For a guy who claims to be above all that silly trophy nonsense, I certainly do seem to be spending a lot of time going for Platinum trophies in my Vita games this month.

In this case, it’s a side effect of a new policy.

Put simply, I’m not allowing myself to buy any games unless I am going to start them immediately, I finished Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate a couple of days ago, and I’ve pre-ordered Rise Of The Tomb Raider.  That comes out Thursday,  I wanted something to fill the gap, and going back to Project Diva f seemed like a good gap filler.

When I stopped playing, back in March, it was because I’d finished all of the songs on Hard mode with a rating of Great or better.  That got me a pretty mediocre 30% of the game’s trophies, because very few of them are actually about playing the rhythm game portion of the game.  The vast majority of them are related to grinding up Diva Points – the game’s currency – and buying items from the in-game store to give to the Vocaloids to make them like me better so that I could buy new stuff from the in-game store to…

Yeah.

Anyway, I reasoned that the act of grinding currency was justifiable as “actually playing the game”, so I did quite a lot of that, and it was going pretty slowly, so I started using some of the challenge items.  These do things like start you off with half health on a stage and prevent you from regaining health (that one is good for a 2x earned Diva Points) multiplier, or ones that make it so that any notes that aren’t perfectly timed actually hurt you (4x multiplier).

Much to my chagrin, I discovered that the absolute best song for grinding Diva Points on – because I could reliably get a perfect rating on it – was the single solo song by the pretty-boy Vocaloid.

Hi, Kaito.

I saw a lot of Kaito.  I didn’t do ALL of my grinding on his song, because I desperately needed variety, but I did play it a lot.  This particular screenshot was when I was only using a 3x multiplier item – when I used 4x, it was good for rougly 43200 DP.

You need about 3 million DP to buy everything.

It took a lot of grinding, but eventually I owned all of the outfits, and furniture, and room themes and other nonsense.

In addition to getting Diva Points, I needed to make all of the Vocaloids love me, and there are a few ways to go about this.  You can play games with them, pet them on the head, give them musical instruments, or feed them.

I stuffed Miku with so many cupcakes that she should have looked like a highly-sugared version of one of the more gruesome murders from “Seven”.

PACK IT IN, MIKU, THERE’S ANOTHER TWENTY COMING.

…ahem…

Anyway, eventually all the characters loved me and we had cake together and I got a shiny new trophy.

The End

PS: I won’t be doing this for f2.  That game is just as nuts about needing to buy stuff and build friendships with the characters, but it also halved the rate at which you gain Diva Points AND introduced cooldowns to how often you can force-feed the Vocaloids.  If the internet is to be trusted, it’s a good sixty hours of tedium, and I’m already not too fond of that particular entry in the series.