Before reading this review, please consider my lack of experience in this genre of games, as I will not dive deep into the controls, most of what I will express here concerns aspects that made me recommend against this product. Allow me to start with the negatives here:
- First of all, more than half of the game's content is locked behind DLCs. If you so wish to ignore this, ( and I may be biased but) I believe the way it was distributed could use a rework here, as the proposed songs come as bundled instead of being sold as individual units, this enables scenarios where you end up buying a bundle just for a particular song. I however do appreciate the inclusion of almost every existing Gunvolt song, I say almost because a number of which could not be added due to the original RoRo singer being absent in the making. I wish they included RoRo's version of Stratosphere however since it was sung by the new singer.
- The game has a section where you can view pre-recorded videos of the music video clips to watch and listen to. These are, sadly, locked to 720p for some unknown reason. As much as I appreciate the feature, I can hardly overlook this.
- Only a chosen subset of songs have their full versions available here, those were the songs that had their Diva clips recorded, which bars more than 60% of the roster, since the idea of recording the Divas perform as they sing was not so ancient. This makes me question: Why not just let us play the full songs without the clips included? Since most of my attention is reserved for the rhythmic part of the gameplay.
- Editing the joystick controls is impossible, only the keyboard controls can be edited.
- The song lyrics can be viewed when choosing to listen to their pieces. My only complaint here concerns the fact that they can only be viewed in the UI's chosen Language. I wish if they could let me swap between Japanese, Romaji or the language I choose. I did however like the fact that they let me read the lyrics translated.
- The Diva navigators can be swapped in the main menu. Spawning them makes them express some nice things, the canonicity of which remains a question. It's nice that the quotes are voiced at least. Swapping these alters only the main menu UI for some reason, as the colors revert back to blue (default) right when I access the concert menu.
-From a score attacking perspective. the game does not have an online leaderboard, something that was present in the older titles; heck even PuzzleMix has these features.
- The game itself stutters and lags when alt tabbing. Using the music player in the background together with the stutters is honestly icky. This has occured on different systems, mind you.
Of course there are things that I liked and enjoyed:
-I enjoyed looking at the album/singles covers. The option to view the lyrics and freely play the songs was nice to have.
-I can't say much about the gameplay here, I don't have much experience when it comes down to rhythm games, I struggled mostly with the circling motions as they demanded more accuracy from my end. The Anthem easter egg is there in case you want to enjoy playing through the song without caring about the score, the Anthem divas are sadly not influenced by the Diva navigator in the main menu, meaning that if you choose RoRo and play a Morpho song, Morpho will resurrect you, not RoRo. There is also the ability to adjust the input delays that comes with a preview of how the parameters might affect the gameplay, which is a huge plus honestly.
- Even though I bashed the score attacking of the game for its lack of leaderboards, locally though, I liked how doing a run with 0 misses rewards you with a gold symbol on top of the S rank. Having a 100% perfect run though rewards you with a symbol of the next level with an S+ rank. Beyond that there isn't honestly much, as you unlock nothing for doing that, but it's still nice that they are there, encouraging the dedicated to best their personal scores.
I bought this only because I am a big fan honestly. Given the high amount of Diva songs available throughout the series, I felt that it was inevitable that a rhythm game that utilizes this material would be considered in a future, the timeline of which I am currently living, thankfully. Considering that more than half of the content is DLC makes me dislike this product. As a rythm game however I think it does the job but I would not want to pay the full price for it. I see lots of potential for score attackers here so there is that. Maybe if the songs came with clean MP3 files, I would maybe recommend this since none of the songs are on spotify for god knows what reason.
