By Angelina Hu
Among the extraordinary boom of Japanese rhythm games in 2020, Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE! feat. Hatsune Miku has its fair share of popularity. Officially releasing on September 30, with over 1,000,000 pre-registrations under its belt, the game has only been growing ever since.
Project SEKAI (the shortened name fans call it by) is a mobile game similar to the likes of BanG Dream!, Love Live!, and D4DJ, with a wide cast of original characters and Vocaloids, or Virtual Singers. The characters, split into five bands of four, are given visual novel stories where the player can learn about their backstories. On top of some cripplingly difficult beatmaps, the game also includes a gacha, as all rhythm games do, so welcome to gacha hell. Again.
A screenshot from the gacha menu ingame.
Jokes aside, a part of the news that Project SEKAI announced on November 25 in a livestream on their Youtube channel is the beginning of the second round of the song and costume contests. For the song contest, players write a song and enter it for a chance to have their work added to the game. For the costume contest, players design outfits for the characters to wear in the game’s 3D MV mode, where you pick costumes for the characters and watch them dance and sing to one of the game’s songs. For a free mobile game, the models genuinely don’t look terrible, and the designers put a lot of effort into animating them and making sure the clothes don’t look stiff.
The first round of the song contest ran from October 1st to November 30th under the theme, “A song that’ll get people hyped.” The first round of the costume contest was under the theme “Sweets” and “Near Future”, and it ran from October 2nd to October 31st. The winners of the costume contest have already been announced; the four winning designs will be implemented in February and March 2021. The winner of the song contest has not been announced.
Artwork of Akito Shinonome in one of the winning “Sweets” costumes, “Pastel Ice Cream” by @komunishi on Twitter. The design of the costume is by the same user.
This time, for the second round running from December 1st to January 31st for the song and December 1st to December 31st for the costume, the theme for the song is “A song that you want to listen to in Spring,” and the theme for the costume is “Magic.”
The song contest, by standard, is limited to people who genuinely know how to compose Vocaloid songs and work with voicebanks. One must also be fluent in Japanese, as that’s the language it must be in. Entries are posted on Youtube under the hashtag #プロセカ, and they must be sung by a Vocaloid voicebank.
Actually, back in February of 2020, a pre-game song contest to hype everyone up and garnor Project SEKAI a bit of attention was announced. The winning entry was revealed later in the year to be Ichinose Lupo’s song alive, as sung by Rin Kagamine. It serves as a good example for what kind of piece can win the contest; Lupo is a professional composer who has a wonderful discography and plenty of experience writing Vocaloid songs.
The artwork from the music video of alive on Lupo’s Youtube channel.
The costume contest, on the other hand, is open to all artists from around the world. The outfit should be designed under the theme “Magic,” and to enter, post your design on Twitter with the hashtags #プロセカ衣装デザイン and #魔法 .
Two designs will be chosen– one under the women’s category, and one under the men’s category, since some of the characters in the game wear masculine outfits while others wear feminine ones. For example, a dress designed for Miku isn’t going to fit with someone like Kaito. Entries must be tagged under which category it would go under; unfortunately, outfits cannot be unisex. One must pick one or the other.
The entry itself is an illustration, styled much like a reference sheet, that shows the costume in full color from three angles: front, side, and back. One may include up to four reference sheets that accentuate the details of the outfit and alternate colors (all costumes in the game currently have multiple variations).
The name of the costume and the player’s Twitter username must be written somewhere on the illustrations. One person may submit multiple entries, but only post one design per Tweet. If you make male and female variations of the same design, post them under two separate Tweets.
Keep in mind that the costumes have to be translated into 3D models for the characters by the design team for Project SEKAI, and as such, any hairstyles designed to accompany the costume will be omitted, and all headpieces must be confined to the space over and above the ears (ex. a hat or headphones). Alterations to winning designs may be made if they are too difficult to reproduce in 3D.
Finally, important points to remember are to use the correct Japanese hashtags when posting and specify which gender the outfit is for, whether in the description of the Tweet or on a reference sheet.
Here are some of the winning entries from round one.
“The Melody Chaser” by @Winepng on Twitter:
“Berry Choco Pancake” by @a_z_a_k_a on Twitter:
The futuristic outfit is simply stunning. And isn’t the pancake-inspired one adorable?
While both of the entries shown above are in Japanese, there is no language restriction in the official rules for this competition. If you can write Japanese, go ahead, but if you can’t, there does not appear to be anything stopping you from entering anyway. Just don’t use excessively fancy words outside of the title.
…of course, the one overarching requirement for the contests is that you have to be into Vocaloid and Project Sekai. You can download the game for free on the Japanese App Store (which you can access by making a Japanese Apple ID; plenty of tutorials exist online). Many translations of the menu navigation and visual novel stories are available on Reddit and Twitter, too, so what’s stopping you? Fans have even created a masterlist of unofficial translations for the visual novel here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18RA7uuZxE1zgxMZYii2Trci7IJxe7I-3SpJOkLrjb08/edit#gid=0
Regardless, good luck if you decide to enter! It’s quite rare for Japan-based mobile games to host such worldwide competitions that permit even English fans to enter, so please take the opportunity if you’re into such media.
Happy composing and happy drawing, Vocaloid fans!
