Lives Up to the Name

SHORT VERSION: It’s really cool! If you want a solid rhythm game for PS VITA or PSTV with great visuals, get it!

LONG VERSION: As a fan of Vocaloid, I have a huge amount of music to listen to, created by the vast amount of artists out there that make really creative use of the vocal synthesizing software. After finding myself knee-deep in Hatsune Miku, I felt like I needed to shake things up a bit and find something new of a similar sort; that’s when I found IA.

Apparently, she’s like a more indie version of the blue-haired diva and many people love the music created with the character’s voice. With my curiosity peaked, I decided to look into some IA music, but felt a little overwhelmed and didn’t know where to begin. With this problem in mind, I thought it was a good idea to look into IA/VT Colorful, a PS VITA exclusive rhythm game made by Marvelous and produced by Kenichiro Takaki of Senran Kagura fame. Considering how rhythm games aren’t really the company’s bread and butter, and considering the many delays that plagued the title, I was a little concerned about how this game would pan out, but after playing it for over 10 hours, I can safely say that there is nothing to worry about. This game is pretty good.

As soon as you boot up the game, you gain access to a tutorial and a handful of songs to play with. As you learn the ropes and get acquainted with the relatively simple controls of pressing the face buttons and D-pad to the rhythm of the music, you gain experience points that allow you to level up. Having this happen gives you many rewards such as new songs, outfits for IA, UI skins and trophies that also give you more points. It’s a relatively simple progression system that doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, for you will usually always have something new unlocked if you just play through the large 60-track song list at your own pace.

A Rainbow of Song

Speaking of the songs, I am very happy with the enormous amount of diversity in both sound and visual style. The first half of the song list contains a diversity of genres that are enjoyable and easy to get into, with a surprising amount of slower, calmer songs that ended up being the most memorable. It’s not until the second half where you start to find more challenging tracks, not unlike something you would find in a Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine, though it does bring in the consequence of many of those songs sounding the same, with everything blending together in a bad way. To remedy the problem, the songs come with videos in the background; all of them very distinct from each other.

These videos show you sights such as trippy dreamscapes, manga-style music videos and even fully animated pieces that look unique and visually pleasing. Though this is all well and good, there is another handful of videos that have fully 3D rendered environments, with IA made present with customizable outfits, that don’t work as well as one might think.

Even though they look just as pretty as the pre-made videos, they always want to tell a story that doesn’t seem to communicate all that well, with many videos consisting of just IA looking upset or confused about something, to which then she starts to employ very vague actions like turning to look at the camera dramatically, run towards or away from something (which is very poorly animated, by the way), and then end the video with her being happy about something. I have yet to figure out what’s going on.

Broken Barriers

Even if this is a Japan only release, the huge majority of the game contains a lot of English text, and even the videos themselves don’t have a lot of relevant text in them, so I find it difficult to pin the blame on a language barrier and easier to pin it on a poor grasp of the visual medium. Either that or they just didn’t have a big enough budget to make them better, hence the huge amount of pre-made videos used for the most of the songs.

What makes it worse is that these 3D videos, which there are only 15 of them of the 60 songs in total, are the only place where you can use the outfits you unlock. Considering how there are a huge amount of outfits available to put on your character, it feels very limiting to have such a small amount of songs to use them on. I don’t think this is such a big problem that would break the game, but I can definitely see people getting annoyed by it.

Moving on from these concerns, there will be a point in the game where you will eventually unlock all the songs and have the credits roll, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the game. Even after playing through all of the tracks, there is a mode called “Step-Up Play” that’s basically a challenge mode, where you can choose your difficulty and play certain songs that have conditions that need to be met in order to gain points and continue to other challenges, which range from fairly simple to very, very hard. Naturally, as you progress to this mode, you get more outfits and rewards to unlock, so there’s definitely a reason to play this mode aside from the simple satisfaction of beating a tough challenge.

IA 24/7

Another mode that is similar to this is the “Daily Play,” which is, as the title implies, a mode where you can play one random song that contains a certain challenge, to which you have 24 hours to complete. For people who want to play in small spurts and on the go, this mode is perfect for when you’re waiting for something or wish to kill some time. You simply boot up the game and quickly play a song, further encouraged through the very quick loading screens, which creates a nice, convenient experience overall.

Regardless of my complaints, the amount of fun I’ve had playing through the game is so much that it outweighs the problems I have with it, which are fairly minimal when talking about the game as a whole. The appealing visuals, along with a robust song list, challenge modes and unlockables, create a solid experience that puts this game on the same level as other popular rhythm games on the PS VITA platform. Whether you play this on a VITA, or sit down on the couch and play it on a television through a PSTV, you’re going to have a good time, especially if you’re already a fan of Vocaloid and the characters surrounding it.

Protip: Play this with headphones. You won’t regret it.