I started playing this game about a month ago, I want to share some of my thoughts about it.
I like rhythm games, despite being bad at them. I also played vocaloid rhythm games before (Project DIVA, Megpoid the Music#, IA/VT, うた組み575, a little of Miku Flick, and more recently Project Mirai). I avoided SEKAI however, for two reasons:
- It is a live service gacha game, and I have strong feelings about this kind of games. Live service games require a constant internet connection, which is not only inconvenient, especially with mobile games, but also means the game can be arbitrarily shut down; gacha games are predatory in nature.
- I religiously used a Samsung Galaxy S5 for years. There is still no phone on the market that isn't a downgrade from that in some way, but the SoC is pretty dated and it doesn't have a lot of RAM - most games either effectively don't work, or outright don't work, SEKAI being the latter kind.
When I bought a Xiaomi 11 Lite 5G NE (what a mouthful; it is a downgrade in some ways still, but it ticks most of the boxes and does have a quite powerful SoC with plenty of RAM), I decided to give it a try despite my distaste, since I've heard and seen good things about the other parts of it, mostly because of my sister, who plays it quite a lot.
The game is based around a story, and I like the story. It is definitely more complex than what Project DIVA X has (the only other rhythm game with a story featuring the cryptonloids). It leans into vocalo culture, and focuses on the different ways music is important to people.
There's a lot of characters - 5 groups with 4 characters each, on top of that you've got the 6 cryptonloids, who have different incarnations of different personalities in each group, and also exist in their "regular" incarnations outside of the groups (though so far I believe only "regular" Miku has had an appearance, and only in the introduction). In the most pessimistic scenario, that's 56 characters, in the most optimistic (counting the vocaloids once), it's 26. It feels hard to keep up with that, but at this point I can at least list some character traits of each, and first names of most (we don't talk about the last names).
The story is presented in VN form, voiced for main characters, some background characters, and
usually for the vocaloids. In the main story, they are voiced - sometimes better, sometimes worse (poor KAITO), talkloid is hard. In the side story, they only have some phrases/sounds that are reused at the beginning of their dialogue, similar to DIVA X. Human voice actors are really good. Sadly, most background characters don't get a voice actor, a sprite or even a name. This feels kinda weird, especially for a high budget game like this.
I like the concept of "Untitled" and SEKAI, and I like to overanalyze them (lol).
I'll once again mention DIVA X and say that it's funny how it also has something like the SEKAI - Clouds. There's also 5 of them. I think I can even find counterparts that would make sense somewhat, it would be like this: Cool - Vivid Bad Squad, Classic - leo/need, Quirky - Wonderlands x Showtime, Cute - More More Jump, Elegant - Nightcord at 25:00. Comparing these two games sure is interesting, feels like Sega took X as a base for SEKAI honestly.
As for the actual rhythm game part, the setlist is really good, including many recent songs, which is something I really miss in the other vocaloid rhythm games that I play - they include many timeless classics, but even Project DIVA Mega Mix(+) doesn't have much in terms of new releases. What's more, it doesn't seem like Crypton are limiting themselves to their own synths now? In Project Mirai we saw a crossover with GUMI, but here it's not just a one-time thing. There's quite a lot of GUMI songs, some IA songs, a few Teto songs, possibly others I missed - I didn't play all the songs that are in the game, not even close. Which brings me to another point, the setlist is
massive. It's to the point I think it might be larger than any other rhythm game I played, ignoring community additions of course.
The charts are also well made, and gameplay is quite fun - clearly derived from SEGA's own Chunithm (which I never played, due to not having rhythm game arcades in my area), but for phones. It's a 3D VSRG with release timing and flick notes. Flick notes can get annoying in rhythm games, but I feel like they are mostly used for good here, and are often really satisfying to hit.
My main annoyance with the game starts once I finish a song. It's the scoring system, it sucks.
Here, the gacha element is applied - a lot depends not on your skill, but on
cards. You get those by, well, doing gacha, which is a predatory mechanic, but let's ignore that now. With a card, you get additional side story, a cool illustration (actually two but that's complicated), brag points/decoration to put on your profile - but the most important part is that you use those cards as rhythm game cheats.
The better cards you have, the bigger your score - skill doesn't matter much. That's just the score though, right? The only thing really important in rhythm games is accuracy anyways, right? Well, not here. The score determines your rank, so you have no way of telling how well did you do on a song at a glance, you can only tell how good your cards were. A simple accuracy display does not exist. Best you can get is a breakdown of your perfect/great/good/bad/miss, which is not stored, so you have to take a screenshot if you want to be able to check your actual accuracy in that way - at least there's a screenshot button on the results screen (actually rare and welcome feature!). The carrier mode of DIVA X is similar to this, however that game has a freeplay mode where it functions like any other DIVA game, with scoring based on your performance. Well, all DIVA games have somewhat weird scoring/accuracy systems anyways, and similar to them, SEKAI keeps track of FC/AP, that's something you can use to reliably track progress in game at least...!
Here's the
good part though. This isn't necessarily your actual accuracy, and you might have not actually AP'd that song. There's another aspect to the card cheats,
skills. Those, depending on the card, might change your greats or goods into perfects, making it possible to AP a song without actually APing it. Well, at least the FC is sacred... Wrong again! Nothing is sacred here! There are skills that allow you to change combo-breaking bads into perfects! In other words, you can also cheeze FCs by cheating... This made me genuinely horrified when I discovered it.
If you want to actually track your progress here, you have to exclusively use cards with skills that don't affect accuracy. Then you can rely on the FC/AP tracking in the game, or take screenshots. This is not that hard, because you can just use the default cards and never engage in gacha. This is definitely a good thing, but why is cheating a feature of
a rhythm game in the first place? At least give us the real breakdown as an option, if it has to be there...
Unlocking things is complicated. There's music money, module money, card money, gacha/general money, gacha/general money for real money, half dozen of thing-unlocking money, event money, playing money and probably even more money.
There's also a lot of ads in the game. Optional ads for random companies, which you watch to get various kinds of money, and required ads for the gacha system. Both annoy me, but at least the former is optional, though it makes me feel like I'm missing out. I would much prefer if the game used a traditional way of playing it, that is, paying for the game, and for songs as DLC. I will admit that having everything accessible for free feels real convenient, especially as I don't have a stable income source right now. Other people are paying for my free stuff, in some way, and people do spend
a lot of money on gacha games.
Overall, I do enjoy the game, but it feels like it for some reason tries to make me hate it, which is unfortunate.
I still get the feeling that SEKAI killed the DIVA series, which is really sad, because it was everything I ever wanted (don't want to say it couldn't be improved upon, but it was great). Rest in peace, DIVA...
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