Hatsune Miku fans were pretty well served on the 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 favorite rhythm games on Nintendo’s console. Seriously, listen to the absolutely pointless pop masterpiece ‘Poop‘ once and it will be in your head for the rest of the day, in a good way.
The recently released Hatsune Miku – Planet of Wonders and Fragments is, without wishing to be too harsh, about as far from the glorious arcade magic of Project DIVA as it gets. This cheap minigame spin-off takes Mika and a few of her friends and lands them on a planet full of cuddly animals in need of help.
Yes, after a mid-air collision with a shooting star, Miku and company make an emergency stop in a small town where it turns out that wishes can come true. However, the ghost of the piece, Pentas, happens to be the shooting star you crashed into. Oops! So it’s up to our friends to do a bunch of work to collect the star shards, reassemble the Pents, fix their transport home, and get twitchy.
The tasks ahead take the form of nine incredibly mediocre mini-games aimed squarely at very young children – be warned, there absolutely no challenge included here — and each of the townspeople has another of these games to play. You get a mild package 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 attempts to tie in the musical aspects of Miku in the form of a very simple 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 here and we finished it all in under an hour .
To add some longevity, there are character skins, cuddly friends, and music to unlock with coins earned from replaying games, but when the games are this boring, it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of five wanting to go back for a second pass. This game is so thankless that even if you completely fail the minigame, you might not even touch the controller, it will give you your star fragment and start you anyway.
There’s no sense of progression or improvement on offer, the story is boring, you’re made to walk in circles around a tiny village and, even at a relative budget price of £20 / $28, Crypton Future Media seems to be asking a lot too. If you have a very young child to entertain, could be this will do the job in an hour or two. Otherwise, it’s hard to recommend something so slight, unchallenged and unwilling to engage with what makes its star such a joy.
