Believe it or not, I enjoy rhythm games a lot considering my musical background. I have played several rhythm games ranging from Dance Dance Revolution, Audiosurf, The Idolmaster and even Project Diva along with a few anime licensed ones.
When I heard about Miracle Girls Festival back in 2015, it’s basically a dream come true. It’s a crossover game featuring female characters (a good chunk from shows that has a female cast) from 11 franchises (Yuru Yuri, Kin-iro Mosaic, Wake Up Girls, Gochuumon to name a few) with the same gameplay like the Project Diva games. How well does it fare? Let’s find out.
The story is rather simple as it involves girls touring around Japan to perform at live concerts around Japan with the help of the girls from Project 575 helping the unnamed director to arrange these live concerts. It’s up to you to give the girls a successful live concert.
If you haven’t played a Project Diva game before, the gameplay for Miracle Girl Festival is straight forward. You simply press the corresponding button that is shown on the screen. For hold notes, you hold the corresponding button until it reaches the end. Lastly with the arrow icon, you press the corresponding button along with corresponding direction on the D-pad.
When you have a voltage over 100% at some point of the song, Miracle Fever Time (which is similar to Chance Time) will activate, which allows you to rack up more points, thus increasing your score. After the end of the performance, you will get your final results based on the percentage of COOL and FINE you have and if you get a rating of standard or higher, you can unlock harder difficulties and even full versions of the songs.
There are two modes in this game, Tour Mode and One Man Live. Tour Mode is basically a marathon mode where you play 2 to 4 songs in one go. To clear the day, your score has to meet or exceed the goal. To clear the whole tour, you need to reach the goal for all days. If you do good, you can do an encore, which is basically the full version of a song on hard difficulty, which can increase the total score even further.
As for the One Man Live, this mode allows you to play any song at any difficulty. This is good thing since you can practice the songs at any difficulty before clearing them in Tour Mode. The game has 22 songs consisting of opening and ending songs from 11 franchises, which you can watch preview videos of. While the song count is kind of low without factoring the ability to play full versions of the songs, which increases the difficulty since it’s a test of endurance to clear it perfectly. Since the game has downloadable content, hopefully more songs will be added later on.
Each time you play a song and clear it, you can earn coins and tickets which you can spend in the backstage. From there, you can spend coins on new songs, costumes, figures and figure cases. Gold tickets can be used to obtain special figures, which can speak. The figures that you collected then can be arranged in a case and seen in the collection mode.
While the song selection is good, the amount of songs is somewhat low for the time being. Aside from that, the production values are top-notch since the character model and the settings look great for a Vita game. The difficulty is about the same as any Project Diva game, except you won’t fail a song even if the meter hits zero. Although there is no possibility of this game being localized, you don’t really need to know Japanese to play this game.
On the other hand, when I played this game, I realized how many shows that I did not get to watch. I guess it’s time to marathon some of them at some point.
The Bottom Line:
Strength: Similar gameplay as Project Diva, good song selection, ability to play full versions of the song and great character models and graphics.
Weaknesses: The amount of songs is somewhat low without consideration of future DLC compared to other rhythm games.
Project Diva gameplay + Moe anime + Idol-production? Damn, this really does looks like a dream come true. Too bad I won’t be able to get it anytime soon.
How many songs are there total?
Yep, which makes this game enjoyable compared to other rhythm games. I have to admit that Love Live School Idol Paradise was disappointing in comparison to this game given that there is no difficulty selection and such.
In short, there are 22 songs, which is decent, but I wish there were more songs… Maybe when song DLC gets released since they already hinted that with few of the trophy descriptions.