The second Vita rhythm game I mashed my way through over the last few days of being miserable in bed will be very familiar to anyone who’s played any of the entries in the Project Diva series, because the rhythm mechanics are almost completely lifted from the PD games but leave out some of the more annoying bits like Technical Zones and Chance Time and scratch notes.

It also doesn’t have Miku in it, nor any vocaloid music.  What it has, instead, are theme songs from 11 different anime series sung and danced-to by a total of 47 (it’s on the box, I didn’t count) incredibly moé characters.

I have not been keeping up on my moé anime, so I only recognized one by having seen it and two or three others by vaguely having heard the names.  So… I probably didn’t get the intended impact of getting to see my favorite characters caper about for my amusement, but it was still full of bippy music and cute girls so what the heck.

There is a …limited… story revolving around the characters from one show putting together a music festival that travels around Japan performing in various fantastical venues, but it’s mostly there to take you through learning the game systems and getting used to higher difficulties, because it starts out at Easy and ramps up to hard very quickly.

If you’ve played any Project Diva games, MGF is going to be a cakewalk of a game, with only a couple of the 22 songs having any real tricks about them.  There’s one song with a jazzy, broken rhythm that is a pain to adjust to and another song that has a ridiculously complicated note chart even on “Normal” (roughly 440 notes, or at least twice the norm) and gets nigh-unplayable once you start hitting the Extreme difficulty setting, but those are outliers in the generally-very-playable songs list.

While it has a comparatively short songs list, it does make up for it somewhat by having both TV-size (90 or 120 second) and full-length (~5 minute) versions of all songs, and a total of 10 difficulty levels.

It’s also a very easy platinum trophy to get, if that’s your sort of thing.  You do have to unlock every song on its Extreme difficulty (and unlocking is a fairly involved process), and then finish every song on Extreme both at the TV-size length and full versions, but the scoring is VERY forgiving.

As an example, I decided to see what would happen if I let a song play to completion without hitting a single note, and I got a passing score…

…so yeah.  Project Diva this ain’t.

What you DO get from playing on higher difficulty levels and getting better scores, in addition to profound satisfaction, is steadily larger amounts of in-game currency, used to buy more songs and costumes for your singers and virtual action figures of everyone and display cases for your virtual action figures.

You also need to earn a ton of the currency to unlock two of the game’s trophies, so there’s that.

Should you decide to pick up Miracle Girls Festival and need a quick way to grind your way to riches, I can heartily recommend playing through “Innocent Blue” on the “ura extreme” difficulty setting.  This is, in theory, the nastiest note chart for the song… but it’s also very quick to play and has no tricks about it.

That brings me to seven platinums for the year without resorting to playing awful games for easy trophies.  Last year was the year of burning through the backlog, but this year has been the year of actually exploring games.  It’s a good change of pace.  🙂