I’ve been spending small bits of free time over the past few days playing the game, so I’m only about halfway through it. But so far it’s making a pretty nice successor to 2nd, and even brings back some of the features from the first game.
Miku playing a PSP inside a PSP. PSPception? Image courtesy of salanos.
I’ll quickly go over some changes and features offered in the game, so those of you interested in buying a copy will know what you’re getting. Read the full story for more!
To start, it is probably important to say that the game play is, for the most part, unchanged from PjD 2nd. Don’t fix what isn’t broken right? Although I do think the difficulty was ramped up slightly on Hard difficulty compared to 2nd. Another major plus to note: The save data from 2nd can be imported to Extend. Any modules, room items, characters, and even money that you earned in 2nd will be imported into Extend. How nice is that?
Upon starting the game for the first time, you’re met with a new style start screen. I always love watching the character silhouettes dance around and do perform actions.
These title screens are always nice and colorful.
Those who have played 2nd will find that the menu layout is exactly the same. So navigation should be no trouble for PjD veterans. Those who do have difficulty can use the icons as a reference, or even use the English patch available from the Project Diva Wikispaces.
The menu layout is virtually unchanged in Extend.
The music selection screen deserves the most mention, as quite a few changes have been made to the controls here. To quickly change to a different character/module, you now use the Right shoulder button. PV modes for songs can now be quickly accessed using the triangle button, just like they used to be in the first game. The most handy feature of all though is the ability to automatically set the default characters for any song. Simply highlight a song on the screen, and press START to enable the Default Character mode. This is extremely handy for playing tracks that use two different characters at once. You can also see your scores for songs and difficulties without going back to the game statistics menu.
The song selection menu. Note how track scores are now visible.
A small but notable change has also been made to the result screen at the end of each song. The characters are now animated instead of seeing a static model. You’ll also see a percentage based on your overall score. You can even take a screenshot of your result screen by pressing the right shoulder button!
Scored a perfect on Melody.exe on my second try!
A final feature to mention is the ability to import the DLC from 2nd into Extend! Sega was kind enough to provide an option to make importing the DLC a painless process. If you want to know how, just check this reference on the Project Diva Wikispaces page.
Here you can see I’ve selected Teto after importing the DLC from 2nd.
As a fan, I highly recommend the game. It borrows only a few tracks from the previous games, while the rest are all new. In fact, a lot of them were very popular tracks, many of which you’d be familiar with. It’s almost as if the game was created to be a “greatest hits” collection of sorts. I’m sad that is has 10 less songs than 2nd (36 versus 46), but it was nice of them to make the DLC from 2nd compatible. There is also over 150 modules total across all characters to choose from!
I’m off to go play it a bit more and unlock the rest of the tracks+modules. So expect a few days of silence. =P
About jrharbort
A Hatsune Miku fan since December 2007, jrharbort joined MikuFan as the Head Writer in October 2011. Follow on Twitter at @jrharbort.