuring a crack of the game and circumventing layers of copy-protection and environmental inconsistencies in order to run. so to get this social experience, where I could not only cheaply access a local cabinet but also train someone else to enjoy it just as much as I had over the years, was a small miracle. there's something beautiful in that that's difficult to approximate through another type of game; passing down my hard-earned knowledge about this confusing, niche machine to someone else, watching her progress through the ranks of extreme and exex charts, and crystallizing my own insights into something I could actually express to someone else.

as of the last few weeks, she finally surpassed me by clearing Disappearance of Hatsune Miku exex. its notoriously precise ending walled me back when I was playing the game daily, leaving it one of the charts I still have never cleared (along with both ex and exex intense voice and denparadigm exex, plus a couple other ones I've never played much bcs I never owned them at home). a magfest acquaintance of mine who streams project diva regularly and owns his own private cabinet still struggles to clear it every time I've watched him play it; clearing this is such a massive accomplishment. a lot of my study of the game for the last year has been spurned on by her talent and passion, sending me back to the lab to learn parts I had previously skimmed over and spool out new strategies. at the same time, I've transitioned into an adjunct teaching position that's monopolized my time in a way I haven't experienced since high school. I think it's time to close the book again on this game, even though I'm certain I'll play it again in the future.

much of my writing this last year has been on action and puzzle games; genres that are often analyzed through the lens of their depth and capability of decision-making. rhythm games are fully execution tests by comparison, which makes them less straightforward to view through that lens. consider this my first attempt to square that circle and analyze what makes an arcade rhythm game compelling at multiple levels of skill.


Background

The unexpected grassroots popularity of the Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software by Crypton Future Media quickly translated to licensing deals, and Sega managed to squeeze the first Project Diva game out for Playstation Portable in 2009, just months after Sony Music Japan reissued Supercell's landmark self-titled album and Miku's popularity went fully mainstream. This rudimentary early iteration of the series was helmed by Sega's CS3 studio (previously Overworks, known for Skies of Arcadia and the Shinobi reboot) in collaboration with shovelware producers Dingo Inc. With the release of a second Project Diva title subtitled "2nd" and its subsequent expansion "Extend", sales for the series began to dominate Japanese charts. Sega parted ways with Dingo Inc. after the PSP market declined and let CS3 handle two further entries for the Playstation 3 and Vita solo, which were known as Project Diva F and F 2nd. CS3's era ended with the release of Project Diva X on Playstation 4, which fell prey to a cool fan reception, a recall in Korea due to explicit lyrics in the song Holy Lance Explosion Boy, and the overall decline of the Miku brand. In their prime, these games were not only advertising vehicles for the primary Vocaloid products and characters (as well as shallow "pet" simulators outside of the main rhythm mode) but also an important venue for up-and-coming artists to spread their work. This series served an important tastemaker function; just look at the number of comments that mention Project Diva on the Niconico page for baker's excellent track Sound (they don't seem to be on this version of the site anymore but I found the old comments by using Google Translate across the whole page with a Firefox extension).

Meanwhile, the continuing relevance of arcade rhythm games led Sega to task a post-Yu Suzuki AM2 with developing an arcade translation of the PSP game. A prototype was undertaken using a variant of the older Virtua Fighter 5 engine before eventually debuting as a standalone title roughly a year after the release of the first PSP title. While some elements were retained from its sister series, including using Sony's trademark triangle/square/cross/circle symbols for its buttons and many of the same promotional videos (PVs), the underlying mechanics, scoring, and note chart design differed. Along with many tracks pulled from the PSP titles, Sega solicited fans to submit tracks in a contest to be added as arcade-only songs, with custom PVs also being produced via the PSP game's unique video editing mode.

AM2 continued to update the game through a series of minor revisions each containing a selection of new songs, while two major additional revisions added in a bulk of songs from the mainline series, with Version A covering Project Diva 2nd and Version B covering Project Diva Extend. A few final revisions trickled in songs from AM2's subsequent Nendoroid-inspired 3DS series Project Mirai before a full overhaul of the game was released in late 2013 as Project Diva Arcade Future Tone. This title reflected both a move from Sega's older Ringedge arcade board to the Nu platform as well as the addition of a touch-controlled slide bar. A slew of songs from the first Project Diva F were incorporated, with further small revisions bolstering the roster. However, the influx of arcade-original songs was minor, and virtually all songs from the Future Tone era were ported in from the mainline games and Project Mirai 2. The relative failure of Project Diva X signaled the end of active development on the series as a whole, and Future Tone was sundowned in 2016 with only one song from Project Diva X included. After six years of arcade exclusivity, Future Tone received a Playstation 4 release compiling nearly all of the songs from the history of the arcade game, with various DLC that further expanded the game. Fittingly, the arcade version of Future Tone received a late update in 2017 after a year of inactivity which added in two new songs, one of which was the incredibly popular Miku 10th anniversary song DUNE/Sand Planet. A slew of additional note charts for old songs (placed under the "Extra Extreme" label) were added over the course of 2018, with no new songs in their wake. Project Diva Arcade has been defunct since.


The Cabinet

Project Diva Arcade uses a traditional single-person cabinet size and structure, with a controller width of 930mm (around three feet), a depth of 865 mm, and a height of 2190mm (seven feet and change). Official images of the cabinet may be seen on Sega's official site. The main display sits roughly a little over four feet up and is gently tilted back for viewing from above. Its bottom edge is level with both the smooth, fiberglass-esque slide bar and four large hemispheric buttons. Above the screen sit two small speakers on either side of the assembly, although for those who find them quiet there is thankfully a headphone port as well. Virtually everywhere I've ever played this cabinet has necessitated use of the headphones, even when placed next to an identical cabinet.

The buttons are very similar to those used in Pop'n Music: they are around as large as the palm of one's hand and are gently curved. These use an Sanwa optical switch with a 200g spring. Third-party controllers often use a 100g spring instead for a quicker activation. I find the latter to be more comfortable; I was fortunate enough to experience a modded Diva cabinet at MAGfest one year that featured 100g springs, and I noticed virtually every high-level player immediately gravitate towards this cabinet. For a game that necessitates double-handed rolls on single buttons, the 100g springs feel much clickier and less prone to "squishing" into the switch such that they don't rebound when switching from hand to the other at a fast rate.

Regardless, each option affords an accurate experience for single-handed "jackhammer" sections where the same note is repeated many times. I have comfortably been able to execute consistent eighth notes at ~200 bpm (a little under 7 hits per second, such as seen here in Denparadigm Ex) and short rolls of sixteenth notes at ~140 bpm (a little over 9 hits per second) on both stock and modded cabs. However, these buttons are known to frequently experience failure; many of the cabs I've played on in my life have at least one button that will intermittently stick during rolls. This is less than optimal in a game so laser-focused on sequences of rolls, and it begs the question of whether a different type of button would have been more suitable or if, like the console series starting with Project Diva 2nd, they should have switched to a system that used a separate set of four buttons for each hand. Official arcade-style controllers for the console games indicate this could have been a reality. Alas, as Project Diva Arcade released shortly before 2nd, it is likely that their controller design paths diverged too early in the maturation of the series for this to have ever been under serious consideration.


Basic Mechanics

Project Diva Arcade retains many of the surface-level characteristics of the original Project Diva on PSP. It uses a four button layout featuring the traditional triangle/square/cross/circle symbols of the Playstation controller, although the buttons are laid out in a row in the aforementioned order instead of in a "plus" formation as on a Dualshock. The game does not use a traditional manner of scrolling notes; rather, the notes pop into existence at chart-specific positions as the song progresses. The notes are initially hollow (or rather, opaque black with a white outline) as they appear, but are filled by a corresponding colored opaque note that flies in from the edge of the screen. The moment at which these two notes intersect is the moment at which the correct button or set of buttons should be pressed.

It should be noted that this method of indicating timing has some unique problems associated with it. Most rhythm games use fixed, scrolling playfields that give each note an identical length of time from entry onto screen to the so-called "judgement line," or rather, the line at which intersecting scrolling notes should be met with an associated button press. However, Project Diva Arcade's judgement marker equivalents - the hollow notes - appear at wildly varying points on the screen, and thus the consistency for where notes appear from and where they are moving to is lost. Had there been no forethought, this would also result in different lengths of time for each filled note before it hits the corresponding hollow note. Project Diva Arcade compensates for this by ensuring that notes always enter from either the top or bottom sides of the screen (depending on which the hollow note is further from) and by giving each note a slight curvature to its path that varies depending on the distance between the judgement marker and the edge of the screen.

Of course, this creates a further issue: the note pathing is now non-linear and variant across different notes. It begs the question of why this method of marking the notes on screen was chosen in the first place. One answer may be to add visual flair to the note charts and incorporate them with the PVs, such as in this cheeky rendition of the Eiffel Tower seen in Paris Cinema Girl, and another may be found in the influence of the Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan series, which popularized a similar non-scrolling charting style reliant on notes placed on different parts of the screen. The original Project Diva developers on PSP may have taken inspiration from the Ouendan games for their casual appeal on a handheld console; however, Ouendan explicitly factors its moving notes in as an execution check on the player's ability to move their stylus around in tandem on the Nintendo DS's touch screen. The Project Diva series never ties its similar charting style to the mechanics in any meaningful way, as the note positions on screen have no bearing on play at all. This makes the choice more of an obstruction to clean chart design than anything else.

Nevertheless, both console and arcade Project Divas band-aid over the non-linear note pathing in the same way: by adding a marker with the appearance of a hand from a clock. When a hollow note appears on screen, it starts with a clock hand in the 12 o' clock position. This hand immediately starts rotating around the note clockwise until it reaches the 12 o' clock position again; this is the point at which the player must press the appropriate button(s). This lessens the overall clarity issue by localizing the judgement marking to the note itself, which keeps the player focused on the static hollow notes appearing instead of the filled notes flying in from off-screen. Still, this is an acquired taste, and one that is much more complex than notes scrolling down a playfield. It also does not provide a practical or consistent manner of indicating the temporal distance between two notes due to each clock hand being tied to a different note with no ability to directly compare two hands on the same note (except in rare cases with overlapping notes, such as this post-chorus breakdown in Soiyassa on Extra Extreme). As a result, the point at which Project Diva Arcade approaches unreadable note density is much lower than that of games with traditionally scrolling notes, creating practical limits on what is reasonable in high-level charts. High-level Project Diva Arcade players should expect to spend a significant amount of time studying endgame charts at slow speeds to grok unusual or poorly conveyed rhythms.

Each note press is graded on the accuracy of its timing on the enumerated scale of COOL, GOOD, SAFE, BAD, and WORST. These not only influence the player's score but also affect the player's remaining life. Project Diva Arcade features a life bar at the upper left of the screen that decays on missed or inaccurate notes (BAD and WORST), and when it drains it immediately ends the song (unless the game is played on the "premium" mode, which is one single song all the way through with no limitations). Getting COOLs and GOODs back to back will also create a combo multiplier; getting a SAFE or below will end it. One additional quirk is the WRONG grade, which occurs when the correct timing for a note is achieved with the wrong button pressed. The developers chose to make the life loss for this grade negligible, making it possible to skillfully mash through some sections that are otherwise too tricky. However, because this kills combos, it's not really exploitable, and the dire consequences of ruining the actual timing make it so that the player still needs to have some comprehension of the song's rhythm.

Project Diva Arcade Future Tone added a new input method alongside the normal buttons: the slide bar. This bar is touch-activated with a light array underneath that tracks points of contact. Sliding is represented in the game via orange arrows, which point either left and right and may have a "tail" of any length. This tail signals the length for which the slide must be conducted, with no tail requiring no particular slide distance and a long tail potentially requiring as much or more than the length of the entire bar. However, slides have no timing restrictions beyond initial contact. The tail technically consists of many smaller hollow slanted bars arranged in a line; tiny slide notes fly from the outer edges of the screen into the hollow bars along with the timing of the song much like regular notes. However, depending on the distance the player traverses sliding their fingers across the physical bar at the moment of the initial slide, a corresponding segment of the tail's hollow bars will fill blue. This will ensure that the player does not lose the slide when the filled hollow bars make contact with their associated notes, and thus it avoids the player needing to make physical contact with the slide bar the whole time the slide is in effect. Effectively, the player may buffer in slide inputs at the slide's initiation and spend the remaining time on hand positioning, although no song to my knowledge ever requires the player to babysit a long slide while simultaneously pressing buttons unfortunately. A fascinating side effect of this is that it also allows a long slide to be filled by multiple short slides, as long as slides past the first are input before the song's progression reaches a point where there are no more filled bars in the tail left. A player may choose to not only break up a long slide but to also switch hands in the middle of a slide without the threat of needing to maintain contact with the slide bar while doing so, which may be useful in scenarios where a slide effectively "crosses up" a player (i.e. a player has to perform a long slide from left to right and immediately jump back to the left buttons).

Slides in Project Diva Arcade may also be presented to the player as "chords," where multiple slides must be input simultaneously. While chords exist for the standard buttons as well, slide chords have the added wrinkle of their control surface being contactable at a continuous range of points; the only restriction for chords is that the two points of contact where the slides are initiated must be a nominal distance apart, perhaps a couple inches. There are four types of slide chords: both left, both right, pointing inwards towards each other (or -> <-), and pointing outwards from each other (or <- ->). A common way of dealing with these chords is through using the index finger of each hand simultaneously; the song Requiem of the Phantasm makes this clear in its Extra Extreme chart by tying this physical movement to the conductor-like gesticulating of Miku in its PV at multiple points, including twice in this clip here. However, astute players will note that the two slides don't need to originate from two separate hands; two fingers on one hand work as well if spaced correctly. Soiyassa on Extra Extreme has a good example of where this is useful in its end section, where the player must alternate double-button chords and slides in the first two measures and single buttons and slide chords in the second two measures. The second half gives the player the opportunity to create parity with the first half by continuing to use one hand on the slide bar and one on buttons if they choose to use two fingers on the same hand to slide; I often accomplish this with my index and ring fingers. Likewise, inward and outward slide chords can be accomplished with the thumb and middle fingers moving towards and away from each other, much like adjusting the zoom on a smartphone's screen. The integration of the slide bar into the player's finger and arm movements prevents them from keeping their hands glued to the buttons, which begins to form a picture of where Project Diva Arcade succeeds in creating opportunities for the players to plan physical routes for their hands through its unique controller.


Advanced Mechanics

The original Project Diva on PSP had a major mechanic that did not get directly ported to the arcade edition: held notes. For these notes, a full snake-like note would fly in from the edge of the screen with the shape of the corresponding button on both ends, and the player was required to press down on the button at the start of the snake and then release precisely at the end; both the press and release here were graded as separate notes. Again, visually this summons images of the similar "phrase marker" mechanic from Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, where the player drags their stylus over a ball that rolls down a snake-like track from one point to another.

Project Diva Arcade replaces this with a twist. The arcade hold mechanic is effectively an overlay on top of the regular note chart that does not directly affect the player's performance in terms of grading or combo breaks. Rather, when a note or set of notes is marked "HOLD," they can be optionally held down past the time where they need to be activated for additional points. The longer the note is held, the more points are earned, and the more notes held at once, the greater the multiplier on said score. A hold will automatically end at the five second mark, at which point an additional "max hold bonus" will be awarded to the player; otherwise the hold will end when one of the notes that is being held must be pressed again for a new note, even on versions of the game where one could theoretically press a note without breaking the hold. Holds can also be added in progressively much like slides, where consecutive held notes may be chained together to raise the hold bonus multiplier without breaking the previous hold. The key here is that while a note or set of notes is held, the player must continue playing the rest of the song. Notes other than the ones being held as well as slides will continue appearing on screen, necessitating that the player proceed with the track as usual while accounting for the held buttons up to and until the max hold.

Project Diva Arcade's take on hold notes is certainly unusual; most games hew closer to the model in the original Project Diva. However, Project Diva Arcade's version brings much-needed complexity to the otherwise drab four button layout. Let's consider the primary "home" position for the hands across the four buttons: virtually all players will play the triangle and square buttons with their left hand and the cross and circle buttons with their right hand. I personally play in a "penguin"-style, where I use my thumbs for the two inner buttons and the rest of my fingers on each hand for the outer buttons. This arrangement allows both symmetric coverage of the buttons and a fair range of movement where virtually everything is in reach with a bit of forward arm movement. All buttons lie directly beneath fingers, with the primary movement challenge being switching between the home position on the buttons and the slide bar.

The hold mechanic effectively removes forward arm movement, forcing the player to rethink the way they approach the control space. Consider a case where one must hold down the cross button (which is second from the right). If they are using their thumb for the hold, then all right arm movements must pivot around the thumb for the duration of the hold. Some aspects of play that this alters are relatively nuanced. If one is performing a trill between the cross and circle buttons (rapidly alternating between the two), they are likely going to quickly rock their wrist back and forth to shift weight between the thumb and the fingers in succession. Here the primary force is exerted by the forearm, with the thumb and fingers simply transmitting the force. If we then consider a situation where one is holding down on cross and then must rapidly play jacks on the circle button (the jackhammer rapid notes mentioned before), then this force exertion will not work, as twisting the wrist will release the cross button inadvertently. Instead, the muscles of the fingers must be directly used to "flap" downward onto the circle button, with care taken not to lose the thumb's grip on the square button during the movement. The same goes in the opposite direction, where one must hold down the circle button with the fingers and proceed to play jacks with solely the thumb. This may sound trivial, so hold your right hand up and attempt to flap the thumb back and forth independently at speed without jittering the rest of your hand. You'll find it to be difficult and potentially uncomfortable to do for more than a few seconds. If you press your fingers against a table you'll find it easier, but note that the buttons have a built-in spring force pressing against your hand that a static table doesn't have. Even the buttons for something like beatmania IIDX or Sound Voltex use significantly lighter springs designed for high accuracy and little input force from the player, making a button's response against the player while being held not much more than that of the table. The specificity of Project Diva Arcade's cabinet design enables its hold mechanic to diversify the way the player physically routes their body parts while playing the game.

The slide bar further complicates matters, as it sits out of range of the hands without movement of the arm. If we continue with the hypothetical held cross button of the previous example, we could theoretically slide our thumb forward over the cross button to reach the slide bar when needed without losing our hold. However, not only does the button's heavy spring render any major movement across the button dangerous due to the potential for an accidental momentary release, but the button has a curved surface which makes the requisite force magnitude and direction for holding the button down slightly different depending on where one's thumb is positioned. If the thumb is positioned near the center, as is intuitive, then one will likely not notice that this is an issue, but sliding towards the back of the button will quickly require the player consciously exert force fully downward even when pressing on a surface that would otherwise be sloped, diverting some of the player's force in a horizontal direction. Therefore, one must fully pivot their elbow around the thumb as a fulcrum in order to reach the slide bar, preferably with a 90 degree angle at the elbow with the fingers pointed towards the left side of the cabinet. The initial swivel can be used as momentum to begin a left-direction slide if the song calls for it, and the fingers can proceed to slide back and forth without much further arm movement. However, this blocks off access to the circle button completely, as it is now under the forearm. One may be able to press the circle button down with the arm, but doing this without the fine motor skills of the fingers is clumsy, and thus even using this technique in the first place may be only applicable to circumstances where the player feels comfortable jettisoning the circle button. Consider further that the circle button is being held down by the fingers and we are now required to attempt to slide by pivoting around said fingers. Trying to even figure out a suitable way to both hold and slide at the same time in that configuration may be more effort than it's worth.

While in many cases you can use a hand that is not holding any notes in order to perform the slide, there are certainly situations where the above becomes highly relevant. Consider this particular ending section from Transparent Watercolors ExEx. At the start of the linked section, the player must slide left, double tap triangle, and hold a triangle/cross chord. Note that this held chord not only requires both hands (unless one has a particularly wide hand span and could hold both with one hand) but also involves one outer button held with fingers (triangle) and one inner button held with the thumb (cross). Immediately after, the player must repeat the inverse of the same pattern, where they double-tap square, slide to the right, and hold down both square and circle, effectively causing a full four-button hold if done properly. The key interest here is the restriction that the held triangle and cross add when the phrase is replicated. The square must now be pressed without the thumb disturbing the held fingers on the left hand, and the fingers of the right hand must slide over the bar and immediately onto the circle button without disturbing the thumb holding down the cross button. I find this creates an incredibly pleasing sensation of holding down the left side of each hand and then flourishing over to hold down the right side of each hand, with a couple button taps in the middle.

Immediately afterwards, the rhythm is repeated yet with the holds changing; the first hold is now performed with a triangle/square chord and the second hold with a cross/circle chord. As the second part of the phrase now starts with a tap on the cross button, the partial sequence must now be performed fully by one hand, with a double tap of the thumb, a rightward slide across the bar with the fingers, and a return to home with both thumb and fingers holding down the chord. These two sequences illustrate situations where the hold may complicate otherwise straightforward patterns by restricting the movement of the player. Others with more comfort with different techniques may find alternate ways to route these physical movements, such as using palms to allow holding a button while freeing up the same fingers to perform slides or choosing specific fingers for each task; I personally use my middle finger to slide in the second variation of the above phrase and then chord the notes using my thumb and pinky, transforming the tap, slide, and hold steps all into a single wrist motion. This is made possible by the richness of routing in the physical domain, where the player can adapt their playstyle and approach to each song's chart according to their own bodily abilities.

The same could be said could be said for many other games with hold mechanics: Pop'n Music, having nine bubble-shaped buttons compared to Project Diva Arcade's measly four, not only has a more traditional hold mechanic but also frankly features much more prominent physical routing at its top level of play, as demonstrated in this video of top player TATSU. Note how elegantly his hands move across the board, swapping responsibilities for each button between hands as the song demands and avoiding getting too comfortable in any home position. Project Diva Arcade never quite reached this level of sophistication when it came to chart design. However, there are two major wrinkles that Project Diva Arcade brings with its approach to holds. The first, more minor one is the way the timing of the hold is completely decoupled from the rhythm of the song itself. Hold notes in most rhythm games directly correspond to phrases and rhythms within the song; the timing of the hold here is purely an overlay onto the regular chart. The player must account for the length of the hold note as a separate internal timer, even as the hold continues into separate phrases beyond the one where it was initiated.

The second, more important reason is the scoring. Project Diva Arcade uses two separate kinds of scoring: the regular score and a Completion Rate (this links to the Project Diva Wiki, shortened URL used due to embedded parentheses breaking on Backloggd). For the purposes of this critique, I will focus on Completion Rate, as it directly ties to song ranks. As with most rhythm games, Project Diva Arcade ranks the player on their performance with a set of separate, fixed grades: Standard, Great, Excellent, and Perfect (although the latter is not score-based and solely records whether the player hit every note in a song). These ranks are given as the player exceeds certain thresholds of earned Completion Rate given as a percentage, with the Extreme and Extra Extreme difficulties putting the thresholds at 70%, 85%, and 95% for Standard, Great, and Excellent. Completion Rate is calculated primarily as a ratio of the player's combo and timing score (without considering holds) to a hypothetical "maximum" score given by playing every note perfectly throughout the song with COOL timing, hence the use of a percentage to represent the score. This means that the primary component of a player's completion score (and therefore the rank they earn on a given song) rests on their basic ability to accurately hit notes.

On paper this sounds reasonable: if a scoring system is a game designer's way of conveying the importance of particular aspects of play to the player, then the scoring system here encourages the player to hit as many notes as possible while also focusing on timing. However, this ignores a key facet of score gained from hitting notes: the combo bonus. Project Diva Arcade applies a flat point bonus of 50 additional points per note multiplied by the tens place of the combo counter. For instance, hitting a note with a combo of between 10 and 19 notes will give a bonus of 50 points, hitting a note with a combo of between 20 and 29 notes will give a bonus of 100 points, and so on up until the combo reaches 50, at which point the combo bonus saturates to a bonus of 250 points per note hit from that point onward until the combo ends. This is not an insignificant amount; notes hit with a COOL timing give 500 points as a base, meaning that a bonus of 250 points will increase the score by a factor of 1.5. Notes hit with FINE timing give 300 points as a base, and the bonus increases them up to a whopping 550 points, which is worth more than a COOL timing with no combo. This scoring system favors consistency through maintaining long combos of correct over timing, the latter of which can be partially mitigated through the combo bonuses.

Looks are deceiving here, however. Consider that I have a song of some relatively long length, such as 500 notes long, which gives plenty of opportunities to build up a 50+ length combo even if it is dropped multiple times. Let's say I drop the combo twice, once around a third of the way through, and once around two thirds of the way through. I have now lost 7250 potential points from the full bonus each time I have dropped my combo (ignoring the points lost for actually missing a single note, which will vary depending on timing), which ends up being a total loss of 14500 points overall. Each combo drop results in the subsequent 50 notes each getting less points than they would have if the combo was not dropped, with the first nine notes being 250 points lower, the next 10 notes being 200 points lower, and so on. On a different attempt, let's say I again drop the combo twice but this time ten notes after the start of the song and 10 notes before the end of the song. I now only lose 2450 points on each combo drop, for a total of 4900 points lost total; a mere third of that compared to the first hypothetical. This is because on the first combo drop I will be losing only 50 points per note for the next 50 notes due to only lagging the original bonus by 10 notes instead of 50, and on the second combo drop I'll lose 250 points per note for only 10 notes as compared to 50. If the maximum score is 367750 (using the formula given in the previous wiki link), then the first hypothetical will result in a 2.6% higher Completion Rate than the second hypothetical even though only two spaced-apart notes were missed in each case. Although not earth-shattering, this is certainly enough of a difference to tip the scale over getting a particular rank, and I on multiple occasions have won or lost ranks thanks to missing single notes at the "right" or "wrong" times. It's difficult to enforce the idea of "consistency" through a scoring system such as this, as it ends up favoring longer combos to the extent that it prioritizes certain notes over others without any thought given to the context of the song. The lifebar does serve as a backup method of ensuring consistency by deducting life on every miss and regaining life on each correct note, but the weights allocated to the lifebar in this particular game make it so that one will rarely die outside of rapid flurries of notes that will instantly kill the player if missed; it has no way to punish long-term inconsistent play because the life regain from correct notes is too powerful. Therefore, the scoring system struggles to emphasize a method of play outside of maintaining large combos, which is applied inconsistently.

However, there is a secondary component to Completion Rate: the hold bonus, which is this second wrinkle for how the game handles its hold mechanic. The ratio of points received to maximum points only considers points gained from hitting notes, both in terms of points gained from accurate timing and the points awarded from longer combos. The hold bonus provides additional Completion Rate percentage points directly on top of the ratio up to a maximum of an additional 5% per song. For example, getting a four-button hold to the full five seconds (which is uncommon but certainly not rare) provides 18000 points, which will give a full additional 1% to one's Completion Rate in the aforementioned hypothetical song according to the formula given in the wiki link above. Under ideal circumstances, one can actually exceed 100% with exceptional performance on a given song (the maximum is 106%, with 100% coming from all COOL timing and a full combo, 5% coming from maxing out on the hold bonus, and an additional 1% coming from a full lifebar bonus per-hit that I've glossed over up to now). As the hold mechanic provides a much-needed complexity factor to a player's routing for each song, centering it as a vital mechanic with the scoring system in this way ensures that players are incentivized to pursue it as often as possible. It also papers over some of the issues with the combo scoring in terms of allowing the player to "make up" lost points from combo breaks with skilled play instead of inconsistently punishing them for their mistakes. For those primarily focused on achieving Excellent ranks on each song, the addition of this percentage cushion predicated on the advanced mechanic provides relief as long as one is willing to learn what makes the game unique compared to its competitors.


Chart Design - Pre-Future Tone

Each song in Project Diva is given between three and five different note charts on different difficulty levels: these are denoted as Easy, Normal, Hard, Extreme, and Extra Extreme, with the former and latter not making an appearance for certain songs. The Extra Extreme difficulty in particular originated in the Future Tone era as new charts with sliding mechanics for old songs that did not have them. Each chart is independently rated on a scale from 1 to 10 stars, including half-star denominations between ratings (i.e. 7.5*, 8.5*, etc.). While ratings for any chart on any difficulty can theoretically fall anywhere in the scale, charts for a given difficulty level tend to fall into a specific range; for example, Hard charts tend to be found in the 5* to 7* range, while Extreme charts are virtually always 8* and above. As a note, I'll be referring to Extreme and Extra Extreme charts as "Ex" and "ExEx" respectively throughout the rest of this analysis.

Many of the basic elements of Project Diva chart construction can be found through analysis of Denparadigm Hard, which, at an 8* rating, sits well above most of the other Hard charts in the game. From the opening verse, one may notice the general structure of the game's charts: each measure (four beats in this case, if you were to count along to the tempo of the song) has its own horizontal line of notes on the screen, which zig-zag back and forth across the screen moving downwards on each measure until reaching the bottom of the screen. Each string of notes on Hard tends to consist of only a single button, although at the blistering speed of Denparadigm it may as well be a jackhammer pattern as discussed before. If we review the layout of the buttons from left to right (triangle, square, cross, circle) we may also note that most of the adjacent phrases tend to use physically adjacent buttons as well, and often times the buttons appear in ascending or descending orders, such as four phrases starting at this timestamp moving from left to right until jumping back to square on the final phrase.

Indeed, I would expect most people watching this video after having read the Advanced Mechanics section to be puzzled at the lack of many of the previously discussed concepts appearing here. Chords are completely absent until nearly two minutes into the song and disappear after the bridge and final pre-chorus, holds only appear at the end of phrases before pauses, and slides seem tossed in haphazardly. Many of the aforementioned mechanics exclusively appear in high-level play, even as in many other arcade rhythm games you would find similar mechanics in much earlier difficulties. Perhaps this was done to assuage issues with the awkward visuals for determining the judgement of a note, or it may have arisen from trepidation about making a rhythm game with a strong appeal for casual fans of the subject material quite as brutal as its contemporaries. Such bland chart design permeated even the highest levels of the console series, with the infamous boss song Intense Voice of Hatsune Miku from Project Diva 2nd challenging its players to 20 straight seconds of sixteenth notes at 220 bpm in the exact same ascending pattern as seen in Denparadigm Hard (although for Project Diva 2nd, this would've been counter-clockwise around the face buttons). Both the console series and Project Diva Arcade illustrate teams with no prior rhythm game experience struggling to articulate novel and challenging chart designs on top of the inelegant base of the original Project Diva, and while it's inarguable that Denparadigm Hard would easily fluster a newcomer with its quick tempo and long strings of notes, it's not a terribly interesting chart either.

With that in mind, it would be more fair for us to analyze a true high-level chart in the arcade version. The Project Diva Arcade version of Intense Voice released two years after its original appearance in Project Diva 2nd, and it thankfully attempted to provide a more considered challenge on Extreme than the lazy button-mashing of its original iteration. As the arcade version's first 10*, we can immediately begin to see some more sophisticated design principles. Relatively close to the beginning of the song we can see rapid triplets: first with cross-square-cross, and second with circle-triangle-circle. This presents a twist on the design of button locality that we first glimpsed in the way that Denparadigm Hard laid out its button phrases.

If we recall the home position for the player's hands specified in the Advanced Mechanics section, we can specify relationships between each of the buttons based on how the player will interact with them in generic cases. There are two major pairings that give insight into how challenges can be inscribed into charts: a pairing based on separating the left and right hands, and a pairing based on the part of the hand used to hit the buttons. The first pairing is straightforward: we divide the cabinet down the middle, with a triangle/square pair tied to the left hand and a cross/circle pair tied to the right hand. The second pairing we see reflected in the above triplets: we have an "outer" pair controlled by the fingers consisting of triangle and circle and an "inner" pair controlled by the thumbs consisting of square and cross. The second pairing is significant because it's symmetrical; in the above triplets, the thumbs are used for the first triplet (cross-square-cross) and the fingers are used for the second triplet (circle-triangle-circle). This ensures that when the player alternates the buttons, they're doing so symmetrically on each hand, which allows the player to activate the same group of muscles on each hand in succession. The alternative, such as switching between circle and square rapidly, would require the player to move separate groups of muscles on each hand at a rapid, consistent rhythm, which would be more difficult. Another subtle aspect of these triplets is that they start with the right hand in both cases, ensuring that the majority of players will lead with their dominant hand. As the first significant execution barrier in the song, these triplets provide a tricky yet digestible challenge for the player.

A few more seconds into the song, we also see an appearance of three-button chords (which I'll refer to as tri-chords). With two-button chords (which I'll refer to as di-chords), there are multiple common combinations that can be done with a single hand, specifically triangle/square, square/cross, and cross/circle. No tri-chord could ever be pressed with a single hand however, making them generally more challenging. As seen in the former clip, these chords are often laid out in a triangle formation, and most often they are chosen based on button locality, with the two most common tri-chords being triangle/square/cross (a left-side tri-chord) and square/cross/circle (a right-side tri-chord). Shortly after the appearance of these we often see the sole quad-chord, where all four of the buttons must be pressed simultaneously. Unlike the tri-chords, where the player must discern which button is missing from a set of three, the quad-chord provides instant clarity into what buttons must be pressed due to there being only one possible combination. It also follows the aforementioned symmetry principle between the hands in an easily identifiable way: both hands must simultaneously press both of their assigned buttons at once. While Project Diva Arcade is nowhere near as chord-centric as many of its contemporaries, the game still deploys these chords frequently in higher-level charts.

In the second main section of the song, we can begin to see ways that chords are utilized in series to create meaningful challenges. Their first application here is in a variant on the staircase configuration, which generally refers to when multiple buttons are pressed in sequence in order from one side of the controller to the other. In this version, one button is repeatedly pressed as a base (first circle, and then triangle) three times in a row, with each press accompanied by each of the other buttons pressed in succession, ascending from one side to the other. This particular idiom lends itself well to moving one hand to the base button while using the other hand to ascend the staircase independently, shifting out of the home position in the process. The final aspect of this is key: by forcing the player to shift out of the home position, the designer immediately has the power to disorient the player by throwing notes at them that would be difficult to do without full coverage of the buttons, which requires the player to budget in time to return to the home position. We examined this concept previously in the Advanced Mechanics section regarding the slide bar, the sole purpose of which is to mandate that the player moves their hands away from their default position; a pre-Future Tone chart such as Intense Voice Ex does not have this luxury unfortunately. However, by moving away from home position, the player may have the ability to reduce physical complexity, such as in this example where a player may avoid fine motor control and asymmetric inputs in the home position (using individual parts of the hands to hit each button while hitting the last note of each staircase as a single-handed chord) by transitioning it into symmetric inputs with gross motor control (playing each side of each chord with a separate hand consistently). In this case, the long pause after the rapid staircase makes it trivial to return to the home position if one leaves it in order to execute the staircase.

I've covered the thought process without considering how the holds affect it, but we can clearly see that a number of these buttons have holds attached to them. In this particular case, the hold mechanic allows the player to optionally pursue the more complex home position route by requiring that they not only press each button in the ascension part of the staircase but hold them as well. This creates further asymmetry between the base button fingers and the remainder of the actionable bodily appendages by giving them different roles (one repeatedly presses, the others press and hold). Although a subtle example, we can see here how the hold mechanic is able to provide the incentive for more difficult physical routes through a sequence, giving players of different physical ability levels separate options for dealing with the section. We can see a Future Tone-era spin on this concept in Transparent Watercolor ExEx, where this particular staircase pattern is followed up immediately by a slide, with a return to home complicated by the immediate follow-up of the opposite staircase pattern with much smaller breaks.

Returning to this section in Intense Voice Ex, we can now observe a different kind of staircase, where the three separate adjacent di-chords are used in succession. If we look back at the common di-chord list, we can see that the first (cross/circle) and last (triangle/square) in the series are di-chords meant for a single hand in the home position, while the middle one is the "thumbs" di-chord (square/cross). Again, the player has the option to either let one of their hands leave the home position to hit the middle di-chord or go for the more complex hold route, where they quickly perform a single-hand chord, a chord with both thumbs, and the opposing single-hand chord in rapid succession. After two of these staircases (first starting at the right side and then the left) and a similar pattern where the single-hand chords occur first before the "thumbs" chord, we see the escalation of this challenge, where the two single-hand chords occur before the "fingers" chord (triangle/circle). In this instance, the less complex route of navigating away from the home position is removed due to the distance between triangle and circle; while square and cross could be pressed simultaneously with a single hand, the same does not exist for triangle and circle as they each sit at the outer and opposite edges of the cabinet. Therefore, while one may progress up to this point without the necessary fine motor skills to transition from full-hand movements to finger-specific movements, they must demonstrate them in this final phrase of the section in order to progress without a life penalty.

I've chosen these examples because they're relatively comprehendable when watching and provide a good entry-level understanding of the subtleties that come from these kinds of constructs when encountered in high-level play. This begs the question of why this kind of design exists in a top-level chart, which should theoretically have much more difficult design. The section after the above is mainly rapid-fire single-button presses, although the designers still are placing jackhammer sections on one button before trills between two buttons, indicating that they still have not realized that the former is harder than the latter due to the stiff button springs and precise timing needed to let the button rebound between successive presses. The real challenge comes within the last six measures, where extremely fast triplets give way to rapid single-button staircases (looping each button from triangle to circle and then later circle to triangle) and shifting trills between the two hands. This is an unfortunate example of a song infamous for ending with an sudden volley of notes, which makes the song aggravating to practice; every failed attempt at the very end of the song results in needing to replay over two minutes of comparatively easy gameplay to get back to the hardest section. While the original PSP version of this song had a similarly brutal outro, it was at least shrouded in a Chance Time mechanic that game had that removed the lifebar while giving the player additional points during the segment. It's also worth noting that this kind of frustration has been addressed in later songs, such as Leia ExEx putting its most technical section at the beginning of the song, making one's poor performance evident from the beginning of the song rather than the end (it's also worth comparing this song, a 9.5* in the Future Tone era, to the 10* Intense Voice Ex in terms of its more complex chord patterns in the chorus).Given that the pattern is not particularly complex at slower tempos and solely subsists on the speed to trip up the player, the song overall doesn't necessarily do an excellent job illustrating the higher levels of play.

Unfortunately, this may have been one of the more interesting endgame charts of its era. The next 10*, Two-Faced Lovers Ex (my apologies for the scantily clad Miku outfit that top-level player hisokee is using in this video), demonstrates a common kind of chart from this era: charts heavily based on the syncopation and rapid syllables of Miku's vocals. For those less familiar with music lingo, syncopation essentially refers to rhythms that prominently feature beats that fall "off-beat"; if you imagine tapping your foot or nodding your head along to a beat, syncopated rhythms will try to exclusively use beats in-between the "on-beats" made by your tapping. As such, most of this song's challenge is centered around long lines of single notes tightly woven together with few chords to speak of. This style of charting and the jackhammer patterns within present their own conflict for the player with regards to moving away from the home position: what segments should they attempt to mash with a single hand while keeping all buttons covered, and what segments should they attempt with two hands in order to ease the strain on a single hand over longer sets of jacks? However, in a chart with few chords to encourage button coverage or holds to encourage single-handed play, the easiest strategy is simply going for two hands as often as possible. Because the decision between remaining at home base or roaming the controller is given so many times, it dilutes its potential meaning and ends up making the chart feel long and samey. By the end of the song, the notes are so densely packed together that, with no adjustable scrolling speed or appearance rate for the judgement markers, they are difficult to even make out.

Two-Faced Lovers is a bit of an outlier example in terms of the severity of its devotion to jacks. However, most of the top charts from that era played with similar design paradigms. How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex features less prominent syncopation and no jackhammers in favor of playing more with odd note localities and staircases, such as in this inspired sequence that both places staircases of different lengths next to one another in the same phrase as well as creating sequential staircases that actually "loop" from triangle on the left side to circle on the right side seamlessly. Po Pi Po Ex hews closer to Two-Faced Lovers regarding syncopation, with its primary chorus rhythm being iterated upon in adjusted staircases with mini-trills intertwined. Of this era, Paradichlorobenzene Ex may be the best expression of this style, with a rolling samba-esque rhythm underpinning some very creative extrapolations of the staircase featuring note triads that advance left and right across the controller. This chart in particular does an excellent job weaving chords into this playstyle, and in the second half of this clip it highlights pairings of notes that we glossed over earlier: button pairs with a single other button between them. This pairing, consisting of triangle/cross and square/circle, both exist across the hands in the home position and feature asymmetric pairings of hand muscles, with each one requiring use of the thumb of one hand and the fingers of the other. This pairing is essential for ratcheting up difficulty after particular rhythms are initially introduced with the two types of pairings mentioned prior, as they demand an additional layer of asymmetric coordination that the other pairing types do not require.

One design aspect each of these charts struggles with is their integration of chords, exemplified best by Saihate Ex. The first half of this chart is innocuous enough, replicating many of the same patterns we discussed previously regarding Intense Voice ExEx (another indicator that the latter chart punches well below its weight in terms of difficulty in its first few sections). The sheer volume of chords in some of these sections strains the player's ability to read them accurately on a first pass, exacerbated by their close locality, minute variations between chords, and lack of distinctions in color between the notes. If we slow this section down, it doesn't look complex on paper, with alternating inner and outer di-chords switching to alternating right and left tri-chords before doing a sort of muddled staircase from right to left using a mix of di-chords and tri-chords. One may feel compelled to leave the home position for the tri-chords, where they might use their right hand to hit the right-most buttons and the left hand to cover the single remaining button, which can then be simply moved one button to the side to hit the alternate tri-chord. Leaving the home position has next-to-no penalty for the player, as the alternating tri-chords end on the same chord they started on and can be easily transitioned out of into the final two di-chords, leaving the player back in the home position regardless. Given the poor visibility, it's more of a knowledge check than anything else; something a player would check in a video before playing the song in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the visual flurry of notes. One way to solve this would be to transpose the notes on screen to match the physical layout in front of the player, mimicking a vertically-scrolling rhythm game in the process. The chart does use this method at multiple points, begging the question of why they didn't choose to deploy this more frequently.

This is not to impugn all of Saihate Ex necessarily, as the song does introduce us to some other chord patterns that will be deployed again later, such as the additive staircase used in the third phrase of this clip that requires the player to actively add each button in successively larger chords before eventually making a quad-chord and subtracting all of the buttons in succession. However, what one may notice from watching the song in full is how segregated the single-button sections and the chords are in general. At this stage in the game's development, the designers seem to conceive of each type of note as a completely separate challenge, with the highest point of escalation being divided between fast jackhammer phrases such as in Two-Faced Lovers Ex and dense chord phrases such as in Saihate Ex. Intense Voice Ex may be one of the better examples of a song attempting to integrate the two, as it repeatedly uses these plinked notes between single buttons on one hand and chords on the other, and the era's final endgame chart World's End Dancehall Ex shows the designers finally giving blended sections a chance in its outro. The rest of the charts we've brought up this far (with the arguable exception of Paradichlorobenzene) fall into this trap pretty noticeably though: examine these examples from How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex and Po Pi Po Ex.

This kind of chart design artificially limits the kinds of phrases that the player must learn, and it ultimately reduces the physical routing tradeoffs required in the learning process. Too many jackhammer sections on their own don't incentivize much other than two-handing each section, and chord spam can easily trap the player in the home position without confounding factors forcing one to move away. Holds, which should theoretically solve both of these issues, are underutilized as well; other than the smart example found in Intense Voice Ex, I found virtually no instances of holds that weren't at the end of phrases before a pause or spread throughout a section of single-button presses. There are glimpses of excellence here, but much of the older Project Diva Arcade material feels undercooked. Thankfully, the changes undertaken in the transition to Future Tone would remedy many of these issues.


Chart Design - Post-Future Tone

Instantly with the addition of the slide bar we can breathe a sight of relief; the game has finally added a mechanic that forces one to leave the home position as a rule, allowing the kind of physical routing I spoke of in the Advanced Mechanics section to finally blossom. There is a reason many other rhythm games that uses buttons has some sort of non-button control surface to add this kind of complication, from the turntable in IIDX to the knobs in Sound Voltex. Pop'n Music, which is closer to Project Diva Arcade in its button dimensions, solved this issue prior simply by having over twice as many buttons, far more than any person could ever cover simultaneously.

To succinctly demonstrate the drastic rise in the charting chops of the designers at this point in the game's development, let's examine this clip from the song Knife Ex, our first 8.5* we've examined. I've chosen this clip in particular because it does not use the slide bar; it simply shows how much more nuanced the original version could have been with better charting. The clip immediately begins with a hold on triangle that segues into a relatively slow trill on square and cross (our inside "thumb" buttons), where each trill phrase ends with di-chord on the right side of the controller (cross/circle). It's followed by an interlude that ends with a hold on circle, and the pattern repeats in an inverse fashion, with each trill phrase ending on the left side of the controller (triangle/square). Without the hold, this pattern is simple: alternate the thumbs for the trill and end each phrase with the full hand chord of whichever thumb you would have otherwise finished on. With the hold, suddenly our issues with accidentally releasing a held button on fingers while using the thumb to consistently play notes arise, as discussed in the Advanced Mechanics section.

Without the chord, one could move their non-held hand to the inside buttons and trill on a single hand. With all of these together, the player must now choose: do they consistently move between home position and the inside buttons in order to avoid using the thumb on the held hand, or do they attempt to do each section in the home position while carefully avoiding releasing the held button? This still finishes in the home position regardless, a complaint I levied in the previous Chart Design section, but note that this is an 8.5*; theoretically "easier" than the other charts we've covered up to now. It also has the bonus of being completely unique in its execution, compared to many of the prior examples, which used patterns repeated from song to song. Note as well how the held circle at the end hits max time not at the end of the phrase but a few notes into the next one right before a square/cross hold, perfectly segueing holds together! The sophisticated charting here in an 18-second clip perfectly demonstrates how one might have leveraged the mechanics of Project Diva Arcade before the slide bar was added.

A chart with more parity with the heavily syncopated examples from earlier is Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex, which originally debuted in the Project Mirai series. From the jump it becomes apparent that the old note layout style - long horizontal rows of notes moving from one side of the screen to the other - has been made less rigid, with more aesthetic flourishes and verticality featured by comparison. This layout style not only gives each song more individual flavor (such as in the Paris Cinema Girl example given earlier) but also can assist readability when deployed correctly. For example, the ending section uses it almost immediately to make a trill between circle and square more clear by staggering the two with a vertical offset. This eliminates one of the issues brought up in the previous section: the inability to parse tightly clustered groups of notes. This is made additionally important in the next phrase, which bucks the tradition established by many of the clips up to now by not fully mirroring the phrase before it. Instead of trilling on the same notes used in the chord as in the first phrase, cross and circle (the latter of which had not been used in the phrase before) are trilled, and by offsetting the cross notes in this phrase to be level with the cross of the chord before it, this twist immediately pops out of the screen differently than it would have it every note in the sequence was level.

The next phrase then starts at the bottom of the screen and works its way up to two inner di-chords, which are placed such that they line up with the controller buttons. The slides here additionally sandwich the di-chords instead of appearing on the same plane, indicating to the player that they should use their fingers to swipe the slide bar while holding with their thumbs. We previously saw this used to good effect in Saihate Ex, and by adding a non-horizontal lead-in, the effect is improved. Another small example of where this kind of charting can be an improvement is seen in these two clips from Step Forward Ex, which actually displays a staircase pattern as a literal staircase. Much like a section of How'd It Get To Be Like This? Ex that repeated a staircase multiple times with various notes cut off and ordered differently, Step Forward Ex repeats the same trick, but the visual layout of the staircase now immediately indicates where notes are truncated or where the staircase is reversed. While the original layouts undoubtedly stuck to simple patterns in order to keep the unorthodox judgement mechanics from becoming overwhelming, the designers eventually figured out how to make the quirks of their charting system work for them to enhance readability.

However, this kind of charting can also work against the player; in some cases the Future Tone-era charts actually employ obfuscation of the chart as a challenge. One subtle example seen in Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex actually relates to holds, where a chance for a seemingly juicy four-way hold immediately gets preempted by other holds. In this case, a left-side di-chord hold (triangle/square) has a circle hold immediately following it, signalling that one should hold all three simultaneously. However, the circle is not followed up with by a cross hold but rather another left-side di-chord hold before finally yielding to a cross hold; the player will optimally hold the di-chord, drop it right before holding the circle, and then re-hold the di-chord and then the cross in order to make a full four-way hold. I'll certainly grant that the conceit is clever in the way it upends the player's expectations on how the game sets up sequential holds, but at the same time this is a pure knowledge check, with as little depth as the long chord phrases that I criticized in the previous section.

A type of obfuscation more pertinent to visual layouts can be found in Jugemu Sequencer ExEx, effectively an entire song built around disorienting the player when attempting to sight read. This includes multiple different box-style layouts, a section that purposefully displays the notes out of order, notes surrounded by a chord that must be hit on each downbeat repeatedly, and trills where the alternating notes diverge away from each other. Clearly the chart designers had fun with this song as they tried to push the note layout system to its limit. Again, this song falls prey to being primarily a long series of knowledge checks, especially since, as a 10*, the actual note-to-note difficulty is probably notably lower than most of its cohort even when compared to the pre-Future Tone charts. Since it's only a single chart built entirely like this, I can let it slide, and since it's not a particularly brutal challenge comparatively, I actually enjoy it a fair bit having sat down and learned the whole thing.

Still, there are instances where these practices accidentally slip into more serious songs. One instance can be seen Denparadigm ExEx, where two right-hand tri-chords overlap with notes in-between the two chords placed between them. Evidently this is meant to both follow the standard of having tri-chords be an equilateral triangle while also having it appear as though they are actually separated from one another and squished to the top and bottom; an admirable attempt, but the overlap between the lines in each chord gives the impression that they're adjacent. Likewise, in Negaposi*Continues Ex, this particular chord sequence attempts to adhere to the faux-vertical scrolling template but jumps up to the top of the screen right as it throws a curveball triangle/cross di-chord instead of the adjacent di-chords preceding it. In this situation, it may have been better to squash the whole phrase vertically and let the curveball chord sit at the bottom so it's clearly visible as a twist by comparison.

Which is a shame, because otherwise this latter sequence is an extremely interesting pattern that far exceeds the examples we covered in the previous section. It starts off with a right-hand di-chord followed by two circle hits in what begins a triplet pattern in an odd time signature. However, as soon as the identical second di-chord is hit, the pattern shifts from double-tapping the right-most note (circle) and instead requires a double tap on the left-most note (cross). The game then turns this into an augmented staircase where the di-chord and its subsequent left-button double tap advance leftwards twice until the triangle is double-tapped, at which point it then throws the curveball triangle/cross chord to disrupt the staircase after only three iterations of the pattern. That curveball is meant to signal that the player must return to the original position (cross/circle) and pattern (right-button double tap as opposed to left), after which they then get thrown into a motif from earlier in the chart utilizing a rapid di-chord staircase that returns to center. This phrase not only completely defies the phrase symmetry that older charts relied on, but it also still somehow returns to its starting point as if it was symmetrical.

Diving into the nitty-gritty of the rhythm in this clip, the song takes the unusual tact of switching into a 3/4 rhythm (three beats in a measure) that is repeated five times. What's more, the actual beginning beat of the repeated pattern the player must hit falls just before the actual start of the 3/4 rhythm, and the accent continually hits preemptively on triplets over top of an already-3/4 rhythm, creating a desync between the actual beat (which is already an odd time signature) and the rhythm the player inputs. The two slides in between the end of the phrase and the start of the motif are essential because they effectively re-synchronize the player to the beat of the song before the motif, letting both the player and the song meet on the downbeat of the fourth measure of the overall clip. The marriage here between the song's whirlwind, atypical rhythm and the complex reinterpretation of a staircase pattern in its image is so crystalline and beautiful that it may be the most perfect five seconds of gameplay this cabinet has to offer; a point at which the game not only completely shears itself from traditional rhythm, but invites the player to partake in the spectacle. Attempting to explain the many ways this may be routed based on player preference could easily eat up an entire other paragraph. Truly phenomenal, even without holds or many slides to add complexity.

Indeed, some of Project Diva Arcade's best moments after the release of Future Tone come from these moments where the game encourages the player's two hands to cooperate past the point of straight lines of chords and into something polyrhythmic. In my interpretation of the above phrase, I completely exit the home position and treat each hand as a separate half of each chord, passing the baton of jackhammer notes from my right to my left and back to my right in the process; the two hands constantly swap different rhythms between one another. Disappearance of Hatsune Miku ExEx features a similar type of rhythm in its notorious ending, where the player plays jacks on one end of the button layout while tossing in other buttons every three notes. The escalation here is interesting, as the first phrase only requires the player to make chords using square and triangle against circle, thus allowing them to easily stay in the home position, while the second phrase with jacks on triangle weaves in a left-hand dichord (triangle/square) halfway through, suggesting that the player may need to move their right hand out of the home position. This rhythm doesn't quite tickle the itch of Negaposi*Continues due to it cinching up each measure in a trill that resyncs the player to standard rhythm on a consistent basis rather than at an odd time as in Negaposi*Continues, but it does innovate with the interwoven nature of chords and single presses more than what was seen in endgame charts in the early days of Project Diva Arcade.

Some of the game's versions of this concept instead fully suggest the home position, mandating fine motor control in the process, such as in this sequence from Denparadigm Ex. The phrase again uses triplets in a similar di-chord double-tap order, but here all the di-chords are outer di-chords (triangle/circle), the special combination that we saw restricts the ability to move from the home position in Intense Voice Ex. The double taps are a staircase from left to right where the player must continually tap the outer di-chord at each outset of each set of three while moving between the different individual notes in the process, while the second half of the phrase switches to alternating squares and crosses in place of the double taps. This hews closer to being a strict execution check; while I see the logic in making a section like this more free-form, I also personally enjoy the game foisting an unusual rhythm and pattern like this upon the player. If the rhythm wasn't triplets, I might be less impressed.

Perhaps the chart most exemplary of the strengths of the post-Future Tone-era design is Piano × Forte × Scandal Ex. This chart doesn't have a particularly awe-inspiring section a la our previous three examples (perhaps due to it being a 9.5* and not a 10*), but instead we see a consistently varied charting style that effortlessly weaves in many of the best elements of the game. The song itself serves as particularly fertile soil: it's not only syncopated but also much looser and airier than the older compositions, owing to composer OSTER project's talent for freewheeling big-band arrangements, and it features an unusual structure with multiple instrument solos interspersed between the traditional verses and choruses.

Even in the first verse we can already see some of the changes highlighted throughout this section, such as the specific placement of holds such that the logical end of each one transitions smoothly into a separate hold instead of large gaps between them. Of particular note is the way this chart deploys obfuscated hold patterns as shown here, here, and here. In each of these instances, continuing one hold with another will cause it to be cut short by an upcoming occurrence of the button used in the first hold, suggesting that the player should cut the first hold short right before beginning the second. On their own, I previously complained about these being knowledge checks; however, executed several times through a song, and when considering the limit of 5% Completion Rate that one can accrue through holds, I see this iteration of the concept as giving players multiple different hold routes throughout the song to consider based on their own personal competence, where even missing the most "optimal" hold in one instance could theoretically still result in the best score as long as enough of the other holds are hit. In the second of these instances, correctly switching holds to avoid ending the bonus also results needing to slide outward with the fingers while the thumbs hold in the center as previously seen in Gaikotsu Gakudan to Riria Ex, and this example switches back to the buttons from the slide bar without breaking the hold as well.

Beyond the acumen in its hold implementation, Piano × Forte × Scandal Ex has excellent fundamentals in terms of its use of the core buttons. One of the tricks the chart pulls repeatedly are slides before a tri-chord, putting the player away to the slide bar fractions of a second before they need to return both hands to the home position. However, shortly before this clip, the designers actually sneak in the same trick using jacks to pull the player's hands from the home position. The jacks could theoretically be done one-handed, but their length and transition between multiple buttons make them much more reasonable to do with two hands, which will require a quick move back to home at the end of the jacks on square in order to hit the tri-chord. Trills are also woven in with more care than we've previously seen, such in this short phrase right before the ending. Note that the first trill actually starts on cross, which is the inner button on the right hand, and it transitions seamlessly into a second trill that also starts with the inner yet is on the left hand. For those composed enough to do so, they could theoretically stay in the home position the whole time. However, this also presents the opportunity to move both hands to the right side of the controller and start the trill with the left hand, transitioning over to the left side in between trills. I personally do something a bit stranger: I cross my hands over one another to begin the trill on the right hand, with it on the cross button and my left hand on circle. I then execute the second trill the same as in the prior explanation, having performed a double tap from cross to square with my right hand while my left hand transitions over to the left side of the controller. While this sacrifices the smooth alternating pattern by adding a double tap in the middle, I find that it gives my hands an easier time moving over, as the right hand executes two hits on adjacent buttons while the left hand has those two presses to move over as compared to only a single one. To provide this abundance of physical routing from a single button-only section is rather genius.

There's another interesting section from earlier in the song that I find equally fascinating. This is a similar trill between cross and square where the cross hits suddenly drop out, leaving the square to wander along the off-beat until the triangle gets subbed in. Again, because the square must constantly be played here, I find myself starting in the home position with right hand on cross and left hand on square until crossing my right hand over my left in order to weave in those triangle notes. The way the chart designers extrapolated the lazy air of that piano line nearly trailing off as it edges higher until finally returning to the trill really sings the praises of what this system can do in the right hands. When Future Tone's charts are at their best, they paper over many of the issues brought up in previous sections, fulfilling the promise of a true arcade-quality rhythm game for the Vocaloid technology.


Analysis of High-Level Play

In the clips I've used up to now, you may have noticed that many of them feature a Dualshock controller in place of the arcade controller I have been describing. Since the release of Project Diva Future Tone on Playstation 4, the majority of the community has transitioned to widely available home versions of the game, which include Future Tone on Playstation and MegaMix/Mega39's across both Switch and PC. This also includes most of the top-level players using regular controllers, which would require a completely different line of analysis than the one used above given the considerable differences in techniques between using an arcade controller and a traditional gamepad. This version of the game is completely fine, and the way the control gets reinterpreted actually has many fascinating quirks of its own, if also sacrificing some of the mechanics in the process. However, it would be preferable if we could take a look at how an actual high-level player takes on the arcade version that we've been discussing. To do this, I'll be using this lovely full combo video of Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex from top-level player F.SinA.

Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex is overall a jackhammer- and trill-heavy chart, though it's occasionally sparse due to the designers gunning for 666 total notes in the song, which falls below most of its 10* brethren. Still, from the get-go watching this video we can immediately see why it makes an interesting watch: the amount of jacks necessitate quite a bit of two-handed playing on single buttons, which in turn means we'll see him leaving the home position quite a bit. There actually is a particular physical technique that can get around this: the "tickle," which you may have noticed F.SinA doing while screwing around in one of the breaks. We won't see him deploy it much, likely for its tendency for losing the even spacing needed to maintain good timing on jacks, but we get to see a good shot of it nonetheless. If you come from a game like Guitar Hero, you may be surprised that he doesn't drop a combo or lose health by doing this; generally the rules on when you can and can't hit notes are much more relaxed in arcade rhythm games, allowing him to freestyle in this otherwise empty section.

Getting into the first verse, we begin the fundamentals discussed above expressed. Holds are common but generally feature only one button at a time, yet we still get to see how it affects the way he navigates across the controller. He seems to not feel particularly strong about one-handed jacks with just his thumb, so you'll see him do short sets of jacks with his fingers even when on an inner button, and when he's performing holds on one of the outer buttons, he'll bring his alternate hand over to assist his thumb on inner jacks. Also pay attention to just how far he brings his hands up between each hit of the jacks, as doing otherwise would likely end up squishing the button in place. The most creative physical routing he incorporates here can be seen in this clip: during a section where he needs to hold triangle through three successive sets of inner jacks (square, cross, square), he initially uses his fingers for the hold before smoothly sliding his arm over the button to use his forearm for the hold such that he can use both hands on the cross button on the other side of the board. Such a clever incorporation of a non-hand body part, and one that requires some serious finesse in order to not lose the hold when sliding over the bump where the palm comes up to meet the wrist.

After one of the song's more iconic sections and another verse of jacks, we finally get to see F.SinA play some chords during this clip. A few important key points stand out to me about his play here. First, you'll notice in the opening di-chord staircase he favors the right hand to play both the right-side di-chord and the center one; as a fellow right-hander, I tend to do this as well. This is followed by a bit of a break section with some slides during which he holds cross and circle simultaneously throughout. Be careful to note the incredibly tight timing with which he releases cross and then represses it before another slide, ensuring that he gets the max hold bonus in the process. Surprisingly, he then chooses to play the next section by one-handing each di-chord and then two-handing each trill afterwards, again preferring his right hand. We then see some quick alternations between triangle/cross and square/circle di-chords followed by the usual tri-chords, where F.SinA chooses to leave the home position for the first set and then execute the same strategy I mentioned earlier for Saihate Ex for the tri-chords. Indeed, I learned that strategy from watching this video; I used to alternate my forearms across three buttons at once to hit these alternating tri-chords! Not a good strategy if you're hoping to avoid bruising unfortunately.

The song enters a lull for a bit before launching into its next-most iconic section: a 12-second sequence of constant triplets. The fluidity of F.SinA's movement is impressive here, as he successfully gets all of the available holds in this section without dropping a single note. His initial route through the jacks section is interesting: he starts with his left hand on triangle as one would expect, before switching to right hand for square and then cross before coming back to his left hand for a repeat on the square. My theories for this are either that it was a snap reaction, or that he does it on purpose to favor his right hand, as we've seen that he prefers it in ambiguous circumstances. During the next section with triplet trills and a hold on circle, he alternates between his right thumb and left fingers for trills between cross/triangle and later triangle/cross, but surprisingly when the trill switches to triangle/square he rapidly moves his left hand between the two. It begs the question of whether he finds his left hand (or either hand) to struggle with trills between thumb and fingers on the same hand, as we've seen repeatedly before that he generally elects not to go that route when possible. The rest of the sequence plays out roughly as we would expect.

The following sequence is somewhat obfuscated but ultimately not much different than we've seen earlier in the song, with more presence of di-chords but otherwise a lot of trills and jacks. When we reach the ending sequence, two particular choices jump out at me. At the beginning of the above clip, F.SinA initiates a hold on circle before playing jacks on cross, a square/cross di-chord, and then jacks on square. Those jacks on square in particular we seem him for the first time attempt one-handed, and with some careful attention we can see he actually begins trailing off after the first three jacks in the sequence, causing him to only get FINE ratings on the last two. It's an extraordinary amount of swag for what I imagine could be little more a couple hundred points; what he gains from holding circle a little less than a second would be just under 600 points, and the two FINEs lose him 400 points from COOLs. I respect his dedication to squeezing as many points out as he possibly could. The second fascinating section is the literal ending, which quickly alternates circle with the cross/square di-chord and then triangle with the same di-chord. Rather than stick to the home position, F.SinA goes to cross his arms over each other, using the right hand on both circle and triangle in order to preserve the alternation of the hands.

From this commentary I've provided on his play, hopefully it is evident how much of each person's playstyle and physical routing depends on their own personal preferences and abilities. F.SinA far outstrips me or most other players in skill, and part of his talent comes not only from emphasizing his strengths but also identifying his weaknesses. He comes up with routes that focus on his strong ability for two-handing jacks and trills and avoids instances of one-handed versions of the same, to the extent that he even incorporates a hold using his forearm in order to keep both hands in play at once. While I wouldn't put Sadistic.Music∞Factory Ex in my list of favorite songs, the way F.SinA approaches provides many examples of the kind of play that Project Diva can excel at when charted correctly: highly demanding charts that allow for physical experimentation and routing on behalf of the player.


Final Thoughts

When I first encountered Project Diva Arcade two years ago at MAGfest, it reinvigorated for me what had become a stale game on gamepad and has kept me coming back off and on since. I would be the first to admit that it has serious flaws in its basic design, as I have extensively covered above in the mechanics sections. These aspects have left me reluctant to invest serious time past what I already have into the game, especially when it comes to the often confusing judgement method that prevents me from playing on reaction as much as I would with a vertically scrolling game. This is also confounded by the fact that there aren't many charts left for me to learn, and the few that still are present tend to lean heaviest into the need for extensive prior study before tackling them appropriately. In a much more mature game like IIDX, I persistently have new charts to tackle, giving me experience without resorting to repeatedly attempting charts. Meanwhile, Project Diva Arcade's endgame didn't extensively develop until the last few years of the game, leaving the top-level chart selection a bit barren.

At the same time, when I get to play one of these many charts listed above, ones that I've spent a considerable time working my way through the intricacies of, I still find myself enraptured by simply how physically engaging the game is. Even though I found myself light on interesting examples of charts using the slide bar (and I left out goofier slide charts such as Po Pi Po ExEx), the sensation of running my fingers across it and seamlessly returning to the buttons thrills me. The hold mechanic is even more genius, adding a significant amount of complexity in planning to a game that may have otherwise felt overly straightforward. Its these elements that I find are totally unmatched when not on the original arcade controller, and if you find one of these cabinets in the wild, it would be worth your time to try it just to get a glimpse of what these mechanics feel like in practice.

I would still wholeheartedly recommend the console ports of this game to anyone, especially those who want an entry point into the genre. However, if you're a rhythm game aficionado and have otherwise passed this one up, or you find you have a cabinet for this local to you, I still believe it's well worth your time to learn this particular version of the game. Although the skill ceiling falls comparatively lower than most games in the genre, it'll still provide many dozens of hours worth of playtime to explore, especially if you find yourself enjoying the music.

Get ready, this is a long one.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that doesn't necessarily excel at any one thing, but it has a strong grasp on how to design a solid RPG. I enjoyed what was here, but I can't help but feel like something was missing. It's nothing revolutionary, but it is a fun game with a great story about what it means to be human.

I first want to address my history with this game. My interest was first piqued when I saw the gameplay demonstration in 2018, but like most people, I was completely entranced by the game at E3 2019. Not just because of wholesome 100 based Keanu, but because it seemed as though you had a great deal of freedom to truly become anyone in the game. You had freedom of choice in combat and missions, and the game promised a complex, branching storyline in which every decision you made had deep, far-reaching consequences on the story, and how people react to you.

This, of course, only ended up being sort of, but not really true in the final game. Most of us know the whole story about Cyberpunk's launch, so I won't regurgitate it here. What disappointed me most wasn't the technical performance or laundry list of bugs - it was the broken promises.

In the end, only the final mission had any real consequences. There was no branching storyline to speak of. This, coupled with the fact that the game was... unfinished when it released, led me to avoid the game at launch. It seemed like there was fun to be had, but I was disappointed in the fact that the thing I was most interested in was not there. Why promote Night City as a setting where you can carve a path for yourself if that path is predestined anyway?

When I played the game, though... my outlook changed. Certain missions did have multiple outcomes, like the Delemain questline, for example, and even if there was no effect on the world itself, I did enjoy seeing the different rewards (and lack thereof) for my actions. Also, you could at the very least set up like six different endings through a few questlines, and I very much appreciated that. In fact, the ending I chose happened to align perfectly with how my Nomad playthrough began, and my own philosophies when approaching the story the game was trying to tell. It was the perfect ending, honestly.

I particularly connected with the story, and I came to accept the fact that a branching storyline would have severely affected the impact that this narrative would have. The game had to be this way, and without spoiling anything, the choices you have in the end are perfectly complimentary to the game's thesis about being human, and how that line blurs through the relationship between man and machine, and corporations and citizens. If anything, the game was ahead of its time when it was being developed, foreshadowing a power imbalance that would only grow more dissonant in the 2020s.

Night City also explores several nuances that I took a liking to. I particularly vibed with the concept of Braindances, which go beyond virtual reality and allow the player to feel and live out every sensation as if they were really the person the BD was recorded from. What this leads to, naturally, is an underground porn and snuff ring where BDs of real murders are being distributed to sellers twisted enough to want to experience that shit, which in turn ties into a emotional questline with great characters that I won't spoil here.

What is truly at the heart of Cyberpunk's themes of life and humanity are the relationships you form throughout the game. Against the backdrop of that aforementioned power imbalance, and the scattered lives of those around you, everyone is just trying to survive. I found myself connecting to several characters' backgrounds and circumstances; even Johnny Silverhand managed to win me over by the end of the game, despite how much of a piece of shit he'd been. And that's really what it's all about - beneath everything, we are all human. The conversation I had with Takemura on the rooftop of a construction site made me realize... oh wow, maybe there is some humanity to everyone after all... even corpos. And while we don't know if there is a way to tear down that unjust system without consequences, it is worth trying. Fighting. Surviving. Living.

I'm not going to argue that the delivery of this game's themes is perfect, but they resonated with me, and the ending I chose felt like the best way to close out my story, and how I perceived the themes of this game. Rather than being afraid to lose people closest to me, I decided to let them help me and take risks because they love me, and take off for greener pastures - no matter what may come in the future.

Cyberpunk's role-playing elements do not revolutionize the industry. They're quite a few steps above Fallout 4, but they don't even come close to New Vegas. What the game does excel at is the world in place, its story and characters, and its gameplay. The builds you can create offer the most freedom to experiment and allow you to basically craft any kind of playstyle you like. I turned myself into a time-freezing, shotgun and katana-wielding killing machine, and I was a force to be reckoned with, for sure, but you can also run a stealth-centric build where you hack and distract enemies, a blunt-force trauma kind of warrior, a nuisance that can passively heal - basically, this game's skills are your sandbox, and they perfectly accompany both the open-ended mission structure, and my desire to see these characters' questlines through to the end. Honestly, even the jank was entertaining and endearing. As long as the bugs aren't disruptive, I am thoroughly entertained by bugs in Bethesda games, and Cyberpunk's bugs were rarely disruptive for me, so I had a few good laughs throughout my playthrough.

All in all, Cyberpunk 2077 came together really well in the end, and I had a good time. It does feel like there's something missing, and I'll always wonder what might have been, but only after Starfield released did I realize just how Cyberpunk managed to get its role-playing elements, setting, story and gameplay all right. Bethesda seems to have transformed into a pale, listless shadow of its former self, and I have a feeling Cyberpunk's legacy is going to shake out differently, being perceived as an all-time great RPG that people eventually warmed up to. Preem shit, choom.