GP Editor Marcus Estrada discusses his hands-on impressions of Orgarhythm, Sound Shapes, and the Hatsune Miku demo at E3.
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "Just like Artdink, Acquire is a quirky Japanese developer with a history of experimentation and big ideas, but has unfortunately been at the mercy of low budgets throughout the years, leaving gamers with some fantastic titles that suffer from a large amount of jank. Acquire worked on Vita from its launch in Japan through to early 2017, injecting a nice level of variety to the console’s library despite some of the technical shortcomings of its titles, making the company a prime candidate for examination here."
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "Despite its somewhat anaemic lineup of backwards-compatible titles (unusual in light of the genre’s strong pedigree on Sony consoles), Vita’s selection of rhythm games is highly impressive in the modern market with genre favourites like DJMax, Hatsune Miku and Taiko no Tatsujin all present and plenty of quirky oddities like Deemo, Love Live & Persona thrown in for good measure. You’re definitely going to need to try your hand at importing to get the most of the genre here, but that shouldn’t be an issue thanks to region-free hardware and easy-to-grasp gameplay."
VGChartz's Adam Cartwright: "the handheld was unable to attract certain types of software – western AAA development quickly evaporated, as did Sony’s own support, because there weren’t enough consoles out there for such titles to be profitable. But that doesn’t mean that every publisher failed to find success. Indeed, there are a number of franchises out there that have been able to appeal to the Vita’s niche and which have seen positive sales numbers and critical reception, leading to them becoming mainstays on the handheld.
It’s these series that I intend to examine in more depth this article – what they are, what entries we’ve seen, what success they’ve had, and what it’s meant for the console’s future. I’ll be using known sales figures where possible to back things up, hopefully demonstrating that the Vita has been a solid home for a number of great series despite its otherwise weak commercial performance on the market."
