Hatsune Miku and Future Stars – Project Mirai

Hatsune Miku and Future Stars – Project Mirai is a Rhythm game developed and published by Sega for the Nintendo 3DS. It was released exclusively in Japan on March 08, 2012. The game is a spin-off of the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series of Vocaloid rhythm games and was first released on March 8, 2012, in Japan with no international release. Like the original, the game primarily makes use of Vocaloids, a series of singing synthesizer software, and the songs created using them, most notably the virtual-diva Vocaloid Hatsune Miku.

A sequel to the game, titled Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai 2, was released in Japan on November 28, 2013. As the game is a spin-off from the Project DIVA series, there are numerous differences between the game and the original series. Most prominent of which is the art style of the game as the characters appear as their Nendoroid-style, super deformed versions in which characters have heads that are three times the normal size and not proportionate to the body. Though the game is still a rhythm game, the way the gameplay mechanics work is entirely different.

In addition, the game does not feature the Edit Mode of the Project DIVA series, while the DIVA Room Mode is replaced by the game’s My Room mode whereby players similarly get to interact with their modules in a room. The game includes an Augmented reality mode, where the characters will appear on AR cards viewed with the Nintendo 3DS camera. For the game’s primary gameplay, its music mode, it uses what it calls the “Chance Circle System”. Buttons will appear around the border of a circle, and a pointer will appear from the center of the circle extending all the way outside the circle’s border.

It will then turn in a clockwise or counter-clockwise manner according to the song and when the pointer passes the button, the player has to press the face button on the 3DS. Similar to the series, the player’s time accuracy will also be rated on a similar scale and manner that will be displayed on the bottom of the screen. The music videos of the songs in-game are partly animations of the characters like in the previous games, but some songs include the original music video with additional 3D effects. As opposed to the previous games, changing the character will also change the voice in the song in some cases. A few songs also have a change in the lyrics when sung by a different character.