I managed to get my Aime card in the mail and go through all the DIVA/SEGA/Aime registration nonsense using my phone on site. Way too late to do the survey (no thanks to SEGA's ridiculous time limit) but I wanted to play with a card anyway at Round 1 again.
So funnily enough after my 6th credit insert, the game popped up a warning message I couldn't read and restarted the machine, eating my credit. Sure enough, the game is running on Windows 8 and has proprietary boot software to run the game (but that's nothing new for a game running on proprietary hardware). Still, I never thought I would be so relieved to see the Windows 8 loading symbol in my entire life.
If there's some downers to the Diva Arcade game it's the multi-button system. When buttons you have to hit in unison display on the screen the note colors are all changed to RED, making it way harder to react to them. That's just mean especially when you have to strike in the heat of the moment. Notes that you hit with a FINE instead of a COOL apparently don't count towards your overall pass percentage or something... there was one song with 500 notes where I only missed 5 overall but it gave me a score of 90%... and lastly, the slider bar begins rubbing your fingers raw after about 8 plays.
The arcade game has some modules the console versions do not have. Most importantly the Valkyria Chronicles Squad 7 module. Nice.
The game however does not autoassign characters based on their lead songs. So if I pick a Luka song, it'll still assign Miku as default if I have set her as default. A bit weird, but it means I just have to pay closer attention. I still did a KAITO song by accident with Miku assigned which was weird.
The Vocaloid point system is a bit strange to wrap my head around. I relied on the "Trial" system to get a bonus 5 points for every song I cleared but from what I can tell there's no difference for vocaloid points awarded regardless of what difficulty you choose. It's a rather abusive system awarding very few points but it doesn't matter for me since I got the module I wanted.
It is heartbreaking to think not only this game, but also many arcade fighters such as Persona Ultimax and Guilty Gear Xrd are running on Windows, but are never considered for a Western PC release... it reminds me of what PG_jp said on Twitter where Japanese video game companies still do not have a company-wide global strategy when it comes to game development from the beginning. Looking forward to the PS4 release of Project Diva Arcade, which is then given to SEGA of America 1 year after release, where SEGA of America subcontracts the work out to a third party studio who has to work on localizing it using raw HEX editors and filling out 2000 forms for Sony for another 6 months. Global. Strategy.
