Miracle Girls Festival is a rhythm based game using the music from various anime. It uses the same engine as the Hatsune Miku Project DIVA F games and is exclusive to the PlayStation Vita. The game features two songs from each of the eleven anime:
- YuruYuri
- Haiyore! Nyaruko-san
- Vividred Operation
- Kin-iro Mosaic
- Arpeggio of Blue Steel
- Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono
- Wake Up, Girls!
- Go! Go! 575
- No-Rin
- Engaged to the Unidentified
- Is the Order a Rabbit?
This means that unfortunately that there are only 22 songs within the song list, which doesn't seem a lot for a typical rhythm game (the Project DIVA F games have just shy of 40 songs and IA/VT has 60 songs). The songs are usually the opening and ending themes from the anime but they can be insert songs or feature the openings of the second season. The key common theme is that the songs have to be sung by the characters so that is the reason why something like the opening of Vividred Operation isn't included.
The game tries to pack in a story which is called the Tour Mode. This is hosted by the characters of Go! Go! 575 (which makes sense now that they are in the game since the anime was very short and the series was primarily a game) where they are travelling around Japan hosting the Miracle Girls Festival. Between each tour there will be dialogue from the 575 team, commenting on the success, their surprise and satisfaction on the turnouts, and thanking the producers for helping make it a reality. During each tour, you will play through a few songs per day in order to get the audience numbers to a target amount (and hopefully exceed it). This requirement is actually very easy as the game is quite forgiving.
If you do really well in the songs in Tour Mode, the audience will require an encore and you will play one song again but will be the full length version this time around. Unfortunately, the low amount of songs means that you will be repeating songs very quickly within Tour Mode. The game somewhat gets by this as the songs have both a short version (i.e. just the chorus once, being the TV opening size) and the full version (such that when you play the full version, there are different lyrics from the second verse onwards, feeling fresh). Plus, this is where you have to use the coins you earned playing the game in order to purchase the 10 extra songs which helps increase the variety. That said, since it is anime music, the genre variety is high.
There are six tours in total and it will only take around 4 hours to finish them all. Most of the fun comes from playing the songs again and again on different difficulties to gain high scores. The characters are faithfully reproduced here, with their individual quirks and their original voice actors. The characters keep the aesthetics from their own animes, and the cuteness factor goes through the roof. The developers did a great job of including neat references to the anime, such as during "Miracle" segments, something like a Shantak balloon for Nyaruko or UFO for Engaged to the Unidentified will appear. It's these little touches that make the game great.
One of the best touches in the game is in Wake Up, Girls! case, their dance routine is the same as in the anime, which feels authentic. Each character has one alternate costume, with DLC providing more. These are other outfits that the characters would have worn in their respective animes. Surprisingly, there are no DLC songs. The gameplay is exactly the same as the Project DIVA F games except that there are no gimmicky prompts such as the one where you flick both analogue sticks. You use the four face buttons, as well as a combination of the D-pad and face button.
Prompts will fly from all over the screen and you press it in time with the music. It is heaps of fun and there is a huge sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when you get it right. What makes it harder though is that the backgrounds are distracting, since it is set on the stages and characters are dancing, with heaps of colors flashing, hiding some of the prompts until it is too late. That said, the game is easy overall. Easy and Normal difficulties will be no challenge to players who have played rhythm games before.
Hard is a lot of fun and seems to be the most balanced while Extreme can be cheap at times and requires memorization, not to mention that it loves spamming patterns which require you to alternate the D-pad and face button quickly in order to make it. There are "Expand" varieties of the songs, which involves some twists to how the notes come into the screen, making it harder by shrinking or growing them. If you find the game too hard, you can use items during the songs to make it easier to keep your combos. All the short versions of the songs initially only have Easy and Normal difficulty unlocked. The Hard, Extreme and Full versions of the songs need to be unlocked by completely specific challenges like getting a rank or getting a certain number of combos.
You get ranked at the end of each song such as Great, Excellent or if you managed to hit all prompts perfectly, a Miracle rank. Depending on your timing, each prompt will net you either a Cool, Fin, Safe, Sad or Worst in descending order of perfectness. Some of the full versions of the songs run for over 5 minutes, which means getting Miracle in them can be tough as you're more likely to make careless mistakes which means repeating the whole song again. It's a good thing all the songs are catchy and except for one song (Your Voice from Kin-iro Mosaic), the beatmaps are great and as such, the game gets very addictive.
You'll easily fall into the trap of playing one more song in order to get a higher score and before you know it, an hour has passed. Playing through the game, it makes you appreciate the music of each of the anime a lot more and of course, makes you want to rewatch the anime again. As the theme is the characters signing on stage during a concert, there are crowd cheering effects and chanting which adds to the atmosphere and gives a sense of a proper concert with the audience hyped up.
Miracle Girls Festival has surprisingly short loading, with only a few seconds at most. Sneaked in here, and during menu selections, are shout-outs by the characters. The voice actors have added in a lot of original dialogue, this is no cheap cash-in. You are able to replay the PV without button prompts so you can enjoy the animation without worrying about gameplay. Other collectables include statues of the characters, and display cases to put them in. Furthermore, there are various different stages that the characters can perform on. These are the only extras the game offers, so that it is a little bit disappointing that there wasn't a Diva Room available like the Hatsune Miku games.
Overall, Miracle Girls Festival is a fantastic and addictive game. You can tell from the small song list and limited extras that the licensing must have cost a lot. Nevertheless, the gameplay is solid adn you can tell a lot of attention has been put into the game. Considering that for most of the anime that was featured in this game, that they will have no chance of appearing in a video game, Miracle Girls Festival is like a love letter / celebration for fans of those series. Of course, it is highly recommended that you have watched all the anime first before playing this game in order to enjoy all of the references (the time investment is worthwhile as most of the anime are decent), Miracle Girls Festival is highly recommended not only for anime fans but also rhythm fans. This is one of the best the Vita has to offer.
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