Finally, they made Umineko in 3D

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

Tribe Nine was an incredibly good game, it had a great template for future story chapters, the gameplay was good, the cast of characters were extremely likeable, and the developers were eager to improve the game, with every update coming with massive QoL that addressed nearly every concern people had systematically. There was real hope that any issue you had with the game would be fixed soon, and the excitement of seeing the great story unfold in such a unique setting with such incredible art...

All that hope got snuffed out because of impatient shareholders. And you know what? After Akatsuki's finished bowing down to them, and turning everybody against them with their greedy practices, the shareholders can just sell their shares and move onto the next company to ruin. We all know that the Kaiju No. 8 game is going to fail in one or two months once they've got their profits there, too. Tribe Nine was the only IP that Akatsuki actually owned by themselves, it could have been a constant thing to fall back on, and they could have respected all the talented developers, programmers, and artists involved; but it was scrapped because it didn't produce enough 'monthly profits' or 'growth' or whatever.

The game's art style is really cute, the character designs are great, the lore is interesting enough to carry the gameplay, and the gameplay itself is really tactical; every card does exactly what it says it does, and the rules are extremely consistent to the point that mastering them is extremely rewarding. Every card always does exactly what it says it does; I haven't once been confused about what was about to happen.

In all my playtime so far, I have never died and thought it was anything but my own fault; and the next run, I didn't die in the same way. This is the basic loop that you'll go through if you're learning this game, just the same as any other game in the genre. I don't consider myself 'good' at this genre; but to the people comparing this to A20 Slay the Spire and calling it unbeatable, I have yet to go past A10, and based off my few hours of both, I would say this game is harder than Spire, easier than Monster Train. Apparently, all you need is 3 hours to form an opinion on how balanced a game is, so with my six hours that should count twice as much I think I'll say it's in a perfect spot to balance out the idiots who put this gem to Mixed.

Imagine you're playing a video game and you walk up to a big glowing switch. You click on it, and then the light above it turns off. "Oh, okay, I get it," you might say. Persona 5 thinks differently; what you really need here is a cutscene to drive the point home. All six characters in your team are about to chime in about how they think that pressing that button turns the light off; "What happens if you press it again?" one of them asks, and your character obliges without your input as they all exclaim "Whoa! It can turn back on! This /might/ be part of a puzzle!" in different ways that showcase their wacky unique personalities.

Bring back Tartarus if this is what you think 'dungeon' means. Everything else is pretty much peak JRPG.

The game that killed Project Diva; the last new game was in 2016, because this game keeps being ported over and over. The Project Diva arcade machine is a lot of fun; but that's because it is an arcade machine, and you can't just port that game straight across to console and expect it to work the same. They traded in putting effort into games for the spectacle of having the biggest song list, and just gave up on actually making new games in favour of porting this one over and over. Any review that mentions the PSP, PS Vita, or PS3 games, they are completely different experiences to this game except on the surface level, and so you shouldn't fall for the nostalgia. Yes, it is Hatsune Miku, but MegaMix is not a replacement for Diva F or F2nd just because it has the same songs in them; their versions of the charts are designed for controller, whereas this game's charts are designed for an arcade machine.

You know how most rhythm games are designed to be played on the matching controller? In a phone game, the notes appear on the screen where you want to press. In Guitar Hero, the lanes are in the same order as the buttons on your controller. In this game, the buttons are lined up with the arcade controller... which you probably don't actually have. Since there were only four buttons on the arcade machine, double notes from the older games were replaced by these combo notes that use an intuitive design to let you tell which of the four buttons you're supposed to press just by their relative positions on the screen. None of that information works with a controller; instead, you'll have to get your brain to recognise that 1 = up, 2 = left, 3 = down and 4 = up, and be able to quickly convert the maps on-screen into buttons on a controller whether that pattern appears horizontally or vertically, on the fly.

Or you can just memorise the songs completely; which you'll have to do anyway if you want max points, because the arcade game was also built around the idea of maximising score through their new hold notes and NOT around accomplishing full combos, so even if you get all 'Cool's on every note you probably didn't hit max score unless you mastered the stupid-ass workaround necessary for this mechanic to even work on a controller where you press the note they want you to hold, then press a button you have bound to all four buttons and release the first note... and then having to fail specific hold notes by pressing the wrong button on purpose so you can get the full hold bonus points, or whatever other stupid techs you need to do. If you're just trying to collect all the full combos on every song, as was probably typical of most people's playstyle in previous Project Diva games, you are encouraged to /ignore hold notes completely/. They just make things more complicated, and you're not getting a competitive score anyway if you're just going for a full combo without planning a route through the song.

Another minor gripe is that the bundle with the extra song pack includes the 'all items' cheat DLC, so if you want to get the songs cheaper, you're going to miss out on the progression aspect of the game. It isn't a good progression system but, for learning rhythm games, it helps to just do a lot of practice, and putting a grind into a game like this is a way of feeling like you're accomplishing something with every song you play.

That all being said, if you like hitting buttons on rhythm and like Vocaloid songs, it's a decent game. If you are looking at my hours wondering how I formed this opinion in less than two hours, I do have 100s of hours across the PS4, Switch, and arcade versions of the game.

The majority of the puzzles in this game are not actually solvable; their solutions are non-unique, and in the end you /will/ have to resort to guessing. This is unacceptable for a Sudoku game. I am sorely disappointed. I thought this could be my go-to Sudoku game on Steam, but if the curated levels in the base game are not even tested for uniqueness, I have little hope the endless mode is tuned to produce solvable puzzles.