Uta Kumi 575 is a rhythm game exclusively for the Vita. It only uses the touch screen as its input. You tap the left and right side of the screen in time with the music. On the higher difficulties, this can be tough. The touch input is not as precise as buttons and the game compensates for that. As a result, it doesn’t feel as tight as a more traditional rhythm game.
The unique gimmick for this game is that frequently during songs, you will have to fill in the blanks in the lyrics. Selecting the right components means that you’ll get to continue your perfect run (the combo doesn’t break even if you get it wrong) and gain more points. Getting the highest ranking in a song will require you to get all the lyrics correct. What this means is that you’ll struggle if you do not understand Japanese but you can somewhat get around it by checking online guides. Note that if you do this, it’ll kill the pacing since you have to pause frequently.
As the title suggests though, the lyrics are all in the haiku format of 5-7-5 syllables and this can be easy to miss but is quite interesting once you realize it. Due to the gimmick of selecting lyrics during the songs, on the lower two difficulties it does not feel as if there are as many button prompts. There are many sections with no prompts as it gives you enough time the lyrics. The hardest difficulty is where it gets much more consistent.
All the songs have three versions – Short, Middle and Long. The song length rises along with the difficulty, with Long being the longest and the hardest. At this difficulty, the time you’re given to select lyrics (which ends up being broken down into individual characters rather than words) is shorted and can be difficult, especially if your Japanese is weak. Sometimes, it gives you hints with a character already filled so you can match the character but you cannot rely on this. There can be a huge string of button prompts on Long difficulty that it starts to merge together. With the lack of physical feedback due to no buttons, it can quickly become a mess once you miss one or two prompts. This is where practice is required to perfect those songs.
Completing any song, no matter the difficulty, will give you points. The higher the difficulty, the higher the points. Getting a three-star on Long difficulty will give you more points than a five-star on Middle difficulty so it’s worthwhile playing the harder songs. You can use these points to purchase from the in-game shop the higher difficulty songs, backgrounds and costumes. Needless to say, you can change the backgrounds and costumes in each song for any of the two characters. The costumes are expensive though, requiring you to grind songs a few times in order to collect them all for each character.
The story mode follows two high school students Azuki and Matcha. The game is split into months of the year, with two to three songs to play each month along with a story cutscene. It follows them practicing their dancing and performing at the school festival, passing Christmas and getting jealous at other couples. It’s a slice-of-life approach. The game uses all original songs. If you like vocaloid music, then there are some familiar composers. While the pair has actual voice actors during the story cutscenes, their singing will have noticeable synthesizer elements since even if you select the wrong lyrics, they will sing those wrong lyrics which is a nice touch.
The background is not as interesting as it could be. It usually has the pair dancing in front of a static background, or real photographs with one of them superimposed on it. It just means you’re less likely to get distracted though. There are 34 songs in total, each with three difficulties. Then each song has multiple versions with alternate lyrics. There is plenty of content for a rhythm game and it’ll take a while before you can get the highest rank on all the songs. You can even customize each song by changing the lyrics and rearrange the dance moves, then saving it to be played later.
Overall, if you just want to enjoy a rhythm game and don’t care about getting the absolute highest rank in all the songs, then Uta Kumi 575 is fun and enjoyable. It has a unique gimmick of selecting the correct lyrics in the spur of the moment. While the rhythm gameplay is not as tight as it could be due to being touchscreen based, it is more than enough to provide a fun time.
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