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Azuki and Matcha of Sega’s upcoming music game Project 575 are pretty laid back. We’d previously noted that if you mess up the lyrics while playing through the game, they’ll sing them anyway and you’re not necessarily harshly penalized for it. Now, though, we’ve got word from Sega that there’s another way to mess around with the lyrics—by tweaking them yourself.
After you’ve unlocked a song in the game, you’ll be able to enter edit mode and check out all the correct options for lyrics. You’ll then be able to swap them out for another word if you so choose. The video embedded above turns every “Ni” word into “Nya” instead, which is the affected way to make someone sound like they’re a cat in Japan. It doesn’t look like you get complete free-form control for this, though. That might be what Song Producer 575 for iOS will be about.
That said, Sega did announce the Project 575 iOS application that you can get as well, although it’s still unclear at this point if the featured app in the video is the same as Song Producer 575.
For those wondering and worried about how the music parts stack up, let’s just backtrack real quick—Project 575 isn’t your normal music rhythm game. In addition to hitting buttons in tune with the song, the game will utilize the Vita’s touchscreen function to introduce lyrics periodically throughout the song which you need to quickly select in the right order. These are based on the 5-7-5 pentameter which haiku fans might be familiar with.
Once you’ve made your input, the girls will sing them in the next line of the song. It adds a little bit more interaction with the song itself than other music games might. Some of the songs will come from Vocaloid song creators like Lamaze-P, Yu-chan-P, TokyoToko and others as well.
The video also showed off the dozens of costumes players can have the characters wear (With Azuki sounding like she’s a little horrified at what she’s wrought into this world having to put them on) which don’t actually look that outlandish for normal high-school girls. There’s a cheerleading outfit, rainy day raincoat set, and waitress outfit as some of those you can obtain. There will also be some 30 locations to choose from or play as backgrounds against in the game.
Project 575 will be out for the PlayStation Vita January 23.
