So I finally got through all of the songs a couple of times in Project Mirai DX.
Pros:
-Jesus fuck, so many songs. 48 songs I think? Idk, it feels like it never ends and gives a really good overview of Miku & friends music.
-Separate patterns for touch and button controls each with their own difficulty mode patterns. Looooooots of patterns. Started with buttons, but switched over to Touch w/stylus because it felt better about halfway.
-A ton of money went into the production values of the game. So many songs have unique mini-movies.
Cons:
-Patterns are pretty hit & miss. With so many songs and pattern variations, they must have had a few different employees creating patterns to sync to the music and some were better than others. A lot of songs are really bad and barely feel like the button presses even go with the music (especially in button mode where there's like 9 notes constantly in a row or something; these songs aren't through the fire and flame), whereas the stuff on the beat are pretty fun to play. But yeah out of all of the music games I've played, this probably has the worst "sync" of the patterns to the music. Which is kind of a big deal for a music game.
-The songs go on FOREVER. Like for the majority of the tracks I'd feel like I'm at the part where the song would end in Beatmania, Ouendan, Persona Dancing and then I look down and I'm only 50-60% through. Using the full versions of the songs might appease Miku fans, but as a music game, especially considering the songs usually have too many notes and almost no breaks in the songs to rest, the songs are just way too long and overstay their welcome.
-The game favors visually/aesthetic presentation over the mechanics. The note patterns show up on lines that go in all sorts of shapes and directions with zero consistency and you'll even have times where so many notes will be on a line doing a small circle that notes cover notes and it gets hard to even see what the next notes are. Sometimes note lines don't appear until a half-second before you have to press. It's just fairly poor design for a music game to not have any consistency in how the notes appear.
So I'm kind of torn. You get a ton of music for your buck with Mirai DX, and sometimes when there's a good sync it's a lot of fun. It's a good journey through the music catalog of Hatsune Miku. But if you stripped away the Miku and the massive songlist, at its core the music gameplay is really average with mostly mediocre patterns that consist of AAAAAAAAAAAA XXXXXXXX YYYYYYY BBBBBBB a million notes going to a song with a medium BPM that should have 1/6th the note count to match the beat. I'm glad I played it, but I also wish the developer was better at making music games.
