Mini Review: Hatsune Miku

Hatsune Miku fans have been fairly well served on Switch, with the excellent Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix giving Vocaloid devotees a generous helping of over 100 super cool tracks to dig into in one of our favourite rhythm games on Nintendo’s console. Seriously, listen to the absolutely nonsensical pop masterpiece ‘PoPiPo‘ once and it’ll be in your head for the rest of your days, in a good way.

The recently released Hatsune Miku – The Planet of Wonder and Fragments is, without wanting to be too harsh, about as far removed from the glorious arcade magic of Project DIVA as it’s perhaps possible to get. This budget minigame spin-off takes Miku and a handful of her pals and crash-lands them on a planet full of cuddly animals who need help.

Yes, after a mid-air collision with a shooting star, Miku and company make an emergency stop in a tiny town where it turns out wishes can come true. However, the genie of the piece, Pentas, just happens to be that shooting star you crashed into. Whoops! So, it’s up to our pals to run a bunch of errands in order to collect star fragments, put Pentas back together, fix their ride home, and skedaddle.

The errands at hand take the form of nine incredibly mediocre minigames that are aimed squarely at very young children — be warned, there is absolutely no challenge involved here — and each of the town’s inhabitants has a different one of these games for you to play. You get a bland parcel-balancing game, a claw-grabbing balancing game, a cardboard box balancing game… you get the idea. It’s not great. There are one or two efforts to link back to the musical aspects of Miku in the form of a very simplistic rhythm game offering (if you can remember six button presses you’ve got this in the bag), but overall there’s not much to dig into here and we blew through the entire thing in well under an hour.

To add a little longevity there are character skins, cuddly pals, and music to unlock with coins earned through replaying games, but when the games are this dull it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of around about five wanting to return for a second pass. This game is so unchallenging that even if you completely fail a minigame, perhaps don’t even touch the controller, it’ll give you your star fragment and move you along anyway.

There’s no sense of progression or improvement on offer, the story is a bore, you’re made to walk circles around a tiny village and, even at the relative budget price of £20 / $28 it feels like Crypton Future Media is asking way too much. If you’ve got a very young child to entertain, maybe this will do the job for an hour or two. Otherwise, it’s hard to recommend something so slight, unchallenging, and unwilling to engage with what makes its star such a joy to be around in the first place.