Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA (初音ミク -Project DIVA-) is a series of rhythm games created by Sega and Crypton Future Media. The games have appeared on the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Nintendo 3DS, iOS, Sega RingEdge and PlayStation Vita platforms. The series currently consists of 5 main titles and 3 spin-offs. The series primarily makes use of Vocaloids, a series of singing synthesizer software, and the songs created using these vocaloids most notably the virtual-diva Vocaloid Hatsune Miku. The game is the first video game to utilize the Vocaloid software developed by the Yamaha Corporation.

Gameplay

As the game is a rhythm game, players are allowed to choose from a wide variety of Vocaloid songs, original songs sung by vocaloids, including songs sung by Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len. Players also can choose which character they wish to play in the game. Known as modules, these modules can be completely different characters or simply different costumes for the same characters. These modules, though not directly controlled by the player, will be the ones appearing in the music videos throughout the game including their specific costumes. For example, if the player chooses Kagamine Rin for their first character and Hatsune Miku for their second character, during solo songs only Kagamine Rin appears in the video but for duets both Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Rin will appear in the video. Each of the songs have their own difficulties which are Easy, Normal, Hard and Extreme. Initially both the Easy and Normal difficulties of a song are unlocked, upon clearing the Normal difficulty, the Hard difficulty will be unlocked and so forth. Players progress through the game by completing songs and unlocking more new songs until they eventually unlock all songs.

Hatsune Miku

Hatsune Miku (Japanese: 初音ミク), sometimes referred to as Miku Hatsune, is a humanoid persona voiced by a singing synthesizer application developed by Crypton Future Media. Hatsune Miku is portrayed as a 16-year-old girl with long turquoise twintails. She uses Yamaha Corporation's Vocaloid 2 and Vocaloid 3 singing synthesizing technologies. She also uses Crypton Future Media's Piapro Studio, a singing synthesizer VSTi Plugin. She was the second Vocaloid sold using the Vocaloid 2 engine, and the first Japanese Vocaloid to use the Japanese version of the Vocaloid 2 engine. Her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. Hatsune Miku has performed at her concerts onstage as an animated projection.

The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初, hatsu), sound (音, ne) and future (ミク, miku), thus meaning "the first sound from the future," referring to her position as the first of Crypton's "Character Vocal Series."

Development

Hatsune Miku was the first Vocaloid developed by Crypton Future Media after they handled the release of the Yamaha vocal Meiko and Kaito. She was built using Yamaha's Vocaloid 2 technology, and later updated over time to newer engine versions. She was created by taking vocal samples from voice actress Saki Fujita at a controlled pitch and tone and those different samples all contain a single Japanese or English phonic which, when strung together, create full lyrics and phrases. The pitch of the samples was to be altered by the synthesizer engine itself, and was constructed into a keyboard style instrument within the Vocaloid software.