Hatsune Miku fans have been fairly well served on Switch, with the excellent Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix giving Vocaloid devotees a generous helping of over 100 super cool tracks to dig into in one of our favourite rhythm games on Nintendo's console. Seriously, listen to the absolutely nonsensical pop masterpiece 'PoPiPo' once and it'll be in your head for the rest of your days, in a good way.
The recently released Hatsune Miku - The Planet of Wonder and Fragments is, without wanting to be too harsh, about as far removed from the glorious arcade magic of Project DIVA as it's perhaps possible to get. This budget minigame spin-off takes Miku and a handful of her pals and crash-lands them on a planet full of cuddly animals who need help.
Yes, after a mid-air collision with a shooting star, Miku and company make an emergency stop in a tiny town where it turns out wishes can come true. However, the genie of the piece, Pentas, just happens to be that shooting star you crashed into. Whoops! So, it's up to our pals to run a bunch of errands in order to collect star fragments, put Pentas back together, fix their ride home, and skedaddle.
The errands at hand take the form of nine incredibly mediocre minigames that are aimed squarely at very young children — be warned, there is absolutely no challenge involved here — and each of the town's inhabitants has a different one of these games for you to play. You get a bland parcel-balancing game, a claw-grabbing balancing game, a cardboard box balancing game... you get the idea. It's not great. There are one or two efforts to link back to the musical aspects of Miku in the form of a very simplistic rhythm game offering (if you can remember six button presses you've got this in the bag), but overall there's not much to dig into here and we blew through the entire thing in well under an hour.
To add a little longevity there are character skins, cuddly pals, and music to unlock with coins earned through replaying games, but when the games are this dull it's hard to imagine anyone over the age of around about five wanting to return for a second pass. This game is so unchallenging that even if you completely fail a minigame, perhaps don't even touch the controller, it'll give you your star fragment and move you along anyway.
There's no sense of progression or improvement on offer, the story is a bore, you're made to walk circles around a tiny village and, even at the relative budget price of £20 / $28 it feels like Crypton Future Media is asking way too much. If you've got a very young child to entertain, maybe this will do the job for an hour or two. Otherwise, it's hard to recommend something so slight, unchallenging, and unwilling to engage with what makes its star such a joy to be around in the first place.
Comments 28
I love Miku, and I bought this game and played it because it's Miku (nuff said) and honestly a 4 is incredibly generous xD It's the worst game I've ever played in my life other than ones that are actually broken and unplayable, you'll have more fun with a mobile game that has one of those terrible ads that tries to convince you it's a real game.
I was thinking the idea of Vocaloid was pretty lame as the voices are artificial and I'm not a fan of artificial voices to sing.
I prefer real voices sung by actual peoples.
Added by moe looking female characters that targeted for male audiences, definitely not working for me as I prefer athletic looking male characters.
This is just sad, there’s so much potential for an actual Miku RPG game in a style similar to this one but this is what we got. Unfortunately it seems like Crypton isn’t really interested in doing more than the bare minimum for Vocaloid games, even the Diva series has stagnated at this point :/
Crypton at this point is just milking the namesake of Miku... they're not interested in actually doing anything worth a damn with her and it's a shame.
I'm not a fan of Hatsune Miku, I find the entire premise of this character to be pretty strange, but for a game with a character like this one in the lead, the basic storyline actually doesn't even sound that bad. Pretty original story, if you ask me, so shame it's so bad.
Sad thing is that some Vocaloid songs have stories good enough to be their own videogame (for example, Alice human sacrifice, Dark wood circus, Daughter of evil saga, Synchronicity, Kokoro/Kiseki) and instead we get... this.
They really have been tossing Miku in just anything lately lol. Clearly they should stick with rhythm games.
@Rambler Seems to be. Considering the output of Vocaloid videos on Youtube & Nicovideo.
As a huge Vocaloid fan, this is disappointing.
I admit I was tempted by this game, but time to yeet it off the 'ol wishlist after that glowing review. 😝 I've been trying to shrink my wishlist, so thank you for the review.
Honestly, what bothers me is the asking price is $28.
What flippin' fish nonsense it is. Should be...uh...$1 at most, for the quality that it has.
We need a new Project Diva game, not this!
It was pretty clear that it was going to be pretty bad just looking through the images on the eShop. Always tempted to buy anything with Hatsune Miku in the title just because it has Hatsune Miku in the title but I'm not buying shovelware at that price even for Miku. If it's like 90% off then maybe.
A bit of a blight on the Hatsune Miku name! Thanks for the review.
This game looks completely skippable. Shame, as Miku's actual rhythm games are brilliant.
@Rika_Yoshitake yeah.Crypton might have created Miku but its the composers making songs and SEGA with the Project Diva games that made her popular.
Yeah, I saw some footage for this and I wasn't impressed. The game just looked way too simplistic for my tastes. Not even 1-2-Switch's mini games were this bland and those mini games were dull as well.
@Anti-Matter Not all of them are female and whats so bad about an artificial voice? KAFU, while technically not Vocaloid, sounds like a real human.
I personally love Vocaloid cause it lets talented song writers who aren't great at singing have a chance at making a hit song.
@Rambler A few years back a program that made vocaloid possible to use in music making software gained a lot of popularity. People who were already making chiptune and (ugh) nightcore picked it up pretty quickly, and thus this whole "virtual popstar" thing started to gain traction.
I gave this program a shot, as it has some pretty good uses, but I found it a huge hassle to use. It's easy to use if you're not lazy. But I am lazy.
Really unfortunate that Hatsune Miku and co. have been used to make such a disappointing game when there's so much potential in them as pointed out by @Hoshiko and especially @Olrun!
Speaking of the Story of Evil, it's barely included even in Diva games (if I recall correctly Daughter and Servant of Evil are only in Project Mirai) which is such a shame!
@Rambler Yeah, far be it for me to bash on other people's tastes, and I would hate to be thought of as a music snob, but a LOT of nightcore songs are LITERALLY just sped up versions of a popular song, being passed off as a remix. Zero effort on the "remixer's" part and that just grinds my gears.
The Karamell dansen sped up version though is a brilliant song!
at first I thought this was a 3ds port.
@Anti-Matter Vocaloid is probably the only truly unique and interesting genre of music left, imo. If you really like instrumental music and don't need to "connect to the vocals/lyrics" it's great. You being bothered by it being artificial though kinda gives me the same vibes as people that don't like synths in their music though. Male Vocaloids tend to sound really weird because the lower tones sound more robotic, so yeah they're mostly moe girls...
@ArcticEcho
I mean...I got nothing against Vocaloid...but calling it the only unique and interesting music genre is a bit....much.
Have fun if you like it but don't oversell it.
It's a brand with cute anime characters and some light pop songs.
@HalloHerrNoob It's not really a tightly focused 'brand,' they're audio programs that work in literally all musical contexts. They aren't all light pop songs either because anyone can buy and use a Vocaloid. I own Vocaloids, they're pretty cheap. There are EDM, Trance, Dubstep, D'n'B, J-Pop, J-Rock, Disco, Ambient, Death Metal, Speed Metal, Prog. Rock, Prog. Metal, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Chiptune and NeoClassical songs all within the Vocaloid umbrella. Many of these are mashups of different genres. The variety is massive. Vocaloid as a whole goes far beyond the songs that make it to the games. There are thousands of Vocaloid albums out there. The most popular songs are all made by the same 5 or 6 artists, sure, but that's all music. Do a deep dive of Vocaloid and you will find it more varied than a lot of other styles. This is because the only thing you need to have a Vocaloid song is to use a Vocaloid somewhere in the song. So it's actually more of supergenre than a genre, as the rules are fairly lax.
@ArcticEcho
I really don't know why you are trying to sell it to me.
I am happy that you like it...but for me it's just cringy.
Tastes are just different.
@HalloHerrNoob I'm not selling you anything, I'm saying you're wrong about simplifying it down to only being light pop songs, because it just isn't true.
This is so disappointing I was so excited to get it, and I actually stumbled upon this article because I was looking to see if there were physical cartridge versions of the game. I was going to buy the extra Project Diva songs, then I came across this new game. So I’m guessing the better option would be to buy a few song packs for PD instead?
Also, I just wanted to say, @DanijoEX is your profile picture Miku and Tracer mashed together? Because that is officially my newest favourite thing ever, OMG! That’s so cool! I love Overwatch, especially Tracer, and Miku is my current hyperfixation, so it’s so cool to see!
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