Well, it looks like Project DIVA is officially dead. It's kind of old news at this point, but I'm still really sad about it. It's one of my favorite game franchises, and I've played it for a lot of my life. I'm decent at it and its "successor", Project SEKAI. The reason I say successor is also why this article exists.

Well, these two games relate but also don't. SEKAI has a completely different platform and play style. The only common factor with DIVA is that it's published by SEGA and that it has the Cryptonloids in it, which are referred to as "VIRTUAL SINGER".

If you look at miscellaneous interviews with SEGA, and you pick up enough pieces over time (which is what I did, so I don't have sources for this. trust me bro! /s), you will realize that not only is SEKAI not worked on by the same division of SEGA as DIVA, but they were planning this since the start of Project DIVA X's development. There are a lot of similarities between PDX and SEKAI. Most notably, the visual-novel-like story elements, and the "clouds" which refer to different emotions/styles of music. If you go deeper, you realize that the storyline of PDX and the storyline of the SEKAI movie are extremely similar. Scarily similar. Miku couldn't sing/lost her song, and you (or in the movie's case, the SEKAI characters) need to save her and the others. How interesting...

In the beginning, SEGA wanted to develop a social game based off of Project DIVA Arcade, which is based off of Virtua Fighter 5. I'm half certain FT was their attempt at easing the players into this by creating a home port of Arcade, but it never really conceptualized. Personally, I believe their random porting of the Arcade codebase to different platforms is just them testing to see which platform will maximize their profits. Imo it's obviously PC because there is a massive modding community for DIVA. But that's beside the point. They realized that if they really wanted to maximize the profits of a social game like that, they would have to make a mobile game where players can be parasocially attached to lots of cute idol characters. This is where the enshittification of the SEGA-Miku project began. Gacha gambling, microtransactions, and a CHUNI playstyle! This also lead to a bunch of other idol games just straight up using the CHUNI playstyle because it's popular now.

Project SEKAI is fun to play, but the 3D models are such a downgrade from DIVA's (diva f2nd the best...) and the game runs on Unity which means it's a buggy mess with mediocre graphics. It feels like they're trying to pull away from the storyline for their 2026 supergame that will feature Miku in some way. I'm not talking about that monstrosity here. I don't like the fact that it exists.

Ummm.. Just play both games. And be sad about DIVA's death. They're killing DIVA and SEKAI for the supergame. Start crying. This is the end.