podcast fodder. it occurred to me over the course of playing that for four-player couch co-op like this, the mindlessness is a boon. you're supposed to be catching up with your friends and fucking around, not actually invested in the game.

it pulls surprisingly heavily from the original gauntlet with little variation: destroy generators that endlessly spawn, open chests and gates with keys, use potions as AoEs, destroy walls, open other walls. the only other mechanical changes is some light meter management, where you can activate one of three different special abilities depending on the level of the gauge or siphon some off to use a dash-twirl kinda action. other than weaving those in, you'll just be mashing the shoot/attack button, and with the advent of a 3D world and shifting perspective for the game, they've slathered auto-aim all over your toolkit, so there's almost no engagement other than being there to press the button... and if you're close enough to an enemy you'll auto-attack anyway, so who cares.

the main intrigue instead is the variety of environments and stages, each with their own hazards and puzzles to solve. you might rend an arena asunder by pressing a switch, skewing the two halves apart and exposing new corridors in the process. there's moments where you'll rearrange a set of catwalks by pressing a series of switches (although you never have access to more than one at once) to raise and lower them to match your character's height. in some (many) instances, you must painstakingly root out a breakable wall and enter it to press a switch and open a different wall somewhere else. indeed, most of the game consists of finding switches to press to access a new area; it is not uncommon for there to be chains of three to seven switches that lead to each other in the span of a single room. is what the switches activate occasionally cool, giving you a new path through the often intricate area designs? sure. but expect the whole game to follow virtually the exact same loop throughout: mash attack, press switch.

there's occasional gesturing to more of diablo-like system, the style which would quickly eat this series' lunch by the sixth gen, though it often doesn't land given the game's arcade-focused nature. other than adding a leveling and stats system to the original gauntlet experience, there's also this odd loot/power-up component, some of which is random but others of which are actually specific, often obscure unlockables within particular levels. of course, seeing as there's no permanence regarding items beyond keys/potions, these end up being temporary powerups; the thrill of grinding out skorne 1 so that you can get a piece of his armor set feels quaint when faced with the reality that said item will disappear 90 seconds into the next stage you play. as an aside: per the original game you're intended to replenish your health or revive yourself with extra credits, but seeing as this console version does not have that system, dying will kick you back out to the hub with whatever health you had going in. that might seem fine, but if you actually want to replenish to full health, expect to spend a lot of time grinding the first level for the 400-500 in health pickups that are guaranteed. for my final boss run, where I needed my level 60 max of 7000 health after spending most of the game maintaining about 2000, this was quite a chore.

this sega dreamcast version seems like a hodge-podge of each of the other versions of this game. compared to the playstation and n64 versions, which have a different set of levels and a proper inventory system, the dreamcast version serves as a more direct port of the original's levels and item system. oddly enough, it does have the additional endgame levels and skorne refight from the original home ports. it also carries in certain mechanical changes from the game's incremental sequel dark legacy, such as all of the new character classes and a functionally useless block ability; what the fuck is the point of a block in a mostly ranged game where having attack advantage is always a priority to avoid getting flanked and overwhelmed? probably the most bizarre aspect of the dreamcast version is that it runs like dogshit even with only a single player, and it retains the somewhat hideous look of the original game. not sure why the dc wasn't able to handle a relatively low-poly game built for a 3DFX banshee gpu, but I'm going to assume fault on the part of the developers.

still, a podcast game with some cool level visuals has its own appeal. was unfortunately left curious about dark legacy and the later gameplay revisions in seven sorrows. an arcade-style dungeon crawler does appeal to me in a base way, and I appreciate that this was an early attempt at creating an arcade game with a proper progression system (including rudimentary usernames and passwords!). should probably bring some friends along for the ride if I ever get a wild hair to try again.

nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.

the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.

with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.

this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.

the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.

on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.

that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.

there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.

the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.

started to see the vision once I realized the grab (your only verb outside of jumping) gives you i-frames when you bounce off of whatever you're grabbing... pretty cool wrinkle on an otherwise plain set of mechanics. a lot of the game is carried by the dense mix of geometric terrain and organic outgrowths a la sonic; it's no surprise that much of this team got rolled into sonic team for NiGHTS into dreams the year after. said team really demonstrates their technical aptitude as well, with some stunning overlapping parallax on stages such as planet automaton and swirling line scrolling in the background of the itamor lunch fight. ristar emotes fluidly, with his walking scowl morphing into a grin and twirl upon defeating hard enemies. occasionally he'll even show a penchant for childlike play, such as in this snowball fight setpiece.

a first impression yields something a little dry on the gameplay front, with single-hit enemies and slow movement compounding into something more leisurely than interesting. thankfully around the halfway point the design veers into level-unique puzzles and setpieces. the one that stuck out to me the most was a series of areas in planet 4 involving babysitting this radio(?) item across various hazards in order to give to various birds who want them blocking your way. presages a klonoa style of puzzles built from manipulating objects in the environment rather than working with pre-defined aspects of the player's toolkit. near the end the game veers into some execution challenges as well, with mixed results. ristar's grab actually has a lot more going on to meets the eye: not only does he have the aforementioned i-frames, but he also gains a bit of height off his bounce, and he can hold onto some interactables indefinitely, swinging back and forth using his arms as a tether. the former gets used for a couple climbing challenges jumping between walls and swinging poles, which makes for some pleasant execution trials in the midst of the level-specific stuff. the latter never gets expanded on quite as much, probably because ristar maintains no momentum from his swinging when he releases due to bouncing back off of the fulcrum he's attached to, so actually manipulating the technique to achieve certain bounce angles is a bit unintuitive.

bosses are neat across the board; while somewhat cycle-based, the designers trickle a couple small points for attacking them before they're obviously wide-open. some of these (I'm thinking of specifically the bird boss on planet 4 and its array of non-linear projectiles) encourage the i-frame abuse in interesting ways. by the end of the game, however, it seems like they expect you to exploit it pretty openly to get anywhere, and by that point the bosses end up becoming grab spam. definitely makes the fights fly by quicker, but I find myself preferring the more cautious approach I took during the earlier bosses, although I would imagine upon a replay some of the same techniques apply.

I've got real admiration for the theatrical trappings, with panels falling off the back wall and gyrating stagehands gussying up the set as you stroll through, but I think coming back to this style of gameplay doesn't hit the same for me anymore. the treasure hyperfocus on impressive boss fights is here without the richer mechanics of gunstar heroes or alien soldier, leaving much stricter scenarios where the player has less leverage over the proceedings. it's heavily setpiece-driven and thus built upon cracking open whatever essential strategy solves each individual encounter rather than learning particular mechanics over the course of the game. a good example would be izayoi, who has a rapid arm extension attack that aims for your head, so if you throw your head above you right when she starts tracking, you can repeatedly have her whiff and then bop her in the face when she briefly exposes it afterwards. that's a cool little extension of the game's primary mechanic (you can throw your head in any direction), but once you lock it in the repetition of her behavior pattern and her cyclically available weak point make the fight rather static.

not sure what to think of the different abilities you can get with various heads throughout either. theoretically I could've enjoyed having them woven in through enemies or something else organic a la kirby, but having the abilities just sitting out in the open right where you need them feels a bit raw. it's especially apparent given how few there are that alter mobility or do anything other than make combat easier; perhaps a bit of tunnel vision on the developer's part, even though you can tell they attempted some actual level design here. you may get a sequence with some wall-climbing thanks to the spiky head ability, but these segments boil down just to "scale the wall with the powerup" without many complicating factors thrown in aside from a late-game segment where you use it to stall on the ceiling and avoid rocket trains zooming by. the way that abilities are applied in the boss fights also fall into a narrow paradigm, with more than a few bosses having abilities sitting around that effectively shut them off: time stop in multiple fights, both a bomb with crazy damage and invincibility in the aforementioned izayoi fight, and the hammer in both rever face and the final boss fight. really something where some sort of trade-off regarding grabbing the ability would've made more sense; the developers settled instead of interleaving junk abilities in the rotating ability selection that will inevitably cause you to eat a lot of damage until they wear off.

obviously with mikami at the top of the masthead on this one it's very tempting to extract the seeds of resident evil and his later titles out of this one. hmmm... limited inventory, you say? narrow corridors with dangerous enemies that you have to expend limited ammo against or lure away through subtle AI manipulation?? all these environments that loop back on themselves... you can really see the sketches of the spencer mansion here...

but really, it's heavily streamlined zelda in the same way quackshot is heavily streamlined metroid. the structure is effectively five dungeons in the classic single-screen room format strung along with some cute cutscenes of goofy and max trying to rescue pete and pj from a group of pirates. there's no resource management; exiting and reentering a room resets the majority of its state, which includes various throwable objects used to attack enemies. occasionally a puzzle will affect something in the next room over, but by and large every room here is a self-contained puzzle, ranging from "clear all the enemies" to push-block puzzles to a couple things in between. they're pretty solid too: the push-block puzzles often require using certain blocks to line up others, keeping the mapping of routes from becoming rote, and since clearing a room requires paying attention to where throwables are located and how to access them, some cool ideas arise from determining an order of attack and manipulating enemies to assist you with killing others. AI manipulation puzzles are a thing as well, ensconced into the game's toolkit with a bell item that draws aggro and thus controls enemy movement. the concepts stay remarkably fresh throughout, although given that the game is only a couple hours long, it would be tedious if this wasn't the case. a couple favorites of mine would be ones where you trick enemies into walking into oncoming fire from cannons and a particular one where you line up four enemies in a corridor to kill them with a single sliding block.

beyond throwing items and kicking blocks, goofy can hold two items at any given time to assist in particular puzzles. other than the bell one mentioned earlier, the hookshot serves the most "interesting" purpose of the bunch, as it can both stun enemies and create tightropes. not exactly exhilarating, but its latter purpose consumes the item, making searching for new hookshots an additional intrigue that drives exploration. beyond these the applications lack substance; the candle widens the sight radius in infrequent dark rooms, keys are just keys, and shovels can be used to farm life-up items in some rare locales with movable dirt. in this way the restriction of holding only two items at once becomes less demanding, since the latter set are so situational that holding onto them longer than a room or two will always be a waste. by the late game item-reliant puzzles give way to ones that leverage the game's inherent mechanics, so it seems like the designers figured this out as well.

crash-like with a twist: you can emanate a magnetic field around yourself for either polarity, north or south. magnetized items (with color-coded polarity for your convenience) will respond appropriately; if you use the opposite polarity, you'll be pulled towards the object, and if you use the same polarity, you'll be pushed away. in practice the implementation is rather ticky-tacky, with the actual interactable set being limited to jump pads you trigger with the same polarity and swings/ziplines you trigger with the opposite polarity. not necessarily a compelling hook on its own, and indeed, the game is a bit of a hard sell. it uses crash's one-hit kill system without a corresponding amount of shield items, its life system is somewhat stingy, and the game outwardly tends towards trial and error, with many magnetic interactable sections coming down to memorizing polarity sequences.

overcome these punitive aspects, however, and you'll find a rare platformer that virtually never repeats an idea. across sixteen levels the game flips the script at virtually every checkpoint, putting fresh spins on ideas from earlier in the level or introducing completely bespoke setpieces and puzzles. in the last level alone, the game introduces stomping hydraulic presses with temporary platforms in between, a curved rainbow slope leading down to a bottomless pit, piston platforms raising and lowering from an electric pit on a cycle (first on an alternating cycle, secondly all synchronized, with parallel bounce pads to suspend yourself between when the platforms lower), alternating lasers on either side of a gap with bounce pads that fling you to the other side, a series of different cycling platforms over lava with enemies you can throw to destroy doors, and a race to exit a safe before platforms crumble in sequence, with spotlights swirling around that trigger lasers on each line of blocks. that's one five minute level! it's erratic and creative in the best ways, switching tempo on the fly between fast-paced, timed platforming and slower throwable-enemy puzzle sections. there's a klonoa-esque flair to its puzzles, but where klonoa would iterate upon individual mechanics and structures to create conceptually driven levels, magnetic neo just tosses ideas off and moves on. a frantic way to approach design.

that alone makes it fascinating, but in a trial-and-error environment, the actual responses to these challenges would be rigid. however, the magnetism component has the subtle addition of proper inertia regarding when one activates and deactivates their magnetic field. this applies both to timing interaction with swings and ziplines to fly off at certain directions and speeds as well as adjusting the angle off of launch pads. sections involving these interactables become more fluid in how they're approached, with minor skips cropping up in various sections when using the physics to one's advantage. the levels are specifically designed around these mechanics, with many sections having multiple different ways to traverse them explicitly laid out by the developers. the simplest configuration of this is having one path dedicated to magnetic elements and the other as a straight platforming sequence; it seems in some instances they punish players who refuse to learn the speedier yet more opaque magnetism sections with long-winded cycle platforming. however, some sections go even beyond this, having the two paths intertwine in such a way that one could seamlessly transition between them depending on how they conduct their movement. considering its corridor-based level design, the open-ended nature of these setpieces bolsters the explorability of their mechanics and reduces the tedium of repetition.

the environments match the design techniques in their commitment to never staying the same, as demonstrated in level 2-3. the level starts at the base of a pyramid, scaling it and soaring through it as the level progresses. when finally it reaches the stratosphere, the background transforms into an oasis above a bed of clouds, capping off the scene with the stark blue sky above. the game keeps this fervor for change throughout. while simple, it matches the strengths of the dreamcast nicely: flat lighting, clean and seamless characters, and bright colors.

a katamari-like from the actual katamari devs; more specifically the Now Production jobbers who toiled to get keita takahashi's vision off the ground back on the original titles, although many of the devs on this particular title were johnny-come-latelies who started on beautiful katamari. munchables twists the "roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff" loop from katamari into a game all about eating, where your mute spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, getting progressively larger after each set of meals. your character's size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. these larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. interesting systemic element here, where due to the split being an equal amount every time, you can decompose an enemy multiple times, eat a select number of sub-enemies, wait for them to recombine into a slightly smaller enemy than before, and then break them once again to get a set of sub-enemies you can scoop up all at once.

this plays into the other mechanic: chaining. eating an enemy starts an implicit chain timer that replenishes with each additional enemy eaten; when the timer expires, the number of meals counted from enemies eaten during the chain will more or less double. a cute idea in theory, although you may be able to see how that breaks any thought involved with above decomposition mechanic: more at once is always better, so split big enemies into as many sub-enemies as possible every time you see them. however, in the first real levels (in the second world) you can see how this still ends up having that katamari flair to it. a large arena of different zones, each locked behind edible barriers with level requirements, where you can freely navigate across zones and backtrack to your heart's content. similar to how katamari lets the player reason about the optimal size to grab a set of items at once, here you can plan inter-zone chains by carefully planning your feeding route to give you just enough food to bypass barriers while leaving plenty of enemies on the field to grab in a single swoop.

if that was the game it would probably be pretty good; there's a buffer-able, charge-able dash chomp you can use to link enemies in a chain, so there's a comfortable rhythm to the experience that negates the otherwise ho-hum movement. unfortunately, the level designers got antsy and started actually designing some levels. the progression quickly devolves into linear gauntlets, jettisoning the potential for inter-zone chains and replacing it with quick bursts of enemies with ample downtime in between. these in-between sections get muddled with switch "puzzles" and other tired gimmicks that continually throw the katamari loop out the window. the aforementioned issue with chaining gets exacerbated here, because there's never a reason to not decompose big enemies as soon as you see them, so the linearity of the levels becomes even more apparent. when the game veers into actual platforming it's even more appalling: there's virtually no mechanics here to support that outside of some mild air stalling whenever you chomp. much more tedious than it has any right to be.

major props to hal lab for avoiding cashing in on yearly picross 3d releases like in the 2d series; round 2 is a complete overhaul of the original concept. the original picross 3d struggled with integrating its 3d nature into the actual puzzle solving, as the game's loop involved slicing its three-dimensional voxel sculptures into two-dimensional slices, where row hints pointing towards the player had next-to-no bearing on the solution of any given slice. round 2 instantly solves that by transforming the game's mechanics into an adaptation of color picross from the main series, where instead of chiseling out a monochrome image, you instead have to deal with multiple colors on each line. hints perpendicular to a slice now show the possible colors for that particular block, and thus the loop now involves checking hints on all three axes instead of just the slice's primary two. switching to colors also vastly increases the potential number of hint arrangements. as in the first game, each hint may indicate an unbroken string of blocks, two separate strings of blocks, or three+ strings of blocks, but now each of the two colors can have its own variable number of strings per row. the amount of different idioms that arise from this far surpass the original game.

what makes this particular interesting is that the coloration of the blocks is not random or chosen purely mechanically: it actually reflects the construction of each puzzle. the voxels of the original game are now marked blue, and new, variably shaped, curved blocks are marked orange. this addition adds substantial context to the chiseling process: compared to the rectangular jumble of the original, you can now clearly make out the structure of what you're building over time. while aesthetically pleasing in its own right, this also assists with the mental leg work, as educated guesses can be made much more easily with a rough idea of the puzzle's shape and edges. this creates some pseudo-idioms in its own right as well: for example, edges with a taper at either end generally appear as a single blue string and then two one-block orange strings. the game can get quite inscrutable at times without some real brute forcing of all the different possibilities, so the organic natures of the game's mechanical structures eases some of the tedium and allows for some guesswork.

I played a couple more rounds of the original just to feel it out, and honestly playing this has dampened my enthusiasm for that entry. so many QoL additions here, from the ability to swipe across the screen to break/paint a bunch of blocks in one go to finally being able to isolate the edge-most slice from any direction. the structure here has been changed from tiered assortments of puzzles from easy to hard to thematically driven "books" of puzzles, with the easy/normal/hard selection individualized for each puzzle. goes a long way in making the on-ramp smooth coming out of the original; no need to slog through the piss-easy stuff if you already have some experience with the concept. the ranking system is also much more granular, with your amount of misses (now including incorrect painting, unlike the first title) and time taken now converted to a numeric score, which gets multiplied against the chosen difficulty of the puzzle to get your final score and rank. also a testament to how difficult this game can get: later puzzles can have top "rainbow" ranks allow for 25-30 minutes on a single puzzle with up to three or four misses. the very final puzzle in the game took me over 45 min!

it has super mario 64 loosely draped over it, but in reality this is meat-and-potatoes platforming platforming: linear levels, hazards galore, and not a single NPC in sight. would be fair to say it has quite a lot of crash in its DNA, although gex completely jettisons the on-rails setup of crash in favor of more spacious locales. to try to wed its two influences, gex tends to set up its areas as narrow gauntlets at the start with forks in the road around the middle of the level so you can access each objective (red remotes that serve as this game's equivalents of mario's stars). for the majority of objectives, which slap a series of platforming challenges in front of a red remote, this is more than serviceable. it becomes more tedious when occasional objectives require you to find X number of thingamabobs strewn throughout a level; in these you get the unenviable chore of playing the same level forwards and backwards, swinging the camera around in the hope that you'll see a thingamabob tucked behind a wall. this is not to say that gex doesn't have some tricks up its sleeve: the early level Out of Toon starts off with a wide open area for its collectable jaunts (and a hidden silver remote too!) before tightening into a line for the rest of its duration, and the more experimental level Poltergex from late in the game provides a haunted mansion locale with doubly-layered rooms, giving two stacked paths that combine and loop back with a couple of branches off at key points (including a secret third and fourth layer of rooms on top). perhaps this game would be more interesting if it leaned more into these styles of level-building that took more advantage of the full 3D space.

gex's toolkit is brief and functional: he gets a tail bounce after any starting jump, and he gets a flying kick that gives a quick burst of speed while tying him to a particular direction momentarily. these are small additions to an otherwise standard run/jump/tailspin verb set, although the smooth implementation allows for seamless transitions and minor momentum conservation to those looking to speed up their gameplay. the obstacles in each level follow suit, providing a nice overview of traditional 3D platformer obstacles at this nascent point in their history. there are seven primary locales with a handful of levels each that reappear over the course of the game, and thus the gimmicks from earlier ones tend to be iterated upon for later entries. the best of these is probably the Circuit Central stages, which have a variety of manipulable platforms for the player to move across its vertically focused areas, such as a platform that rotates around a center pillar until it is struck, sending the platform off in its tangential direction. these levels also center an time-based energy power-up that allows gex to turn on other platforms and walkways when in contact with them. most other level gimmicks are cycle-based: flying table/drawer-platforms in the haunted mansion areas, rotating flat platforms suspended in air in the space areas, dripping lava in the prehistoric areas. very traditional platformer design, but at the same time it becomes hard to tell which of these were really new ideas in '98 when thinking through the slurry of platformers I've played from this period. it becomes even harder when said challenges are seemingly dropped at random throughout a level without real mechanical through-lines to grasp onto.

I went in thinking the voice lines would be trite, but they verge on nonsensical; it sort of presages a family guy-esque "look at the reference!" formula without the nicety of setting up some punchline in the process. gex rarely emotes anything relevant to the situation (outside of an eyebrow-raising chinese accent in the Kung-Fu Theater areas), instead preferring to sing bars from schoolhouse rock songs or drop random schwarznegger lines. or he just says "it's tail time!" over and over and over again. wanted to dunk on the simpsons writer who apparently penned much of this, Robert Cohen, but looked into his history and found out that his one primary simpsons episode credit was.... Flaming Moe's. very unfortunate, because that episode is a series-defining classic.

better sense of scale than the first regarding both its central mystery and its locales. for one, you're given much more room to stretch your legs, with the second half of the game taking place in an area roughly the size of the entire first game and the first half having a few beefy areas of its own. the multiple mysteries in this one indeed also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than the meandering approach of curious village. at the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover's bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. an examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it's conveyed entirely through history lessons and layton's personal observations, and the writers' preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes. I've cooled off on curious village's twist in the couple of years since I played it, and even though this one is probably more interesting, it still feels like a sudden burst of passion at the end of another meandering 15 hour adventure. then again, more pretty backgrounds than last time, so it all comes out in the wash.

puzzles in general are now better integrated into the story; layton still lives in an alternate reality where everyone is obsessed with puzzles, but at least he's actually using his skill at solving them in practical ways to navigate the world and solve mysteries. I'll hesitatingly say that conceptual puzzles seem to be fewer in number compared to curious village, with more focus on various physical layout puzzles and some math ones here and there. conceptual puzzles have the strength of obfuscating a solution space and thus making the exercise feel more like a product of reasoning and less trial and error, but I do also appreciate the variety of layout puzzles here, especially when it comes to ones like chopping wood in the right place to make a square or placing lanterns to cover every path of a forest. tired of maze puzzles tho; really no mental leaps required for them beyond just following each path to the right place. those are really the other extreme compared to conceptual puzzles, where the whole solution space is there for you to look at and you just check off whatever path leads to the finish. the best conceptual puzzles come on the critical path at least, so you won't miss any of them.

there's also better scaffolding around the ADV parts of the experience to keep exploration fresh thanks to some new integrated minigames. there's a persistent puzzle with an exercising hamster you must lead around a grid in order to have him reach a step count, and by solving puzzles around the world you can win items with new properties for him to chase. the puzzle itself is cool, and having a variety of ways to reach the maximum step count goes a long way to making the puzzle feel less prescriptive. when that's reached, he'll pop up in the world to tell you where you can find hint coins, removing the pixel hunting component of the game completely. there's camera components you can find as well that, once assembled, can be used to take pictures of specific rooms in the game. this opens up a "find the differences" type game that will open up a bonus puzzle; another neat addition that complements the main draw nicely. the third is less interesting: you can win different tea ingredients to make people tea? in-game there's no benefit to doing this, although I have a feeling some of the post-game puzzles will unlock if you can serve all the different kinds of tea. problem is figuring out all of the different brews is complete trial-and-error, and although some NPCs will give you recipes, others are much more vague. would help if some NPCs who want tea didn't suddenly stop wanting tea if you fuck up their initial order, though considering that they randomly re-enable later I have a feeling this is just some scripting issue.

real left-field win here for atlus, adapting the grisly world of surgery to an arcade-like game designed by the digital devil saga staff and helmed by one of the designers of the hamtaro gba games. it's primarily a game of juggling various timers, specifically the main time limit, the drain on your patient's vitals, and the time until a new hazard spawns in that will increase the drain rate. kyriaki, the first of a set of viruses called GUILT that make up the second half of the game, best exemplifies this. it appears by creating an incision in the patient's tissue, which will bleed and thus increase the drain on the patient. locating one permanently requires using the ultrasound to locate it (preferably after creating the incision) and then cutting it out of the tissue with the scalpel, after it will which it will make another incision, leaving you with two extra cuts to deal with. to kill it, you target it with a laser for some amount of seconds, but leaving the laser in one place for too long will puncture the tissue, requiring you to drain the resulting hemorrhage and close the wound with healing gel. when multiple of these appear at once, you'll be put in uncomfortable circumstance of having to juggle your focus on each one as well as the various injuries you incur along the way, down to decisions such as "should I try to cut them out now or suture wounds while I wait for them to line up so I can cut them both out at once." choosing wrong can often mean a quick death for your patient, especially in particular scenarios where killing one on its own might lead to two more coming out from underneath and causing many extra incisions at once. reminds me of something like diner dash in an odd way.

draining vitals isn't a one-way street however, as you have two separate tools for increasing vitals in exchange for time. the primary one is your stabilization serum, which gives a quick burst of vitals in exchange for the time you take raising the plunger of the syringe to fill it; the amount you raise the vitals scales with the amount you fill into the syringe. alternatively, you can use the aforementioned healing gel, which lightly raises vitals as applied by rubbing the screen. both are limited resources that refill slowly when not being used and will refill completely after a short lockout when they deplete, and alternating between the two becomes a natural tendency in the later operations when simply fighting the virus on its own can't outpace the natural vitals drain. later levels extend these limitations to other tools as well: final boss savato repeatedly locks out your scalpel when severing the spider-virus's webs, and in its second phase managing your time remaining on the laser to both proactively deal damage to the virus itself as well as reactively dealing with mini-spiders it floods the tissue with imposes further considerations on when and where to strike. the best levels impose malleable rotations on the player, where multiple tools must be swapped between in series. these are rarely static, as the often twitchy viruses and the wounds they inflict will keep the player weaving in defensive maneuvers dynamically. learning this balance between offense and defense evokes the tension and precision of the real operating room.

the level of creativity on display with the operations is also worth applauding. the latter half of the game (especially the "boss rush" chapter six) begins to repeat itself a fair bit, but earlier on the game is more than happy to give one-off operations their own bespoke mechanics, from clots staggered in sequence traveling through winding veins to draining fluid from a man's lungs on an airplane undergoing heavy turbulence. the game even weaves in non-surgery elements just to keep things fresh, such as some hexagonal block puzzles and a mid-story bomb disposal. as with any game like this, duds rear their head as well. two of the GUILT strains become annoying for opposite reasons: triti and its rules for cell expansion (it's similar to conway's game of life) are poorly explained and tend to mandate a specific solution that will jeopardize the operation with any single mistake. conversely, deftera depends on two viruses colliding in order to vacuum out of the tissue, and while its random movement can be manipulated by using the gel as a fence of sorts, ultimately a good performance on these levels comes down to rolling lucky on getting good collisions back to back. falling back on more of a puzzle approach as in the former example or mechanics out of the player's hands as in the latter example can work when it's a singular operation or a break from the action, but given that both of these get repeated a few times apiece, it's hard to be quite as forgiving.

a triumph for scenario design aficionados. hour after hour of slices of the real world perfectly aligned into a playground of roving militants and hapless civilians. rarely does a game ever make its missions feel properly explorable while keeping it taut and linear at the same time, and yet deus ex routinely weaves both together. for every point A to point B underground lair with traps laid out in sequence there is a completely open venue, such as the suffocating catacombs and their dimly lit hallways giving way to the Champs-Élysées avenue of paris, with a bakery to pilfer contraband drugs from, a hostel with full bar access, and an arms dealer's loaded apartment, all off the beaten path from your main objective. military bases and science labs retain the layout you'd expect had you ever toured one, and you'll find that locker rooms, rows of cubicles, and break rooms feature just as prominently in the dungeon crawling as warehouses with guards patrolling or tightly wound mazes of laser tripwires and turrets. the authenticity and legibility of these areas comes first, and yet more often than not the designers still manage to weave in appropriate challenges without violating each location's fidelity in the process.

and really, dungeon crawling is the name of the game here, more or less. at least half of the game takes place in some sort of complex with a destination and a set of non-linear gates along the way, all of which serve as hinge points for the player to choose which resources to expend. the "immsim" label comes from just how many resources have all gotten slammed together in your control: lockpicks and "multitools" for bypassing security, ammo for many different varieties of firearms, bio-energy for utilizing your augmented abilities, and a slew of consumable items meant for tanking bullets, running past enemies undetected, or breathing under water for long periods of time. at its most taut, the game generally puts some sort of barrier up in your way and then a way around it, with the direct option being something like combat or picking a lock and the indirect option being finding a vent or waterway to circumvent the barrier. with enough of these situations back to back, the game hopes that you'll avoid sticking to one gameplay style in order to preserve your resources in that area for later when they seem more necessary; you can't crack every door with lockpicks, so you'll probably have to get your hands dirty or crawl on your belly here and there if you want to keep your picks for when the alternative is, say, running through a irradiated area. the nice part of this is that it truly does work: I explored, snuck around, and fought off enemies all in equal measure throughout the game through entirely organic response to each of the situations. the downside is by endgame the resource economy has completely turned in your favor assuming you've been rotating all of your options, making decisions on resource expenditure past a certain point much more about cleaning out your inventory rather than rationing.

when the game is firing on all cylinders, you'll get something like bunker III from the aforementioned catacombs. the area is two large rooms with a camera and turret tracking you at the back of the first room right in front of a cell full of hostages, multiple floors connected by stairs with archways for cover in the second room, and a back hallway swarming with rocket-strapped operatives where the camera/turret controls and a key to the next reside; a waterway additionally connects the front of the first room with the back of the second room. here you have actual tradeoffs to deal with: just grabbing the key and skipping the whole area by going through the waterway, but the coverage in the back hallway can be intense depending on the AI's behavior, and your direct path to the key is blocked by strategically placed crates as soon as you leave the waterway. gunning for the security controls instead is feasible, and you can leverage the fact that hacking computers (sometimes?) pauses enemies for a bit to quickly run out, disable everything, and hop back in the waterway. you could also sneak in from the front and use an augmentation that hides you from cameras to avoid triggering the turret, and if you rescue the hostages with lockpicks instead of locating the cell key and leave the area early, you'll get the next area's key from their camp leader anyway. when the game constructs situations like these, they not only make the discrete tradeoffs impactful on the flow of a given level, they also weave it into the actual second-to-second movement, stealth, and combat as well.

at its worst it's the opposite: individual rooms with a guard or two and maybe a computer system or locked door stitched together by long hallways that inoculate each scenario from one another. in these sections the main appeal is exploration, either through finding nooks and crannies hidden from view or by reading the many "data cubes" with flavor text strewn around. it can still be exciting, especially earlier on when you don't have tools to detect enemies through walls and the suspense of moving around still persists. later in the game when one has more abilities at their disposal, breaking apart puzzles or barriers by jumping over them with enhanced height, moving large crates to use as stairs with enhanced strength, or shooting down doors with a mastered rifle ability can potentially make the monotony less apparent. some of the barriers don't fare quite as well due to a lackluster implementation: the hacking, for instance, is more or less free even with minimal upgrades, and for every camera you have to actually maneuver around there's at least four you'll disable without thinking just because the security terminals are easy to access. if the mission locations didn't adhere to the small details of real environments or didn't have cute little secrets in vents and lock-boxes, these issues would likely overcome the holistic experience and result in tedium.

the tiny details extend further than objects in the world as well. from early on when one of your augmented colleagues begins spontaneously complaining about getting the wrong can of soda from a vending machine, I had hoped that the scripting for the NPCs would stay high quality, and it absolutely persisted to the final moments of the game, when a civilian mechanic distraught by my actions pulled a gun on me behind my back. the tight pacing of the levels compared to a full open world experience allows for many of the individual NPCs to have unique dialogue, behavior, and even inventory when subdued. of these the most fascinating to me may have been a conversation with a chinese bartender in hong kong, who extolled the CCP's commitment to capitalist enterprise outside the purview of the new world order by emphasizing authoritarian nationalism against main character denton's idealized western democratic order. it's something you wouldn't see now in the xi jinping era and weirdly reflective of the game's almost non-ideological view of politics: people-facing organizations controlled by layers upon layers of shadowy organizations, each manipulating social behavior in a top-down way compared to the bottom-up class struggle and ideological superstructure of reality. not really a thought-provoking work unless you're particularly animated by vague gesturing towards "control" and "liberty," but at least you can tell the developers didn't take it too seriously either. there's roswell-style gray aliens running around for christ's sake.

the appeal of a convention stems from the yawning tide of people who embody it; a mass of the like-minded enveloping a space, to the extent that one could never meet or know every one at once. the homogeneity would not be pleasant if it permeated our entire lives, but to momentarily enter a crowd knowing that each person among it could understand your drive and passion is invigorating. when I come to these I tend to roam solo, poking my head into every room I find and silently people-watching from the sidelines. I greet friends of course, and I may strike up a conversation in line waiting for a cabinet, but I find my immersion into the atmosphere alone provides a mental balm before even socializing comes into play.

every year going to magfest I plan new ways to make the experience more comfortable: a well-rounded diet, planned breaks, and more consistent sleeping arrangements. this time my new innovation was a fanny pack, replacing the cumbersome backpack of previous trips with something less intrusive and throwing my misplaced sense of embarrassment at wearing one out the window. with this came a swap from my switch to the smaller form factor of my 3ds. I've come to really lean into my 3ds as of late, bringing it to long waits at the barber or when lazing around at a friend's house. at some point I realized that all my downtime wasted on scrolling twitter could be funneled into a marginally more meaningful hobby by using my 3ds instead. besides, the console is becoming a bit retro! recently a young child saw me with one and asked their mother about the strange two-screened phone I was holding, begging to peer over my shoulder while I played dragon quest.

bringing the 3ds to magfest also gave me the opportunity to try to shore up my puzzles on streetpass, which I had neglected for quite some time. the entire idea behind streetpass - every person's 3ds signalling out in an attempt for two to pass each other and exchange information - was an outgrowth of nintendo's attempts to turn the handhelds into tools for positive social reinforcement, originating at least as far back as the nascent pokemon exchanges on the original game boy. it turned the 3ds into something that continually engaged with the world while you did, giving you brief glimpses into the lives of those around you while you traveled. the most basic of these was puzzle swap, less of a game and more of a mass exercise in collecting pieces of various puzzles distributed by nintendo through occasional content updates. some pieces you could roll for using "play coins" collected while walking with the 3ds in your pocket, but some were exclusively gained through trading with others, and in general the most consistent way to locate certain pieces was by trading with as wide of a group of people as possible. of course, this collaborative effort operated best in a world of mass public transit and high population density, traits missing from the suburban american experience. my regular streetpass contacts were ones at my high school, and the minimal outside interaction led to an eventual disinterest in churning through the same puzzle collections day after day. the eventual death of the 3ds only cemented the end of my streetpassing days.

even just from waiting in the eye-watering badge pickup line at the con, snaked switchback style across an expo room before leaking out from one side of the building to the other, I had already matched with at least 10 people, showering me with new pieces and puzzles I had never gotten a chance to download. a feature past my time called "bonus chance" had kicked in, giving me many pieces from each individual I streetpassed instead of just one like the old days and letting me mop up my collection way quicker than I had anticipated. every break I took during the con seemed to have at least a couple more people trickle into my waiting queue, and by the end of the con I had collected every trade-only piece with less than 100 to go overall. there were people walking around with all of the pieces, people walking around with just a few, some who had scarcely updated their streetpass since the mid '10s, and others who seemed to have gotten in on the tail-end of the whole phenomenon, with lots of pieces for the last few puzzles and barely any for the early ones. for a weekend, this social game that had withered away over five years prior got the chance to bloom again.

these people who I previously just saw from afar, stood next to at adjacent cabinets, or sat behind at a panel now became little figments inside my 3ds. I had always perceived the con as a regional experience, but their data now told me there were those as far as the west coast or even alaska participating, perhaps expats who had moved close by, or former residents flying back to stay with friends. little tidbits such as their most recently played game gave me insight into their tastes, and many of them had included celebratory messages of excitement for the return of the con. their collections, their smiling avatars, their flairs, their messages; it humanized these many con attendees who I often had passed by and further strengthened that bond we shared of mutual attendance. after years of using an ugly caricature of mips from sm64 as my avatar, I finally changed it to one that reflected my face. it only seemed natural to give them the same clarity they gave me.

adding another feather to my cap by winning this year's monkey ball tournament at magfest after last year's typing of the dead win. a friend of mine has run lights and lasers at magfest on and off for the last decade or so, and when he told me there was a monkey ball cabinet in the arcade during a walk-through the night before it opened I was overjoyed. memories of old cons with filthy, unmaintained cabinets that one could barely roll through beginner courses on drifted away as I hoped this would finally give me the monkey ball arcade experience I had waited for. the last-minute announcement of a tournament was even more appealing; this would finally put my endless pandemic training to good use.

they had two cabinets in fact: an original stand-up cab, near flawless except for an uncomfortably dim screen, and a naomi kit and 3d-printed banana shoved into an astro city cab for those who preferred to sit down. both cabs were swarmed at open time, but I snuck in some time on the astro city cab late the first night. the setup was appreciated but god was it sensitive; imagine a joystick with the same deadzones and behavior of the gamecube analog stick, but with a porn-quality cock-sized banana attached to it, nauseating yellow from the printer filament. I resorted to two-handing the monster, using one hand to brace it while gently pressing it with the other. the original cabinet was completely stiff by comparison. even minimal motions required cranking it to either side, and certain full-length presses felt like they lacked the tilting distance of the gamecube version. definitely a learning curve, but it was to be expected. it was my first time, after all.

unlike typing of the dead, which at least had some head-to-head scoring support, monkey ball's tournament was structured as consecutive single credit runs between two players in bracket matches. begs the question of why they didn't just do a pool structure since it was all single elim anyway; a friend of mine who runs my hometown arcade organized the proceedings, so I wasn't about to crawl up his ass about it. score attack also left the crowd puzzled, as most of us ignore score in comparison to floor count. a quick google search as the competition started rolling led me to this particular guide (specifically section 2.6), which outlined the scoring system in some detail. effectively the number of seconds (including centiseconds) multiplied by 100 gives the bulk of the score, with the score doubled if it was done in less than half of the allotted time. bananas contribute another 100 points for each one obtained. however, warps contribute significantly more points, as a green warp goal will give 10000 additional points on the base value (reds give 20000) along with an additional multiplier for each stage skipped. the latter multiplier makes up for score lost on skipped levels, but the base bonus is pretty intense overall; there aren't levels that can give you anything close to 10000 points as a base, much less several in a row! when it comes to a score attack competition, warps are overly centralizing, to the extent that a player could perform worse and still secure a win by locking a warp.

so to the player I unfairly trampled first round, I'm real sorry. you breezed through beginner without dropping a single life, showing off little skips and flair in the process. I popped in after and warped through most of it and demolished your score, even tho I dropped a life and missed the extra stages. it was honestly a screwjob, and I don't blame you for running off afterwards. in the final round a similar issue happened, where two people in a match on expert each got the warp on floor 2, with one person failing at the infamous floor 7 (also known as Exam-C), and the other getting a couple floors beyond that. the former person flew through the warp and got the time bonus, doubling a 70k reward to 140k points and completely blowing the other person out of the water, floors be damned. hell, the same round I took a single credit all the way to floor 16 and I still did not get as many points as she did thanks to an overly cautious run through floor 2. it really was a bit ridiculous. however, these tournaments are about understanding the rules, not necessarily agreeing on whether they're fair. so, emboldened by my rather strong previous showing (only one other person got a run past floor 10), I threw caution to the wind on my floor 2 attempt, snagged the time bonus, and that was it, even with a total choke on floor 7.

of course, in console play I can comfortably take a 1cc all the way through expert extra, so this shouldn't have felt that impressive, but on the chunky banana the gamefeel transformed the game a fair bit. the whole tournament was on the original cabinet with the weightier controls, so nailing the precision of floors like 14 where nudges around pegs that will bounce you off ledges was as easy as just pressing the stick in the right direction; no attention to minuscule movement required. it's when it got to floors demanding quick build-ups of speed or wild tilts such as floor 18 that it began to dawn on me that perhaps the cabinet was not as in perfect of a condition as I had hoped; could have also been some early control mistuning by the developers, but I'd like to think they understood their own game well enough to design levels around the original stick. still, we got lucky that plenty of extremely challenging stages are front-loaded in expert, as we all still got a good show of some very solid east coast players taking a crack at a sega classic. maybe we would've all preferred to play on gamecube instead tho lol

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.