The latest Hatsune Miku rhythm game follows the Rock Band /
Pinball Arcade “DLC platform” format to great success. Project Diva Future Tone
delivers the great music, fun gameplay, and cute vocaloid waifus you love in a
selection of a’la carte DLC that gives you a surprising amount of bang for your
buck. They maybe trimmed it down too much to chop it up into DLC, as this game
is almost entirely devoid of extra fluff, but if you’re only interested in
playing the songs it is arguably the best Miku game yet. See all of the details
here in our full review.
Game Details
- Publisher: SEGA
- Developer: SEGA
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Music / Rhythm
- Pros: Great gameplay; nice presentation; fantastic songs
- Cons: Lacking modes
- MSRP: DLC varies
Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone is essentially just a
DLC platform. You download the base
“game” for free, which only has two songs and a bunch of outfits for
each character, and then expand the game as you see fit by buying DLC packs.
Unlike Rock Band, however, you don’t just buy songs one at a time. Thankfully,
in Future Tone the song DLC is currently available in two big chunky packs that
each offer 100 songs for $30 each or $55 in a bundle. Getting more than 200
songs for the price of a normal game is pretty darn awesome, all things
considered.
If you want even more costumes, and a couple of extra songs,
there are also three “Encore Packs” that include new costumes and accessories
and even some extreme difficulty versions of songs. These cost $10 each or $25
together in a season pass. Normally you have to unlock the extra costumes and
stuff with in-game points you earn by playing, but you can also pay $13 for an
Unlock Key DLC that opens up everything immediately.
The presence of the Unlock Key DLC is sort of puzzling to
me, though, because outside of earning points that you use to unlock costume
modules, Future Tone doesn’t give you any sort of structure or meaningful
progression system. There is no story mode or career or anything to really “do”
besides just playing through one song after another. It isn’t as if the story
mode in Project Diva X was particularly good, or anything, but I did like
having a feeling of progression. All of the songs you own are available and you
just pick one after the other and play through them with no fanfare. I also
preferred having to unlock costume modules via in-game actions (performing well
in specific sections of songs) rather than simply buying them in the menu in
Project Diva X as well. Future Tone just sort of opens everything up and says
“Have at it” without giving you a goal.
Your goal becomes, then, to simply play the songs and have
fun at your own pace. And because of the wealth of songs (assuming you bought
the song packs) and costume options, there is a lot of fun to be had here
because the gameplay is genuinely great. I also have to admit that playing
dress up with the vocaloids is a lot more fun than you’d expect and some of the
costumes are pretty spectacular and awesome and cute (and sexy). Every song has
a unique music video - that your chosen characters in your chosen costumes are
then placed into – and they are really, really impressive. The fact that every
one of the 240+ songs has a unique video tailor made to perfectly match it is
just astounding. The amount of work that goes into these games is awe-inspiring
and makes the bland and repetitive backdrops in other music games seem pretty
pathetic.
The gameplay in Future Tone is a little different from past
Project Diva games on consoles in that it adds a fair bit of complexity. The
core game is still the same – you press buttons to the rhythm as they fly in
from offscreen – but Future Tone adds slides on the PS4 touch pad and having to
press multiple buttons at once on top of everything else that really ups the
difficulty. Honestly, it takes quite a while to get used to it if you’re coming
off of Project Diva X like I was. The multi-press prompts are also kind of hard
to see since they’re spread across the whole screen, too, which makes them hard
to recognize and press in time particularly on harder difficulties with a
million other button prompts flying around at the same time. Once you wrap your
head around the new mechanics they’re fine, of course, but expect a steeper
learning curve than in past games.
The presentation in Project Diva Future Tone is quite nice.
As mentioned above, the music videos for the 240+ songs are all unique and
awesome and had a ton of work put into them. The character models also look
really great and some of the costumes are really awesome. Sound-wise the game
is spectacular with a ton of fantastic music. The song list is essentially a
greatest hits collection from the franchise as the songs are taken from
previous console releases in the series in the Future Sound song pack and from
the portable and arcade games in the Color Sound pack.
All in all, Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone is an
outstanding entry in the franchise. The gameplay is fantastic and a little more
complex than past entries, the presentation is spectacular, and the song list
comprised of all of the best songs from previous installments is awesome. If
you’re already a fan, having all of your favorite songs in one place is a dream
come true. Likewise, if you’re new to the series having all of the greatest
hits in one game makes Future Tone an obvious starting point. Keep in mind that
the game doesn’t have any structure or progression – you just pick songs and
play them – but the music is so awesome and gameplay so solid that it is easy
to spend hours just going through the song list. And then playing your
favorites over and over again. Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone is highly
recommended for vocaloid fans, music / rhythm fans, anime fans, and anyone in
between.
