Huh, so much better buy then Diva X from the sounds of it? I enjoyed Diva F 1 quite a bit but 2 didn't quite click and didn't bother getting X due to song counts.
Are there at least Japanese subtitles?
Yes, this game is far better than X. All of the random unlocks are gone (you can unlock whatever modules you want whenever you want, and the pacing is very fast -- you're never more than 1-2 songs away from earning another one), all of the Diva Room crap is gone, it's just you and Miku and friends pushing some goddamn buttons. You can seriously get from a cold boot to playing in about 20 seconds -- it's a very streamlined experience.
As for subtitles, it's romanji only in the songs -- probably due to the fact that they only already have ~40 songs in the game translated (the songs from F2 and its DLC) and translating songs is generally a giant pain in the ass (I remember the Blu-ray/DVD release of the AX 2012 Miku concert being delayed by nearly
two years due to delays in the subtitles). Maybe if they released and translated the PSP games way back when. :x
As a side effect to that, I wonder if they can restore the normal hold bonuses? On the JP end everything got buffed retroactively because of the pause bug...
I'm not really sure how they would fix it? It seems like a design flaw that came up due to the game originally being designed with no pausing in mind. Unless they were going out of their way to not invalidate old scores (which was then mooted when they increased scoring the way they did), so who knows.
Honestly, it doesn't matter much. It would be nice to have the scores line up 1:1 with the arcade version, but records on the console and arcade version would be held separately anyway due to other differences (mainly being able to hold all four inputs with one button in the PS4 version).
I also kind of wish some of the other arcade features (such as skins, player titles and ghost scores) made it, but that's picking nits (well, maybe not the ghost scores part -- that would be really nice to have).
controller options other than DS4?
Hori has made a couple of arcade style controllers for this game, although you will need to rebind buttons in order to get the right layout. (The arcade cabinet is just four buttons in a row, going Triangle, Square, X, and Circle). Thankfully, Sega put in
full button remapping in the game so you can use whatever gonzo configuration you want.
This game actually plays well on an arcade stick too -- that's actually how I play it.
