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Video Game / Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage!
aka: Project Sekai

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/project_sekai_6.PNG
Let's sing together!note 

Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! (aka Project SEKAI: Colorful Stage! Feat. Hatsune Miku in Japanese) is a Free-to-Play Rhythm Game game released on September 30th, 2020 for mobile devices, with a demo version released from September 4th through the 11th. The game is published by Sega and developed by Colorful Palette, a subsidiary of Craft Egg. Colorful Stage! is an entry in the larger SEGA feat. HATSUNE MIKU Project that the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series is also a part of, and as such shares a few elements with its companion series. The game also doubles as a Tech-Demo Game for Crypton Future Media's "Newtype" series, a line of in-development voicebanks and counterpart to Yamaha's Vocaloid software.

The story of Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! takes place in a world very similar to ours, where Virtual Singers, voice synthesis software that are marketed like real singers, are popular music icons recognized the world over. In this world, there exists the concept of "SEKAI": pocket universes formed from the true feelings of humans and inhabited by Virtual Singers. With the aid of an "Untitled" song, humans can travel into the SEKAI and, by bringing their true feelings to fruition, transform a SEKAI into a new song. Colorful Stage! follows the stories of several unique individuals whose fates align through the "Untitled" song and the music born from their bonds.

The SEKAI found throughout the game are split into one of five types: Band, Idol, Street, Musical, and Underground. Each Sekai stars a group of talented young musicians, each accompanied by a group of Virtual Singers who resonate with the overall theme of the SEKAI.

  • Leo/need: The group in the School SEKAI, Leo/need is a band formed of Childhood Friends. Its members are Ichika Hoshino, Saki Tenma, Honami Mochizuki, and Shiho Hinomori.
  • MORE MORE JUMP!: The group in the Stage SEKAI, MORE MORE JUMP! is a team of four Idol Singers: Minori Hanasato, Haruka Kiritani, Airi Momoi, and Shizuku Hinomori.
  • Vivid BAD SQUAD: The group in the Street SEKAI, Vivid BAD SQUAD was formed to "surpass a legend". Its members are Kohane Azusawa, An Shiraishi, Akito Shinonome, and Toya Aoyagi.
  • Wonderlands X Showtime: The group in the Wonderland SEKAI, Wonderlands X Showtime is a fun-loving group who wants to put on a good show. Its members are Tsukasa Tenma, Emu Ootori, Nene Kusanagi, and Rui Kamishiro.
  • Nightcord at 25:00: The group in the Empty SEKAI, Nightcord at 25:00 is a mysterious musical group only seen performing at night. Its members are Kanade Yoisaki, Mafuyu Asahina, Ena Shinonome, and Mizuki Akiyama.

Gameplay consists of traversing between the real world and the SEKAI, interacting with a wide range of characters along the way. In songs, players tap, hold, slide and flick notes as they approach a bar at the bottom of the screen, all while backed by gorgeous 3D live videos starring the groups and Virtual Singers. Through a gacha, one can collect additional outfits for the characters to wear in both 3D and 2D (animated in Live2D) scenarios. The game also features a special mode called "Virtual Live" where groups of players can join up and attend virtual concert versions of in-game performances on a regular basis.

As a spinoff of the Project DIVA series, Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage!'s song list consists of Vocaloid songs both returning and new to the series, featuring a wide range of producers. Unique to Colorful Stage! is "SEKAI Ver." songs, new arrangements of Vocaloid hits that combine the Vocaloid's performances with the game's original characters. "Virtual Singer Ver." songs are available as well, for players who want to play to the tunes that they know and love. In addition, the game heavily features brand-new songs commissioned specifically for the game; while commissioned songs are nothing new to the SEGA feat. HATSUNE MIKU Project franchise, Colorful Stage! weaves them into the story through a regular event schedule, with new events and songs added every other week.

    Featured Songs 
Note: Songs in bold are SEKAI Ver. only

Leo/need

MORE MORE JUMP!

Vivid BAD SQUAD

Wonderlands X Showtime

Nightcord at 25:00

Virtual Singer

Mixed

  • SEKAI (Original, DECO*27 & kemu) note 
  • Wah Wah World (Original, Mitchie M & Giga-P) note 
  • Gunjou Sanka (Original, Eve)note  (Full Ver. MV)
  • Identity (Original, Kanaria)note 
  • Aoiro Enogu / blue paint (Original, Kujira)note 
  • Salamander (Original, DECO*27)note 
  • Cosmospice (Original, Pinocchio-P)note 
  • Tokugawa CUP NOODLE Kinshirei / Tokugawa Cupnoodle Prohibition (Mitchie M)note 
  • Journey (Original, DECO*27)note  (Animated MV)
  • Be the MUSIC! (Original, Kinoshita)note 
  • NEO (Original, JIN)note  (Animated MV)

Other

  • End Mark ni Kibou to Namida wo Soete (cosMo-P) note 
  • the EmpErroR (sasakure.UK) note 
  • Don't Fight the Music (Chroma) note 
  • folern (nulut) note 
  • Sage (Camellia) note 
  • MarbleBlue. (MisoilePunch♪) note 
  • Saishuu Kichiku Imouto Flandre-S (ZUN x Beatmario)note 
  • Help me, ERINNNNNN!! (ZUN x Beatmario) note 

In addition to regular content, the groups are featured in a variety of additional content:

  • 25-ji, Night Radio de.: A web radio show that features Kanade, Mafuyu, Ena, and Mizuki's voice actresses and (true to the group's name) premieres every two Saturdays at 1AM JST. Episodes vary in length between 30 minutes to an hour. Airs on a biweekly basis. Concluded as of the 3rd Anniversary update.
  • WonderShow Channel: A monthly stream that stars the actors and actresses from Wonderlands X Showtime (with guests from other units) and delivers update information for Colorful Stage!, including upcoming song releases and version updates. Concluded as of the 3rd Anniversary update.
  • MORE MORE JUMP! Voice Dramas: Voice dramas starring MORE MORE JUMP! are occasionally featured on the game's official YouTube channel. Episodes are around 5 to 10 minutes each. As of 2022, it was announced that these voice dramas would be discontinued for the time being to focus on other projects.
  • Leo/need SNS Feed: Leo/need is featured in a series of fictional social media posts that are shared through the game's official Twitter account. Concluded as of the 3rd Anniversary update.
  • Vivid BAD SQUAD Archives: Occasionally uploaded to the game's official YouTube channel. In addition to featuring short voice drama parts, they also feature alternate and new game-size covers for existing songs featured in the game. Concluded as of the 3rd Anniversary update.
  • Petit SEKAI: A series of anime shorts that premieres on Tokyo MX in Japan and on the game's official YouTube channel.
  • Colorful Corner: An English language video series presenting news and updates on Hatsune Miku: COLORFUL STAGE!, alongside a variety of other content. Hosted by COLORFUL STAGE! community manager Saccharin and assistant Rappie.
  • Connect Live: A series of in-game concerts that are hosted and performed by the characters in real-time. The voice actors respond to comments sent by the audience during the MC segments, and full versions of songs from the game are performed on a virtual stage, introducing choreography for songs that don't have 3DMVs.
  • MORE MORE JUMP! Live Streams: A talking stream with the MORE MORE JUMP! members as VTubers. Concluded as of the 3rd Anniversary update.
  • Journey to Bloom: A mini-series of anime adaptations of the game's Main Story scenarios for each unit, made and released to for the game's 3rd Anniversary. Each episode is roughly 4 to 5 minutes in length for a total of 5 episodes.
  • ProSeka Broadcasting Station: Essentially the replacement for "WonderShow Channel", this monthly program presents news and forthcoming updates for the game. Unlike "WonderShow Channel", this program features actors/actresses from all units as rotating hosts.
  • Project SEKAI Radio: Essentially the replacement for "25-ji, Night Radio de.", this web radio show features rotating duos of actors/actresses from a given unit hosting. Viewers are given a chance to submit questions to be read and answered on the show revolving around a specific theme prior to each episode.
  • SEKAI's Game Season: A series where each of the groups "play"note  a given Nintendo Switch game (with a Virtual Singer on to give additional commentary): Leo/need with Miitopia, MORE MORE JUMP! with Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, Vivid BAD SQUAD with Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Wonderlands x Showtime with Nintendo Switch Sports, and Nightcord at 25:00 with Ring Fit Adventure.

International versions were announced on August 31st, 2021, the 14th anniversary of Hatsune Miku's release date, including an English version of the game and a Chinese version. The Chinese version launched on September 30th, 2021 in mainland China and South Korea and will be gradually made available to other Asian regions, while Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! was released December 7th, 2021 to 130 countries worldwide, with an open beta test released on October 4th, 2021.

See also the page for its spiritual predecessor Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA.

Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! features examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    Tropes A-G 
  • Abandoned Area: The "Traveling Winter Railway" trained illustrations appear to take place in a long abandoned, overgrown train station that's been covered in graffiti.
  • Abusive Parents: The game features few, though the most notable examples are Touya's father initially, Akito and Ena's father, and Mafuyu's parents.
  • Actually, I Am Him: A fair portion of the N25 story involves the girls discussing and following OWN, a rival producer who is quickly gaining traction on the internet despite (or because of) their "cold and emotionless" musical style. It's revealed halfway through the story that OWN is Mafuyu under a pseudonym.
  • Affectionate Nickname: A number of these exist in the game. For example, In one yonkoma, MEIKO introduces herself to the MORE MORE JUMP! team and is given the nickname "Mei-chan" by Shizuku. When MEIKO proposes calling Shizuku "Shii-chan" in return, Shizuku adamantly refuses since the nickname is reserved for her precious younger sister (much to MEIKO's confusion).
  • Ageless Birthday Episode: Whenever a character's birthday is celebrated, no one ever mentions what age they were previously or what age they're turning. The same applies to Virtual Singers, as their "birthdays" are described as "Anniversaries" and celebrate the release of the software rather than the Virtual Singers aging up. It wouldn't be until the game's third anniversary that the characters would properly age, as the main cast moved up a grade at school.
  • Alice Allusion: Wonderlands x Showtime's Welcome♪ to the Sekai Full of Wonders Gacha is themed after Alice in Wonderland, with Tsukasa and Emu having unlockable King of Hearts and White (or rather, Pink) Rabbit outfits, respectively. The other themed characters show up as well, with Rin as the Mad Hatter, Nene as the Smoking Caterpillar, and KAITO as the Chesire Cat.
  • All There in the Manual: The official fanbooks give a little insight into the non-playable characters that show up in unit and event stories, detailing their hobbies, ages, and food preferences that aren't mentioned in the game.
  • Alternate Universe: Some trained illustrations appear to take place in alternate universes, most often based on the theme of the event the cards are tied to. For example, the "Welcome♪ to the Sekai Full of Wonders" illustrations takes place in an Alice in Wonderland setting, while "Cyber Sniper" is set in a Cyberpunk style city.
  • And Starring: The "feat. Hatsune Miku" in the title, in case you didn't know who was running the show.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: You can use rare materials dropped from songs to buy outfits (and color variations of those outfits) for characters to wear during 3D music videos. Some outfits are tied specifically to 4★ cards that must be owned before you can buy them.
  • And the Rest: Rather than naming all of them when talking about the Virtual Singers as a group, advertising often says "Hatsune Miku and her friends".
  • And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: While in the Sekai, you can purchase furnishings for each of the particular Sekai, with each one having unique decor. In addition to making it look nicer, furnishings also serve as stat boosts for your units, individual characters, and Virtual Singers and can be upgraded with additional purchases.
  • Animated Music Video: Some songs have dance videos where you can watch the characters perform the song on-stage, with the ability to swap out the characters by equipping different cards or changing their outfits. A few songs also come with traditional music videos that play in the background during gameplay, being either copied from their existing videos or created specifically for the game.
  • Anime Theme Song: The game features 2 original theme songs, produced by famed Vocaloid producers DECO*27 and kemu (SEKAI) and then another one by Giga-P and Mitchie M (Wah Wah World). "Hello World" from the first season of Blood Blockade Battlefront is also covered here.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Retrying a song is not only free of charge, you can retry halfway through a live if you broke combo for example.
    • Stamina is not deducted if the player fails to clear a stage.
    • After complaints from the beta that the hit detection on flick notes was too strict, flick notes were adjusted for the final release such that any form of upward swipe is valid for a flick note, but hitting a flick this way only awards a GREAT judgment as opposed to a PERFECT judgment if you swipe in the correct direction.
    • The game's gacha system features multiple levels of pity to assist unlucky players.
      • Pulling on the gacha at all generates a "pity currency" called Gacha Seals; each pull is worth 1 Gacha Seal. Gacha Seals can be spent on the purchase of a card in the gacha that you acquired the Seal from; 4★ cards require 300 Seals, while Birthday Cards require 100. Alternatively, you can spend Gacha Seals to buy Gacha Seal Tickets at a 10:1 exchange rate. Gacha Seal Tickets can either be spent on a future Gacha Seal card purchasenote  or saved to buy cards directly from the Gacha Seal Ticket Shop. Said shop only accepts regular (green) Gacha Seal Tickets and only stocks permanent cards (so no Birthday or ColorFes, for example), but cards from past gachas or events can be bought here, with 2★ and 3★ cards appearing after 6 months and 4★ cards appearing after one year.
      • There is also a separate pity called Gacha Bonus. This is a gauge that accumulates Gacha Bonus Points whenever you pull from the gacha, with a gain rate of 0.5 Points per Free Crystal pull and 1 Point per Paid Crystal pull. When 50 Points are built up, you can expend gauge to get a random 4★ for free, while building up the gauge to the maximum of 100 Points allows you to get a free 4★ of your choice.
    • For a while, Another Vocal Ver. songs were very difficult to get as they only take character-specific Another Vocal Cards that could only be obtained by raising a character's Relationship Values. This was remedied by later events introducing group-specific Another Vocal Cards that can be substituted for any one corresponding member's Another Vocal Card as well as an update that allows players to exchange unwanted Vocal Tickets for Another Vocal Cards.
    • During a Cheerful Carnival event, you have the option of changing teams once at any time if you don't like your team choice. However, once the first scores are tallied all players are locked into their choice, preventing players from swapping to the leading team after the fact.
    • April 2021 added some quality of life features to Multi-Live to address some of the issues plaguing the infamously-buggy Cheerful Carnival Multi-Lives, including rebalancing the scoring rank in real-time to accommodate players who disconnect mid-match and enabling the activation of Super Fever even if a team member has disconnected.
    • Since Event After Lives are only around for one day, after the event is added to the Event Story roster under the Story tab, you can download and watch a solo version of the After Live whenever you want. If you missed the item from the concert, you can also get the item this way.
    • The Event Story menu also allows quick access to Side Story for cards that are tied to events, including those bought from the Event Shop and cards that appear in related gachas. This makes accessing all stories tied to the event much more streamlined compared to using the Training Menu to see the stories.
    • The 1st Anniversary update includes multiple quality of life features, such as:
      • The ability to use Gacha Seal Tickets to buy cards directly via a shop. 2★ and 3★ Cards are added to the shop 6 months after their first appearance, while 4★ Cards are added a year after, but Colorful Festival and Birthday cards can't be bought this way.
      • A massive overhaul to the Event Bonus system. The base Bonus for a matching Character/Type has been increased to +25% (from 20%), cards introduced in the corresponding Event Gacha give an additional +20% Bonus, Cards now give extra Bonus based on their Master Rank, Original Virtual Singers are now eligible for +15% Bonus, and any card of the required character is now eligible for Bonus regardless of what Unit it's associated with.
      • A large rebalance to Challenge Live point calculation. Challenge Stages now take less points to level up and Challenge Points are easier to get in exchange for reducing the magnitude by which Challenge Point gain scales with score.
    • The February 2022 update added an optional feature that causes your combo counter to glow rainbow while you have an All Perfect active.
    • The game finally began rerunning Limited Event Gachas in May 2022, giving players another opportunity to get the Limited Cards they missed.
    • The June 2022 update added additional quality of life features for core gameplay, including the ability to adjust note judgment timing and a toggleable display to show FAST/LATE/FLICK whenever you hit a GREAT judgment.
    • An update added a Disk Shop to the Virtual Live waiting room, allowing you to spend Crystal to buy access to Lives that you have missed or want to watch again. This includes recordings of Connect Lives, although they still cost Paid Crystal to purchase.
  • Anti-Rage Quitting: Players are encouraged to stay in a Multi-Live to the end even if they run out of Life, as they can still contribute to Super Fever and earn rewards at the end even if they can't score any more points. Players who disconnect from Multi-Lives too often are also slapped with temporary bans from Multi-Lives, and disconnecting in the middle of a song dynamically recalculates score distribution for the other players so they don't get punished for something you did.
  • April Fools' Day:
    • The April 2022 event involves all of the Virtual Singers showing up in the "real world" and hanging out with each other and their other selves simultaneously. In addition, all of the group members are rearranged into fake groups, with each "group" getting new versions of Sekai covers featuring the new members.
    • The 2023 event has a new school called "Music MIKUdemy" suddenly appear in the "real world", which all of the characters in the game attend, including the Virtual Singers. Kanade also gets a unique school uniform sprite for this event. The school also has its own theme song, "Be The MUSIC!", which is performed by every character. The Colorful Palette Store put up an advertisement for a full-scale functioning Nene-robo robot you can "buy" for a whopping 10,000,000 yen.
  • Arrange Mode:
    • Clearing 30 Lives with a specific character in the Center slot of your formation unlocks the Challenge Live mode, a daily mode where you tackle songs and aim to beat a target score using only cards of that specific character. Clearing the target score grants huge rewards, including Crystals, Character EXP, and a variety of rare materials.
    • A Mirror Mode option was added as part of the game's 2nd Anniversary update, which flips charts horizontally when toggled. Some players consider this an Anti-Frustration Feature since flipping the chart helps alleviate mental fatigue when practicing a chart for extended periods of time.
  • Art Evolution: The "Brand New World" update brought with it a massive visual overhaul to the game's 3DMVs to make them look incredibly fresh and pretty. This includes improvements to visual filters, shading, lighting, reflections, Depth of Field, camera angles, bloom, and anti-aliasing, improved 3D character models, and added foreground/background visual effects and props. Compare the original "Tondemo-Wonderz" 3DMV with its updated 3rd Anniversary version.
  • Art Shift: As part of a recent trend, some banner 4*'s have begun to look more stylized and painterly compared to the other cards in the set, including other 4*'s on the banner. For example, there's Haruka's "Premonition That's Right on Target" limited banner 4*◊ vs Rin's limited card◊ on the same banner.
  • Art-Shifted Sequel: The artwork/models in this game are a major departure from Project DIVA, which based its style on Kei Garou's Vocaloid2 box art. Colorful Stage! on the other hand has gone with using a simplified form of the Vocaloid3 and Vocaloid4 box art style, which was drawn by iXima.
  • Ascended Fanboy: Nearly every member of the original cast was a fan of Hatsune Miku and her friends before actually meeting them in the world of SEKAI. In fact, a number of the Virtual Singers' introductory cards have the cast watching videos of their performances and discussing what they like about them. Ichika Hoshino is the biggest example of this in the game, and as such serves as the Audience Surrogate for the Vocaloid fans that play.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • Capitalizing on the already memetic Mikudayo, promotional material for the game introduced "MEIKOdayo" and "KAITOdayo" variants with the same messed-up proportions as the original.
    • The Nene-robo is a "dayo"-fied Nene.
    • The "Miku(?)'s Costume" boost item you can buy in the Wonderland Sekai is a life-sized Mikudayo mascot outfit similar to the original outfit worn at Tokyo Game Show.
    • The game brings back the fan-associated Virtual Singer items, with those being Miku's spring onion, KAITO's ice cream, Luka's tuna, MEIKO's wine, Len's bananas, and Rin's oranges.
    • The utaite trend, which was originally spawned by the popularity of Vocaloid songs. The original characters are essentially utaite, as they cover and perform popular Vocaloid songs which are then deemed "SEKAI" versions.
  • Bait-and-Switch: The event A Sorrowful Farewell at the Curtain Call did a lot to make the players think that the story would be about Wonderlands x Showtime breaking up and going their separate ways. The illustrations (Save for Tsukasa's) have sad or bittersweet expressions, the event description mentions their promotional performance being the last, and the event song has a melancholic and nostalgic sound, and sad lyrics, and is titled "What kind of ending do you want?". The event story itself is actually more light-hearted than players were initially led to believe, and while Rui did entertain the idea of joining a new theater troupe in Arkland, it doesn't actually happen, as, in Chapter 8, he's reminded that his place is with Wonderlands x Showtime and accepts this. That said, the ending does set up some future "Wondershow will inevitably disband" angst, which has been being built up for some time.
    • Of course Wonderlands x Showtime not being broken up can be spoiled by just reading the side stories, which were released 4 hours prior to the event story going live. Rui's side story in particular talks about the next show Wonderlands x Showtime will perform together.
  • Balance Buff: Event contribution for Virtual Singers was universally buffed after the 1st Anniversary update; all cards of a given Virtual Singer are valid for the event point bonus regardless of unit if an event specifically requests that Virtual Singer, and Virtual Singer cards with the "Virtual Singer" unit designation were boosted to provide a flat +15% bonus at a minimum regardless of the event.
  • Bigger on the Inside: The SEKAI are implied to be this, as while the spheres that reflect them only show a single, usually small, location, there are hints that each SEKAI is far bigger than it appears to be with more areas to explore. For example, Empty SEKAI is an endless void that one could potentially be forever lost in if they aren't careful, at least according to Luka. As well, Street SEKAI is implied to be a large city, despite the main base being a street corner with a cafe.
  • Bilingual Bonus: "from Y to Y" MASTER has a section where a series of hold notes spells out "FUTURE WISH" in English during the part where "mirai" and "negai" are sung repeatedly.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • The event Live with Memories ends on a bittersweet note, as the Yoshizaki siblings agree to go their separate ways so that Hanano can grow up and get to know her new family. However, Youta, the older brother, promises that the two of them will watch a Leo/need concert again together someday in the future.
    • A Sorrowful Farewell at the Curtain Call ends on a bittersweet note. Rui accepts Asahi's offer to join him as a director at Arkland, knowing this opportunity will open up a lot of paths for him to fulfill his dreams as a director. However, Asahi, upon seeing Rui's pained and reluctant expression, backs off and reminds Rui that his place is with Wondershow, telling Rui that he'll be back someday when he's grown as an actor. Rui rejoins his group, and they head home after a sweet moment together. However, Rui acknowledges that a future where Wondershow will disband to chase their own individual dreams still looms ahead, and he asks himself if he'll be prepared for it when it happens.
  • Bland-Name Product: The "Nightcord" chat program that Nightcord at 25:00 uses to communicate appears to be a riff on Discord, the real-life popular chat app, which is reaffirmed by the program's appearance in Petit SEKAI.
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation: COLORFUL STAGE! tends to have this problem, as it notably has an issue with its grammatical and spelling errors going unnoticed by the translators on release, the changes to characters' personalities (and their dynamics with other characters along with it), inconsistencies in how some things are translated, the Pronoun Trouble with Mizuki, and just generally being considered inferior to the other translated versions of the game, including unofficial fan translations which tend to be truer to the original text. Because of this, many fans who are familiar with the Japanese version of the game tend to ignore the "official" translation and stick with the unofficial ones.
  • The Board Game: Jewelry Box of SEKAI, a licensed version of the game "A Lot of Gems!" developed by Arclight Games, released in October 2023 with illustrations by Rella. Players compete for the highest score by flipping up cards to obtain Gems and steal from other players.
  • Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: While Tsukasa is capable of some pretty wacky antics on his own, Emu's behavior is so off-the-walls crazy that more often than not he ends up playing straight man to whatever bizarre thought process is running through Emu's head at any given moment.
    • Airi frequently plays the straight man in response to Shizuku's odd comments.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Combo achievements on Easy and Normal don't give Crystal, but the Gold rewards are quite plentiful, which can help in a pinch if you need to buy something quick.
    • Because of the extreme rarity and material costs of 4★ cards, 3★ cards will end up being your main bread and butter for a while unless you're ultra lucky or have way too much money, as you're guaranteed one per 10x pull and they're significantly easier to max. A fully invested 3★ will typically have competitive stats and Power with a max level un-invested 4★ with a marginally weaker Skill, making them just as viable.
    • For Character Ranks raising, Star Lessons and Skill Level Up on 1☆ and 2☆ cards are the best way to gain Character EXP fast as they cost fewer resources.
  • Borrowed Catchphrase: Emu's catchphrase "Wonderhoy!" has been said by not only the members of Wonderlands x Showtime, but also nearly everyone she's interacted with in the main cast, with some exceptions.
  • Bowdlerise: COLORFUL STAGE! has been accused of doing this and is guilty of it in some areas due to how they translate some of the dialogue between the characters. A notably controversial example is the way Akito and Toya's relationship is translated, as they have a particularly close, hoyay-laden relationship in original Japanese text (and every other language translation of the game) which is toned down if not nearly nonexistent in the COLORFUL STAGE! translation. Compare how Toya's birthday comic was translated by an unofficial Twitter account◊ vs how COLORFUL STAGE!'s translators translated it◊.
  • Breaking Old Trends: Colorful Stage! does this frequently, which often throws the players off.
    • During the majority of the game's first year, it was believed by players that Virtual Singers would not receive limited edition cards due to nearly all of the Original Generation receiving cards before them. As of the games first anniversary, Miku broke the trend by receiving a limited Colorful Festival card, with the other Virtual Singers receiving limited cards a few months later through a collab event.
    • For nearly the entirety of the game's first year, 3DMV's for Leo/need appeared to be exclusively comprised of Miku appearances, as no other Virtual Singer was shown singing alongside the group. However, as of the group's cover of Lost One's Weeping, Rin Kagamine was shown singing alongside the group playing her unique guitar. Later, Len Kagamine appears in a 3DMV alongside the group.
    • Len Kagamine is the first Virtual Singer to be introduced into a new Sekai in a card rarity lower than a 3★. In this instance, he was introduced into Leo/need's Sekai as a 2★ event card.
    • April 2022 marked the first instance of a Virtual Singer Event, with only Virtual Singers getting event boosts rather than the original characters.
  • Breather Episode:
    • Same Dreams, Same Colors acts as one for Vivid Bad Squad as the group spends the majority of the event on a camping trip rather than discussing working toward their goal to surpass RAD WEEKEND.
    • Compared to the more Rapid-Fire Comedy pace of other Petit SEKAI episodes, Episode 10 is a simple, feel-good episode about teaching Miku all about cup ramen.
    • In general, mixed events tend to be more chill compared to the more serious unit events, as they have characters from different units meeting and interacting with each other in plots that have little to do with their main storylines or conflicts beyond references to them.
  • Brick Joke: In Episode 7 of Petit SEKAI, Rui gets the idea to time travel to next week to get a second Tsukasa for their performance. In Episode 8, which premiered the following week, said time machine can be seen appearing over the roof of Kamiyama High during MORE MORE JUMP!'s live stream.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: The exact definition of "victory" varies on a player-to-player basis, but if you intend on ranking high in events get ready to pony up some cold hard cash. Crystal you get from microtransactions can be used to both gamble on cards specifically designed to be useful in its accompanying event and recharge Live Bonus to grind for more points faster compared to waiting on your timer to recharge. The 1st Anniversary update drastically widened the gap between paying and non-paying players by introducing a bonus to Event Point gain for any "featured" gacha card on an event banner and boosting Event Point gain even further based on a card's Master Rank, with higher rarity granting higher Master Rank boosts, making it even easier for paying players to generate massive amounts of points in shorter amounts of time. COLORFUL STAGE! makes it worse with Colorful+, whose higher tiers grant actual gameplay advantages such as +10 Auto-Live daily limit and +10 Live Bonus cap, meaning paying more for Freemium makes it that much easier to tier.
  • Call-Back:
    • In the "Intersecting Melodies, Glowing Warmth" event, Ichika identifies Kanade and Mafuyu from the "marionette" song they created in the "Imprisoned Marionette" event. Kanade in turn recognizes Ichika as the girl singing in the park during the "Singing With You in a World Where Cherry Blossoms Dance" event.
    • The music video for "Worldwide Wander" has a scene of a crystal heart necklace falling into the water, referencing the previous MORE MORE JUMP! original song, "Ice Drop".
    • The 3DMV for "Machi" features a scene of An performing on a mic, replicating the scene/untrained art of her card from "Bout for Beside You".
    • An NPC labeled "Sexy Older Sister" was introduced in the event The Vivid Old Tale, where Nagi tells a young An about her training to become a kindergarten teacher. Come five events later, the NPC returns in Paint What You Love ♪ Rainbow Canvas now called "Sexy Kindergarten Teacher", revealing that her dream of becoming a kindergarten teacher came true.
  • Call to Adventure: Each of the stories start with each group's representative being transported to their respective SEKAI and meeting Miku for the first time, who reaches out to them and invites them into the realm of the Sekai to achieve a specific goal. The other characters receive their own "calls" as the main story progresses.
  • The Cameo:
    • Non-Crypton Future Media Virtual Singers such as GUMI, IA, and vflower have appeared on the music jackets of their songs. For example, vflower's character design can be seen on the music jacket of "Goodbye Declaration".
    • Characters from other units will often appear in different unit event stories to play small roles.
  • Cap:
    • 1★ cards cap at Lv. 20, 2★ cards cap at 30, 3★ cards cap at 40 and can be raised to 50, while 4★ cards cap at 50 and can be raised to 60.
    • Area Items go up to Level 10. The June 2022 update went up to eleven (literally) by adding Wish Droplets, an expensive and rare item that can be used in combination with other materials to unlock Level 11 on maxed level Area Items.
  • Cast Herd: Not quite a hard and fast rule as it would seem. Characters typically only interact within their units (outside of mixed events and rare area conversations), but it's very common for them to know characters from other units due to a shared history, being classmates, being related, etc. That said, nearly every group save for Leo/need, the Virtual Singersnote , and Wonderlands x Showtimenote has a designated pair, though even these get shuffled around sometimes, usually for SEKAI cover songs:
    • MORE MORE JUMP!: Minori/Haruka, Airi/Shizuku
    • Vivid BAD SQUAD: Kohane/An, Akito/Touya
    • Nightcord at 25:00: Kanade/Mafuyu, Ena/Mizuki
      • In the case of SEKAI variant Virtual Singers, they are often officially paired with certain original characters who they often share aspects of their personality with. For example, Hatsune Miku is often paired with Ichika in School SEKAI and Mafuyu in Empty SEKAI.
  • Cast of Snowflakes: The background characters that wander around the overworld aside, the supporting characters that avert being The Faceless all have unique designs and live2D models regardless of their importance to the story. Some notable examples include Sakurako, Nagi (who only appears in a flashback), and Mio.
  • Censored for Comedy: Honami's art skills are so bad that her drawing is pixellated out on the untrained version of Emu's "Same Face as Mr. Octopus ☆" card.
  • Character Celebrity Endorsement: The Virtual Singers and original characters have appeared in several real-world campaigns as ambassadors for products such as Pocari Sweat and Nissin Ramen Noodles.
  • Character Focus:
    • Although the overarching stories of each group covers all of the characters and how the group formed, each of the stories contains at least one chapter that gives a member from that group backstory and/or characterization.
    • Unit events serve to continue the story of a specific character from that unit, oftentimes also featuring a new song that has that character at the center. "Stella" featuring Saki and "RAD DOGS" featuring Touya are just two examples.
  • Childhood Friends: Several examples exist in the cast:
    • Kamishiro Rui and Kusanagi Nene have known each other since they were children.
    • Shiraishi An and Kiritani Haruka have known each other since elementary school.
    • Tenma Saki and Tsukasa have known Aoyagi Toya since they were all young children due to Tsukasa and Saki's mother being Toya's piano teacher, and they often played together between his classical music lessons.
    • Shinonome Akito, Shiraishi An, and Aoyagi Toya have all known each other since middle school. However, downplayed in the case of Akito and Toya with An; while they've known each other for some time, they don't actually befriend An until after the events of the main story. Played Straight for Akito and Toya, who have been close since they formed BAD DOGS two years prior to the main story.
    • Shinonome Ena and Momoi Airi have known each other since middle school. Akito became acquainted with Airi due to her visits to the Shinonome household to see Ena, however they aren't close.
  • Choreography Porn: The games 3DMV, which feature the characters doing high-energy dances, especially Wonderlands x Showtime and Vivid BAD SQUAD. These dances are mo-capped, which allows the characters to add their own unique twists to the choreography.
  • Chromosome Casting: Unlike its sister series, Colorful Stage! made a point to avert this trope to be consistent with the VIRTUAL SINGERS group being mixed gender. As a result, Vivid BAD SQUAD and Wonderlands x Showtime are both units that have two male and two female characters each. The characters also interact with unique male NPCs throughout the story, with quite a few of them being father characters.
  • Christmas Episode: Every year, each unit gets a Christmas-themed unit event.
    • 2020, Wonderlands x Showtime: On This Holy Night, I Sing, Wonderlands x Showtime puts on a Christmas-themed musical.
    • 2021, MORE MORE JUMP!: MORE MORE Making Christmas, MORE MORE JUMP! planned to perform a live event on Christmas day.
    • 2022, Vivid BAD SQUAD: Find A Way Out, Christmas is around the corner, however, unlike the aforementioned events, it's not in the foreground of the story, which is more about Akito remembering a traumatic event in his life and learning to overcome it. Christmas themes are more prominent in the side stories, and the trained illustrations and outfits aren't Christmas-themed at all, unlike the previous years'. As well, the only Christmas-themed untrained in the set is Kohane's "Countdown to Christmas!◊" 3☆.
  • Comic Books Are Real:
    • The Virtual Singers are initially thought to be virtual celebrities similarly to how they are in the real world, with things such as Magical Mirai and Vocaloid producers existing in-universe. However, it's quickly revealed in the main story of each unit that the Virtual Singers do actually exist, and they are born in the world of SEKAI from the feelings of each character.
    • The original Virtual Singers exist independently of the original cast in their own SEKAI. How this is possible isn't really explained in the story, but the Virtual Singers are shown to be incapable of appearing outside of SEKAI in physical form, and instead, are projected from the phones of the characters as holograms. Miku and her friends are also able to show up in technology, as their "live" performances that the original cast watch are just the Virtual Singers messing around in real-time from their own SEKAI.
    • A possible case for the Evillious Chronicles cast. As a part of a collaboration event, a new SEKAI temporarily manifested which featured the main characters from the Seven Deadly Sins story, and Miku explains that the SEKAI is unique as it was born from the memories of someone that had been on a long journey.
  • Comic-Book Time: The characters never seem to age or advance a grade regardless of how much time passes or how many birthdays they seem to have. Interestingly, by the game's second new years event the character seems to remember the events of the previous new year but are still in the same grade they were during that time.
  • Co-Op Multiplayer: Players can team up to clear lives together on multi-player.
  • Company Cross References: One of the chapters for the Close Game/OFFLINE event (a Puyo Puyo-themed event) is called "Minna de Puyo Puyo!", the same name as the Japanese Puyo Puyo spinoff for the Game Boy Advance.
  • Consistent Clothing Style: Downplayed. While every unit has a base sort of base style to match the music genre the unit is associated with, the types of clothing that can be unlocked through Gacha tend to vary. Vivid BAD SQUAD and MORE MORE JUMP! tend to be the most consistent in their styles, such as Vivid BAD SQUAD's members usually wearing street style clothing and MORE MORE JUMP! usually having different variations on idol costumes, but there are exceptions, such as VBS' "Chasing the Light of That Day" Gacha outfits. Nightcord at 25:00 styles, on the other hand, tend to be more varied, as in one Gacha they wore Elegant Gothic Lolita outfits (Overture Echoing in Silence), and in another (portray yourself), they had dark Decora-style clothing.
  • Cosmetic Award: Getting an All Perfect gives slightly flashier confetti and jingle at the end of the song. You also get a rainbow pip for song completion instead of the usual yellow pip (cleared) or pink pip (Full Combo).
  • Cover Version:
    • A major element of the music in this game, which features humans covering Vocaloid songs not unlike the popular "utaite" trend. The Vocaloids themselves also get in on the action, with them either singing alongside the human singers, covering other Vocaloid songs (such as Miku performing "Roki", originally a Kagamine Rin song), or both.
    • Songs that have non-Crypton Vocaloids as their original singers may come included with an additional cover redone in Crypton voicebanks, such as "Fragile" having a Len and KAITO version in addition to the standard GUMI version.
    • In addition to SEKAI Ver. and Virtual Singer Ver. songs, you can unlock Another Vocal Versions of certain songs, which are solo/duet covers of songs performed by specific characters.
    • MORE MORE JUMP!'s theme song, "Newly Edgy Idols", twists it a bit by altering some of the backing lyrics to match the singers depending on whether the SEKAI Ver. (with the MORE MORE JUMP! members) or Original Ver. (with Miku, Rin, Luka, and MEIKO) is played.
  • Covers Always Lie:
    • The original title screen has Ichika meeting base Miku, but it doesn't happen in-game at all (Ichika initially only meets Leo/need Miku) until the end of the first week of the game (the last of a series of virtual lives to commemorate the game's release), where all the unit leaders perform together with base Miku, and in-story until the 1st anniversary event story, where all the unit leaders express shock at base Miku not looking like any of her Sekai versions that they were familiar with.
    • The Virtual Singers have their own main story section separate from the individual units, with the Virtual Singers on the cover of it being the original ones. Despite this, the story chapters are actually about the SEKAI variants of the Virtual Singers rather than the base Virtual Singers, and the base Virtual Singers aren't actually featured at all.
    • SEKAI album covers feature the main Virtual Singers of a respective SEKAI even if said Virtual Singer isn't featured in a single song on the album. For example, Leo/need's SEKAI album cover has Miku and Luka despite only Miku being in the songs.
  • Creepy Doll: In the "Imprisoned Marionette" event, N25 goes on a day trip to an antique doll museum that Kanade received tickets for from Honami. During the trip, Mafuyu comes across a beautiful marionette, which inadvertently triggers her Trauma Button and causes her to freak out. Kanade takes the incident as a learning opportunity to help Mafuyu open up a little more to the others and figure out what Mafuyu saw in herself from that experience.
  • Crossover:
    • Several of the game's songs are featured in SEGA's Performai trilogy of arcade rhythm games. maimai features Rettou Joutou by Vivid BAD SQUAD and Jishou Mushoku by Nightcord at 25:00 with accompanying 3DMVs from the game, O.N.G.E.K.I. features Time Machine note  and Tsugihagi Staccato by MORE MORE JUMP!, and CHUNITHM features Sekai wa Mada Hajimatte sura Inai by Wonderlands X Showtime as well as cards from the game as playable characters. The series later returned the favor with three special song additions for Colorful Stage!, adding a Nintendo Hard song from each of the three games: "the EmpErroR" from maimai, "Don't Fight the Music" from ONGEKI, and "End Mark ni Kibou to Namida wo Soete" from CHUNITHM.
    • The game featured a collaboration with the Vocaloid-based Evillious Chronicles franchise in December 2021, which added the songs "Aku no Musume", "Aku no Meshitsukai", and "Saribitotachi no Waltz". In addition, it added a brand-new limited-time SEKAI with characters, story and area conversations adapted from the franchise, as well as a special gacha with cards based on the characters that each Crypton character plays in the "Seven Deadly Sins" arc of the series.
    • A Regional Bonus for COLORFUL STAGE! added a Sonic the Hedgehog outfit for all characters as a pre-registration bonus.
    • January 2022 added a collaboration with Nissin CUP NOODLE. This added five new comissioned songs with lyrics inspired by CUP NOODLE flavors, with new SEKAI Versions for each of them. Notably, these are also the first songs besides "SEKAI", "Wah Wah World", and "Gunjou Sanka" to have cross-unit covers, with all three sibling pairs (Tenmas, Shinonomes, and Hinomoris) getting covers with Miku. Nenerobo and Mikudayo also get their first ever singing roles alongside Nene, Len, and KAITO.
    • Several famous Vocaloid producers have been commissioned to create songs together such as DECO*27 and kemu, Marasy and Kemu, Harumaki Gohan and Kitani Tatsuya, and Mitchie M and GigaP.
    • The Close Game/OFFLINE event is Puyo Puyo-themed. The story involves Nene and Emu facing off against Akito and Toya in competitive Puyo Puyo. Toya gets a Puyo Puyo-themed card, and the Cheerful Carnival has players picking their favorite kind of Puyo: Green Puyo or Nuisance Puyo.
    • The December 2023 collaboration is a crossover with Sanrio, with every character getting cards that feature Sanrio characters. In addition to 4* cards for Hatsune Miku/Hello Kitty, Saki/Pomu Pomu Purin, Airi/My Melody, Toya/Pochacco, Emu/Cinnamoroll, and Ena/Kuromi, all other characters get 2* cards featuring a unique Sanrio character.
    • A collab with Touhou Project is scheduled for 2024. 3 songsnote  will be added to the game, with Bad Apple getting a SEKAI cover version.
  • Crossover Punchline: The entire premise of the April Fools' Day event. It's the first time the Virtual Singers are shown interacting with their various other selves onscreen and other variations of the Virtual Singers they're familiar with. There's also a crossover between the existing units, leading to new covers of SEKAI songs featuring the new members. The temporary groups and the songs they cover include:
    • Aoharu/friends: Ichika, Saki, Ena, and Airi covering "Aoku Kakero!" with Miku
    • YUME YUME JUMP!: Shiho, Shizuku, An, and Kanade covering "Happy Synthesizer"
    • Fantasista SQUAD: Akito, Touya, Tsukasa, and Rui covering "Ifuudoudou" with KAITO
    • Happiness Sentai Sunny-Sunny☆Wonder: Haruka, Kohane, Emu, and Mafuyu covering "Positive☆Dance Time" with Rin
    • Kyujitsu, Shumijin Doushi de.: Honami, Minori, Nene, and Mizuki covering Venom
  • Cut and Paste Environments: Each of the groups have a single stage associated with them that is used across all MVs they perform. They do manage to keep it fresh between songs by drastically changing the setting and theme of the stage to fit the song, however. Come the games first anniversary new stages were introduced.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
    • Amusingly, the game's use of variable note sizes can cause headaches for players accustomed to uniform note sizes used in most hallway-style rhythm games. In many of these games, "wide" notes are usually special and usually require a unique input, but in SEKAI big notes are just normal notes but, well, big. Sight-reading charts can thus get confusing for players accustomed to other rhythm games, as the presence of wide notes can easily throw off a player's mental processing. (Unless you also played Tokyo 7th Sisters which has had the same wide notes since November 2017, but even then the way the two games handle holds and multiple inputs vastly differs, resulting in this trope anyway.)
    • As anyone who has played a sufficient amount of MASTER can attest to, any chart with inconsistent or unusual note shapes can be very disconcerting and disorienting to look at, making sightreading that much more difficult. With the implementation of variable speeds in charts (first seen in Yaminabe!!!! EXPERT and MASTER charts), a known Scrappy Mechanic in various rhythm games, reading notecharts now becomes even harder.
  • Darker and Edgier: Compared to your standard flavor VOCALOID game like the Project DIVA series, SEKAI involves actual characters undergoing realistic issues and story arcs, with several cast members suffering from varying levels of angst and/or depression.
  • Deep-Immersion Gaming: In the close game/OFFLINE event story, the characters are depicted as being in the environment of the shooter during the face-off, including a CG shot of Nene backflipping with a gun in her hand.
  • Depth of Field: The "Brand New World" artstyle enhancements to the visual filters include lading the background and foreground with depth-of-field.
  • Difficulty Levels: with Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert flavors. New to this game is the dreaded Master difficulty, which must be unlocked by clearing certain conditions under Expert and features astronomically tough charts that range anywhere between 26 to 37! The 3rd Anniversary update added the special APPEND difficulty, which uses the Lv. 37 gimmick of requiring 3+ fingers and ranges in difficulty from Lv. 23 all the way to an extended upper limit of Lv. 38 in addition to having more gimmicks within the charts.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance: Live Bonus becomes less effective the more of it you use at once. By default, you can use up to five at once, but while you get 5x EXP/Items for using one and 10x for using two, at three you only get 14x, at four you only get 17x, and at five you only get 20x. During Events, you can use up to double the maximum allowed Live Bonus per song, but you get less and less Event Point multiplier per Live Bonus used after 3, capping at 35x at 10 Live Bonus, and EXP/Item rate scales even worse, capping at 25x for using 10.
  • Double-Meaning Title: "I nandesu" can mean "It's Me", but since "I" is pronounced as "ai" in Japanese it can also mean "It's Love". If you take "I" to mean "Ena", it can also be read as "Enanan desu", or "I'm Enanan".
  • Dysfunction Junction: Despite the game's cheery outlook, concept, and atmosphere, the cast themselves are internally a mess in different ways. A significant number of the characters are shown dealing with varying degrees of depression due to the pressures of societal conformity (Mafuyu in particular is pretty damn close to suicidal) and many others are victims of bullying or have emotionally distanced themselves to avoid bullying from others. Vivid BAD SQUAD is relatively well adjusted in contrast to the other groups with the exception of Touya who suffers from dealing with the effects of his father's oppressive control for the majority of his life until he personally decided to call quits and finds what it is that he wanted to do and Akito who struggles with belief in himself due to the world looking down on him as a singer. Nightcord at 25:00, however, play this even straighter compared to the other groups in the game and their corresponding group's SEKAI being called Empty SEKAI.
  • Early Game Hell: The game pushes Forced Level-Grinding heavily for a while; cards are barely strong enough to even get C Rank from the get go and the weakest Score type provides barely any EXP, material payouts at the start are low and you need a ton of them to upgrade almost anything, and the story mode requires the player to grind a lot to unlock new cutscenes. Doubly so for Challenge Live, which requires improving Relationship Values to unlock additional deck slots, the first of which unlocks at Rank 13.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • "Jackpot Sad Girl" is the only commissioned song to not release with either a 3DMV or a 2DMV. This would later be rectified by giving it its own 2DMV a year later.
    • The On This Holy Night, I Sing event has multiple examples of this:
      • According to a Q&A with staff, there are no plans to add more commissioned songs like Nijiiro Stories (which featured KAITO and MEIKO in place of Tsukasa and Emu). The explanation given is that early on in the game's production, developers thought they should focus on using Virtual Singers that best reflected the image of the commissioned producer.
      • It is to date the only unit banner to feature two Virtual Singer cards, with the gacha featuring Nene (the banner character), Miku and MEIKO. Before and after this all unit banners have only featured one Virtual Singer card, if any, aside from mixed unit banners with a Virtual Singer as the featured character (of which there are two).
    • "Stella" is the only commissioned song in the game to solely have Another Vocals for characters that weren't the focus of the event the song is connected to, as Honami and Shiho received Another Vocals in place of Saki.
    • As of the game's second anniversary, there have only been two instances of a character receiving two focus banners in an event cycle, taking the place of one of their unit-mates. Saki received Stella After the Rain and Unnamed Harmony in the first rotation of Leo/need events before Ichika had gotten her first unit banner. Ichika had two banners in the second rotation to catch up,note  with Saki not receiving another banner until the third event rotation.
    • The First Anniversary Festival Gacha is the only instance of a human character being featured alongside a Virtual Singer instead of someone from their unit, with Ichika and base form Miku being the featured cards. This lineup was never repeated, with all further fes gachas returning to the original system of featuring two characters from the same unit.
    • Duet Another Vocals on commissioned songs mysteriously stopped happening after the Nocturne Interlude event song "RAD DOGS", which featured Akito and Toya and An and Kohane as respective pairs. In the current state of the game, Another Vocals on commissioned songs are either given solely to the focus character of the event, two characters closely related to the event song as separate Another Vocals or everyone (or almost everyone) in the unit.
      • Duet commissioned Another Vocals come back in at least one form, as the song "88☆彡" received duet Another Vocals for Tsukasa and Nene, Rui and Emu, and MEIKO and KAITO respectively.
  • Earn Your Fun:
    • The MASTER difficulty for each song first needs to be unlocked by scoring 7 or fewer GOOD or lower judgments on a song's EXPERT chart.
    • Since Rank Match mostly selects Lv. 22 and harder songs, unlocking the mode requires the player to have at least 10 Full Combos on EXPERT and/or MASTER songs.
  • Elevator School: Downplayed, but both of the schools featured in the game cater to both middle school and high school students.
  • End of an Age: An's FES story shows a time when street music activities were bustling on Vivid Street due to RADders still being active as a group and RAD WEEKEND motivating people to gather in the streets and sing all day and night. The street corner was more crowded and colorful than it is in the current day, and more live houses needed to be constructed because of how many people wanted to perform. This began to change after COL, the live house where RAD WEEKEND was performed, closed and An's father announced his retirement, as with time, people began to regard surpassing the legendary event as a dream that would be impossible to achieve, and the enthusiasm began to fade. By the current day, few characters outside of Vivid BAD SQUAD show any interest in surpassing the event, and Vivid Street has taken on a duller appearance compared to how it looked in the past.
  • Enhanced on DVD: The "SEKAI Album" releases tend to touch up or alter some songs from their original game release versions.
    • The "Rettou Joutou" full release replaces Len and Rin's NT vocals with their original V4X tuning, has updated mixing, and both An and Kohane's vocals were re-recorded.
    • "Doctor=Funk Beat" has gotten a similar treatment, as KAITO's NT vocals were redone to sound more lively.
  • Ensemble Cast: Every unit has its respective stories that can be unlocked and read when the units are leveled up. Except for the Virtual Singer unit, no unit is given more focus than the others as of current.
  • Eyedscreen: The game is normally presented in fullscreen, but some 3DMVs have black bars on the top and bottom to simulate a widescreen effect.
  • Fairytale Motif: The Halloween event story Scream!? Welcome to the Wolf Forest! has a Little Red Riding Hood motif for Kohane, Shiho, and Haruka, with Kohane as Red Riding Hood, Haruka as the huntsman, and Shiho as the wolf. Minori and Rin stand out, as they're both baby goats.
  • Famous Ancestor:
    • An's father is the keystone member of the music group RaDders, which hosted the legendary music event RAD WEEKEND before promptly retiring. Vivid BAD SQUAD's story revolves around them trying to find a musical style to surpass the talent of RAD WEEKEND.
    • Shizuku reveals that her father used to be in a hit band. However, due to hiding his identity often and rarely making live appearances, few are aware of his fame, which has allowed the Hinomori sisters to strike out on their own rather than live in the shadow of their father.
  • Final Boss: "Project SEKAI Championship" always features a special song at the very end of the competition to cap off the final round. It is always a previously-unannounced song, and the competitors are forced to play it on MASTER without having seen the chart before. Originally, as an Anti-Frustration Feature to avoid too much Fake Difficulty, Schizophrenic Difficulty is invoked as it is easier than the other songs in the final round, typically only being a Level 32.
    • The 2022 Autumn season introduces "Kusare-gedou and Chocolate" by Pinocchio P, a level 34 song on MASTER.
    • The 2023 Spring season has the level 33 song "Setsuna Trip".
  • Fisher King: To some extent; it is stated that SEKAI (and the Virtual Singers inside it) take a form reflecting the "true feelings" of the people that it is connected to, regardless of whether or not those people are actually aware of them; the goal of the SEKAI in most cases is to help its creators discover the feelings that created the SEKAI in the first place. Both Wonderland and Empty SEKAI bend these rules a bit, as Tsukasa and Mafuyu have unique connections to their respective SEKAI as the sole creators of them with the world reflecting their feelings and memories. While the other characters are allowed inside, they don't initially influence the direction of the SEKAI until much later.
  • Flashback Episode: The game has had a number of these since launch:
    • Almost all of the Someday, From the Depths of Despair event takes place in a flashback, detailing the events leading up to Kanade and Mafuyu meeting online for the first time and forming the first iteration of Nightcord at 25:00.
    • The event The Vivid Old Tale flashes back to An's childhood and gives a bit more depth to An's bond with Nagi Kotaki and the people of the city.
    • A good chunk of the That Day, the Sky Was Still Far Away event focuses on Shiho's middle school years, where she met and inspired a girl named Miyu Takagi.
    • And Now, the Ribbon is Tied tells the story of how Mizuki and Ena ended up joining N25, primarily from Mizuki's perspective.
    • Find A Way Out gives the players a look into elementary through middle school Akito's ventures as a street musician post-RAD WEEKEND.
  • Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras: In the normal world, you can see various extras wandering around in the background. They all tend to be the same handful of models depending on the location and are very uninteresting to look at compared to the main characters. Averted in the case of story-relevant NPCs that pop up throughout the events, however.
  • Freemium:
    • In the Japanese version, you can buy a Colorful Pass, which grants 450 Paid Crystal up front, 50 Paid Crystal every day for 14 days, and 2x Challenge Points, 2x Live Points, and 2x Daily Paid Gacha for 30 days. Renewing your Colorful Pass for consecutive months additionally rewards increasing amounts of Crystal bonuses for each additional month renewed.
    • In the Global version, you can buy Colorful Plus (or Colorful+), which comes in Basic, Standard, and Deluxe tiers, which are progressively more expensive the higher you go. Basic is essentially the same as Colorful Pass but without the renewal bonus, granting 1060 Paid/Free Crystal and 20 Bonus Energy Drink S up front, 50 Paid Crystal and 3 Intermediate Practice Scores every day for 14 days, and 2x Challenge Points, 2x Show Points, and 2x Daily Paid Gacha. The Standard tier upgrades ths Crystal cache to 2120 and changes around a few rewards, granting 3 Beginner Skill Scores and 50 Intermediate Practice Scores on purchase and granting 3 Bonus Energy Drink S daily for 14 days, while also doubling the Auto-Play cap. Deluxe goes one step further, giving 6380 Crystal and a massive material cache up front, more material caches daily for 14 days, and also doubles the base Bonus Energy limit to 20.
  • Funny Background Event:
    • Due to being on keyboard, there's parts of some songs where Saki doesn't have to do anything and just dances along to the music while waiting for her parts. It's easier to see in Virtual Lives when the player can see the entire performance rather than what the camera sees in the 3DMV.

    • The "On This Holy Night, I Sing" cards have Tsukasa dressed in a full-body Christmas tree costume in the background. MEIKO's card shows him planted head-first in a massive Christmas cake.
    • At the start of Episode 7 of Petit SEKAI, Rui's time machine from Episode 6 can be seen popping into existence in the upper right corner as MORE MORE JUMP! is finishing their latest livestream.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: These types of bugs have become so common since launch that players have begun to refer to the game as "BUG-ject SEKAI".
    • There's a bug that makes Multi-Live room not start even after there are 5 players in the room. The developers have released a patch note to address this problem in their next update.
    • There's also a rare reported bug where a player's score gain is drastically lowered during Live, not even reaching 4 numbers after full combo-ing a song.
    • Another particularly destructive bug caused players to lose their accounts if they filled up all ten of their team slots.
    • Another Multi-LIVE related bug. The global score bar sometimes will display a result of lower rank despite getting higher rank. (For example, results is C despite global score bar reaching the B rank line or in some instances, halfway to A). It also affects the rewards given afterwards.
    • Tapping on certain screens such as the home screen too quickly can lead to the entire screen disappearing, rendering the game unplayable. The only way to fix this issue is by restarting the app.
    • For some players, the music shop merchants have disappeared, rendering them incapable of purchasing newly added non-event songs and Another Vocals from the shop. Word of God confirmed that they have no solution for this bug, as they are unable to replicate it themselves.
    • Using a system language that uses commas instead of decimal points severely messes with how the game reads internal values. This causes a lot of unwanted behavior, such as bizarre UI scaling during gameplay and some charts being rendered Unintentionally Unwinnable due to the game incorrectly interpreting the given BPM for certain track segments.
  • Game-Favored Gender: Inevitable due to the Improbably Female Cast, but Colorful Stage! is affected by this.
    • Male characters are incredibly shafted in the outfits department. They have access to gender-flipped versions of almost all of the base female outfits and vice versa, but any gacha outfits are strictly gender-locked. There being far fewer 4★ for the six men in the game makes it difficult for them to get more outfits. If one were to leave out the mission pass outfits, by the time of the games first anniversary the female characters have been given over 50 outfits versus the male characters having a little over 10.
    • Excluding Another Vocals, there is a distinct lack of female/male covers in the game:
      • Before the mixed group Nissin Ramen Noodle collaboration which gave female-male covers such as "Salamander", which featured Ena, Akito, and Miku, and "Cosmospice" which featured Saki, Tsukasa, and Miku, there was only one official male-female SEKAI duet (or quartet in this case), that being "Bouken no Sho ga Kiemashita!" for Wonderlands x Showtime which features Tsukasa and Emu alongside Len and Rin. The official Colorful Stage! YouTube channel exclusive Vivid BAD SQUAD Archives seems to exist to make up for Vivid BAD SQUAD's lack of in-game female-male duets, as there is at least a story-related excuse for this note . Wonderlands x Showtime, on the other hand, has no excuse.
      • For some reason, this also applies to the Virtual Singers, as male SEKAI duets have yet to feature a female Virtual Singer, and female duets a male Virtual Singer. Although, there has been one quartet featuring Len and Rin, which was in the Vivids cover of "Rettou Joutou".
    • Averted Trope in the case of card rarity distribution by gender, as it seems that the creators are attempting to avoid this with the Halloween 2020 Gacha that consists exclusively of high rarity male characters. This is significant as it follows two events and three gachas where high-rarity female character cards were released back to back. The June Bride-themed Gacha was also male-only, and event shop wise the only female character in the event was An. That said, An was barely in the event story and only showed up in the final two chapters.
    • As the first-anniversary outfit Gachas are locked to the respective unit on the banners and the Virtual Singers, the female Virtual Singers benefit somewhat more from it as they have an outfit with every unit while KAITO and Len only have outfits with their unit, Vivid BAD SQUAD and Wonderlands x Showtime, the latter two only being because there were male characters in those units.
    • The female Virtual Singers have received more song, story, and card diversity during the game's the first year due to their quicker appearances across Sekai. By the game 1.5 Anniversary, the female Virtual Singers had completed their appearances across SEKAI while Kagamine Len and KAITO were still missing their Nightcord at 25:00 variants.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: The original songs introduced for N25 are treated in-story as Kanade's attempts to help others, such as "kagirinaku haiiro e" being her response to Ena's troubles during the "Unsatisfied Pale Color" Event.
  • Gameplay Automation: A feature called "Auto Live" was added in a post-release update. This allows you to auto-play through songs and get rewards for doing so; this is geared towards players who don't have time to sit down and play the songs themselves, especially during events. However, to balance this against manual song plays, notes hit in Auto Live give "AUTO" note judgments that only give half the points compared to normal, Auto Lives don't track combo and don't count towards any song completion rewards, and you can only use the feature up to 10 times a day.note 
  • Gender-Equal Ensemble: Wonderlands X Showtime and Vivid Bad Squad both have two guys and two girls each, not counting their respective virtual singers.
  • Genre Mashup: The game's theme song, "Wah Wah World", is a bit strange, featuring Mitchie M's signature cute pop/EDM fused with Giga-P's electronic punk music, alternating between the two styles throughout the song.
  • Gender-Inclusive Writing: In the Hatsune Miku: COLORFUL STAGE! localization, Mizuki is variably referred to as either "they/them" or "she/her" depending on the character, since not every character is aware of their Ambiguous Gender or history.
  • Good Parents: Those who were relatively well-adjusted, in light of the Dysfunction Junction of the cast, often had this. At least for those who had their parents mentioned. An, for example, had a closer relationship with her parents and being a Daddy's Girl, and Kohane often mentions how her parents support her new endeavor in joining An, Akito, and Touya to create an event that will surpass RAD WEEKEND in the story from time to time.
  • Gratuitous English: Several event and Gacha titles are written in English, such as Happy Lovely Everyday, Period of Nocturne, and Resonate With You, among many, many others. English words are also incorporated into the characters' clothing.
    • Humorously, COLORFUL STAGE! will often still rework some event titles when they're brought over to the English server, even if they're already written in English. For example Period of Nocturne becomes Nocturne Interlude in COLORFUL STAGE!.

    Tropes H-M 
  • Hairstyle Inertia: Zig-zagged. Flashbacks to the character's childhood appearances show that their hairstyles were more or less the same as their current hairstyles, though either with different bangs, lengths, or accessories.
  • Hard Mode Perks: Harder difficulties drop better and more quantities of rewards than the others, making grinding the harder difficulties more worth using energy on.
  • Improbably Female Cast: Gender ratio is heavily skewed towards females; of the original characters, there are only 4 males among the main cast. With the virtual singers included in the ratio, that makes 6 male characters, 19 females, and Mizuki, the latter of whom is treated as female from a gameplay perspective.
    • The game has an unlockable title for clearing a certain number of lives with a team of only male characters.
  • Inconsistent Dub:
    • In COLORFUL STAGE!, all game-original characters are referred to in Western name order (first name first), while all Virtual Singers are referred to in Japanese name order (last name first). This is due to Crypton Future Media, which enforces Japanese name order as the proper way to refer to their characters regardless of region.
    • COLORFUL STAGE! uses the official English title for "Hatsune Miku no Shoushitsu", "THE END OF HATSUNE MIKU", rather than the more-commonly accepted "The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku" that was also used in the official translations of the Project DIVA games.
    • COLORFUL STAGE! can't seem to figure out how they want to translate "Aibou" into English. While "Aibou" is generally translated across media as "partner", and this is the accepted fan translation of the term, COLORFUL STAGE! has used multiple different translations for it depending on the context, coming up with translations such as "partner", "buddy"note , "best bud", and even "coworker".
  • Insistent Terminology:
    • "Virtual Singers", not "VOCALOID". This is an actual term used by Crypton Future Media to refer to their characters since the VOCALOID name and software are owned by Yamaha.
    • While other characters get birthdays, the game is particular to refer to Virtual Singers having "anniversaries" rather than "birthdays".
    • When referring explicitly to the Sekai, the in-universe Pocket Dimension music worlds, the term is always spelled in katakana ("セカイ") rather than spelling it in its kanji form, meaning "world" in Japanese ("世界"). In COLORFUL STAGE!, the word is rendered as "SEKAI" in all capitals like the Japanese title, rather than being translated.
  • Interface Screw:
    • The song "Yaminabe!!!!" by cosmo-P introduced a gimmick referred to as "soft landing", where the note speed shifts dynamically based on the song's current BPM.
    • The Brand New World update introduced a fourth note type called Trace Notes, which are essentially just a different flavor of Hold Notes. The real threat of Trace Notes is that they introduce translucent visual effects to charts, which can be used to either spice up how the charts look or, more deviously, intentionally mislead the player's visual processing. The chart "Devil Janai Mon" uses this to excellent effect on MASTER, as the chart opens by transcribing the character "堕" several times with translucent Trace Notes, which do not need to be interacted with but come at such rapid speed that they will likely cause anyone who's never seen it before to briefly panic.
  • Jaw Drop: In Journey to Bloom "RESOLVE", Akito's response to meeting Hatsune Miku in the SEKAI for the first time is to stand there with a comically slack-jawed expression of utter disbelief.
  • Jiggle Physics:
    • Female characters with larger busts, most notably MEIKO and Luka, who have the largest busts in the game, tend to have this on their Live2D models.
    • Present in 3DMVs, but done realistically and virtually unnoticeable except with very specific dance moves. Even then, not many cast members have a large enough bust for it to have a noticeable effect.
  • Kayfabe Music: The concert Colorful Live - 1st Link - has the projected models of the original characters and Virtuals Singers performing while a real band plays in the background, similarly to Magical Mirai.
  • Kids Are Cruel: There's an alarming number of characters whose backstories involve being the target of bullying during their middle school years. For example, Mizuki's story revolves around the lack of acceptance they'd gotten from their peers, leading to them having a Friendless Background for having interests that aren't seen as acceptable. The bullying continues into high school, as even their "friends" they had made gossiped about them when they believed they weren't around. It's not until Mizuki made friends with the members of the main cast, particularly N25, that they had begun to feel comfortable coming out of their shell over time. Rui was also bullied and outcasted for being the "weird kid".
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler:
    • Event stories assume that you've already seen the entire main story and that you're watching the events in release order, so plot details from both the main story and past events can get spoiled with little fanfare in later events.
    • Due to server issues causing people attempting to roll in the Gacha to interfere with people who want to grind in events, Colorful Palette had begun to release Gacha four hours earlier than events in order to rectify this. Unfortunately, side stories from Gacha cards more often than not spoil the event story, right down to how they end.
  • Licensed Game: As the Project DIVA series, but unlike most Vocaloid-themed rhythm games, the Crypton Vocaloids themselves share the spotlight with a cast of Original Generation characters.
  • Logo Joke:
    • The app boots up with one of the characters shouting "SEGA!", followed by another saying "Colorful Palette! From CraftEgg!". Following the development shift in early 2021, the "from CraftEgg" portion was dropped.
    • Weaponized in Episode 5 of Petit SEKAI, where Mizuki suggests meeting at 9PM instead of 1AM, cueing a "Nightcord at Around 21:00" logo cut-in. This gets derailed repeatedly due to scheduling conflicts, with each successive postponement cueing a new "logo" with increasingly bizarre names until they wind up back at 1AM, cueing the actual "Nightcord at 25:00" logo.
  • Limited Wardrobe: Played With. Discounting the unlockable outfits that the players can obtain from mission pass or high rarity Gacha cards, the characters are rarely ever seen in outfits outside of their default outfits and school uniforms ... at least in their Live2D models. In their cards, they'll often be shown wearing different outfits, though these are very rarely translated to their models and they are still most often shown wearing their default outfits even in cards.
  • Lyrical Dissonance: Being a game full of Vocaloid songs, this is expected. A notable example is a song commissioned by Neru for Wonderlands x Showtime, "Becoming Potatoes", which is a funky little song about how much the singer's life sucks and is meaningless. The 3DMV for the game doesn't help match the tone either, as it has the characters gleefully dancing around with canes.
  • Marathon Level: To commemorate the 3rd Anniversary update, an APPEND chart for "Hatsune Miku no Gekishou" was released for a limited time, with the unique distinction that it uses the song's full version rather than the standard cut. The result is a grueling 5-minute, 4500 note slugfest against one of the hardest songs in the game on an extraordinarily tough difficulty setting.
  • Market-Based Title: The English title drops the original "Project SEKAI" name completely and puts the "Hatsune Miku" name upfront. While no official word has been put out as to why, it has been theorized that this may be because of a naming conflict with Western visual novel localization company Sekai Project.
  • Medium Blending: The 2DMV for "Tokugawa CUP NOODLE Kinshirei" involves 2D animation, photorealistic CGI Cup Noodles cups, and a live action cat.
  • Meet Cute: Ichika and Kanade meet for the first time in the "Intersecting Melodies, Glowing Warmth" event when they reach out for the same CD at the music store. Amusingly, the first thing they notice about the other is their hair.
  • Meido: The "Ai no Material" 2D music video has MORE MORE JUMP! and MEIKO dressing up in maid cafe-style maid outfits. Obtaining the relevant 4★ Haruka or Shizuku cards from the gacha also allows players to buy their maid outfits for any of the girls.
  • Mirror Character: Every Sekai version of a Virtual Singer reflects the characteristics of the original character they're associated with in some way. For example, MORE MORE JUMP's version of Len Kagamine shares his dazzling idolish charm with Haruka, which was spoofed in an official 4koma following his debut.
  • Microtransactions: Per the norm with Japanese mobile games, Colorful Stage! has microtransactions.
    • Players can do one discounted paid solo per day, which is 100 paid crystals versus 300 free crystals. Two if they have Color Pass activated.
    • Players can use paid in-game currency for a discounted 10-roll (1500 paid crystals vs the standard 3000 crystals).
    • There are also sometimes limited-time gacha banners that guarantee a 4☆ but you have to pay the 3000 crystals using paid crystals.
    • The Premium Mission Pass costs real-world money. Paying for it will allow the player to obtain Premium rewards from Live Missions available in-game. It also comes with whatever costume Premium Pass has for the month.
    • Color Pass is useful for the Premium Pass as it boosts the number of Live points the player obtains which makes getting the rewards faster. There are other benefits for buying the Color Pass as well, as the player gets an increasing amount of Paid Crystals every time they buy it, as well as free crystals across logging in for 14 days. It also gives the player an extra discounted solo per day for as long as the pass is active. The pass costs real money, and is around four dollars usd, or 480 yen.
    • The game has several monthly packs called "Value Packs" which gives paid crystals (Gacha Tickets after the first anniversary) and materials needed for other parts of the game. In that same section, the player can buy music cards, stamp sheets (needed for obtaining stamps at a quicker rate) and they can buy Live pts for their mission pass.
    • The game introduces first anniversary costumes for each unit, including the Virtual Singers. However, unlike shop outfits that can be crafted for free, these outfits cost money and are attached as bonuses to a paid gacha that can only be rolled once per unit.
    • Connect Lives are special types of Virtual Lives that you must buy a virtual ticket with paid crystals to attend (1980 paid crystals for just the ticket or 3980 paid crystals for the ticket + the virtual merch). The main distinction is that, unlike the regular Virtual Lives, Connect Lives are essentially analogous to real concerts; they go on for longer (1-3 hours), get special key art and names, and add the ability for the cast to interact with the audience in real-time, and have in-game merchandise. The tickets are merch are non-refundable under any circumstance unless the developers for some reason have to delay the live, meaning that even if you have a bad internet connection during the concert or for some reason can't attend, you won't be refunded. Non-paying players can attend Rehearsal Lives instead, which cost 100 Crystal for a ticket but have fewer characters, shorter songs, and only last 30 minutes.
  • Miracle Rally: The "Operation Secret Valentine" Cheerful Carnival event in February 2022 ended with Team "Give Gifts" winning by a margin of just over 17,000 points. This is notable because for the rest of the week, Team "Receive Gifts" was leading throughout the entire event and prior to this a trailing team had never won a Cheerful Carnival.
  • Missing Mom: Played with. While a lot of the mother characters aren't absent, they aren't treated as important to the respective character stories compared to some father characters, such as An, Emu and Ena's fathers, and have few speaking roles relegated to voiceless text boxes. The only exceptions to this are Mafuyu's mother, who is partially the reason for Mafuyu's current characterization, and Kanade's mother who is deceased. To note, they are the only mother characters to have Live2D models, while the rest remain as The Unseen.
  • Mood Whiplash: "Shoujo Rei" sounds fairly melodramatic and airy for a summery song, but its 3DMV suddenly cuts to a Smash to Black at the end of the song, leaving only the fading lights and sounds of the railway signal and brief stills of Haruka, Shizuku, and Miku standing on the railroad tracks before they vanish altogether. It makes more sense when you realize that the song is about Star-Crossed Lovers and suicide.
  • Motifs: Occurs in the gacha cards released with the corresponding events they feature in. With the 4*'s featured having unlockable clothes. Some notable examples include:
    • Alice Allusion: An Alice dress unlockable at the start of the game. The gacha featured in the WonderlandXShowtime focused event, "Wonder Magical Showtime" has Alice in Wonderland motifs with the featured characters in the gacha and event rewards dressed as the residents in Wonderland in their uncapped art, such as Nene as the Caterpillar.
    • Fairytale Motifs: The gacha corresponding the Nightcord at 25:00 focused event, "Mirage of Lights", had a Snow White theme with the group's cards being the cast as different aspects of Snow White throughout the tale that mimics their state in the event. The gacha corresponding the "Mesmerized by Mermaids" event also has Little Mermaid motifs as well.
    • Tarot Motifs: The cards for the "My Footprints, Your Destination" event are themed around tarot cards. Mafuyu and Ena's cards are based on The Hermit, Mizuki's card is called "Hermit Reverse", MEIKO's card is based on Justice, and Kanade's card is based on The Hanged Man.
  • Multiple Demographic Appeal:
    • The Improbably Female Cast makes it clear that the game is targeted towards young adult men first, but the game makes an effort to appeal to a wider base with the inclusion of Bishōnen male characters, compared to similar gacha games that predominantly feature only men or women. Mizuki's Ambiguous Gender has also proved popular with a wide variety of players.
    • There's also the fact that by music alone the game features a huge variety of songs and also makes an active effort to include more recent hits while also including a larger selection of classics, drawing in both older and newer Vocaloid fans alike.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • The concept of the Sekai is essentially an extension of the Element Clouds in Project DIVA X, itself a reworked version of the song categories from the very first Project DIVA game. As well, similarly to X, which had the Virtual Singers' personality types determined by the Element of the modules used on them, the personalities of the Virtual Singers in SEKAI are determined by the SEKAI they are born into, which come from the hearts of the original generation and gives the Virtual Singers certain styles and traits from their associated character(s). There are also five Elements in X that have close SEKAI equivalents; "Cool" for Street SEKAI (And possibly School SEKAI), "Elegant" for Empty SEKAI, "Quirky" for Wonderland SEKAI, "Cute" for the Stage SEKAI, and "Classic" for the default Virtual Singers.
    • Difficulty colors are carried over from the main series with the addition of EX EXTREME's purple color: blue (Easy), green (Normal), yellow (Hard), red (Expert), and purple (Master).
    • One of the Premium Mission Pass outfits is the hoodie that Mikito-P's avatar wears on the cover art for "Roki", complete with the paper target stuck to the character's head.
    • Unlike most of the other returning songs, which feature different cuts compared to their appearances in the DIVA series, "The Intense Voice of Hatsune Miku" uses the exact same cut as the DIVA version but using the 2017 remake instead of the original.
    • It's difficult to find a commissioned song that doesn't mention "SEKAI" in the lyrics somewhere.
    • "Glory Steady Go!" namedrops "SEKAI", "mirai", and "DIVA" in its lyrics, alluding to the three titles under the SEGA feat. HATSUNE MIKU Project banner.
    • KAITO and MEIKO's unique Kizuna Rank title is "First Singers", alluding to them being the first two Japanese VOCALOID.
    • Miku and Luka's unique Rank 46 Kizuna Title is called "Someday's Dancehall", alluding to wowaka's song "World's End Dancehall" in which Miku and Luka duet.
    • Good Smile Company illustrated official artwork of Mikudayo and Nenerobo for the CUP NOODLE collaboration campaign. Mikudayo is a botched attempt at a costume based on a Hatsune Miku Nendoroid, which Good Smile manufactures.
    • Rin uses a Gibson Les Paul for the 3DMV of "Lost One no Gokouku" as a nod to the song referencing the guitar by name in the first verse.
    • The music video for the April Fools' Day version of "Aoku Kakero!" prominently features lots of flying music notes as a tribute to the original "Pocari Sweat" campaign video.
    • The games art style is a stylized version of the Crypton Vocaloid's V3-V4X software box art by iXima, just as Project Diva art style was based on KEI's box art.
    • Most, if not all of the game official art used for the official Twitter and [2DMV=]'s are by artists that previously worked on the music videos for various famous Vocaloid songs. In some cases, the artists for those official videos may return to do work on the SEKAI versions of the songs, such as akka, who famously did the art and animation for "Otome Dissection", returning to work draw art for and direct the SEKAI 2DMV.
    • The APPEND difficulty is named after the convention used by Crypton Future Media's Hatsune Miku Append and Kagamine Len/Rin Append voicebank lines, which are Expansion Packs for their corresponding base VOCALOID software designed to produce fundamentally different sound.
    • Footage of "39 Music!" from Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix appears on an electronic display in Journey to Bloom "STELLA".
    • The MORE MORE JUMP! dance routine featured in Journey to Bloom "HOPE" is from the 3DMV for "Happy Synthesizer", which was the very first 3DMV revealed for the group in 2020.
    • Some of the 3DMVs pay tribute to the original videos for their songs.
      • "Rettou Joutou BRING IT ON" has barbed wire and yellow tape appearing at the edges of the screen during the chorus, similar to the ones that appeared in the original video. The dance routine also adapts the choreography used for its appearance in "Magical Mirai", but for four dancers instead of two.
      • The Original Generation song "A Future Written as Regret" has a Freeze-Frame Bonus of the origami crane that appears in mafumafu's MV.
      • The stage variant that Leo/need uses for "Teo" features the library from the original MV outside the window.
      • "Nostalogic" has a new 2D music video that is heavily inspired by its video in Project DIVA F, including the Blue Crystal outfit and the city scenery in the background.
      • The new music video for "Just Be Friends" features a lot of imagery that appeared in the original version (which cannot be used for legal reasons).
      • The 2D MV for "Keitai Renwa" also features some visual similarities to the MV used by mafumafu, especially during the chorus segments.
      • The outfit Miku wears in the "Ren'ai Saiban" 2DMV hybridizes the "judge" outfit from the original music video with elements of Miku's "Stage Sekai" design.
      • The 3DMV for "Children Record" has the screens on-stage colored according to the signature colors of the Mekakushi-dan alongside their corresponding numbers within the group (including a red "No. 0" for Ayano).
      • The chorus for "ray" has the stage changing to a setpiece similar to the screens used in the original music video to show Miku singing alongside BUMP OF CHICKEN.
      • The 2DMV for "Lower" has a forest and a flaming witch's hat appearing in the background during the instrumental between the first chorus and the second verse, alluding to nulut's music video for the song.
      • The full version of MORE MORE JUMP's Dreamin' Chuchu 2DMV is released in Valentine 2022, referencing the lyrics in the song, "After all today's valentines".
      • The full SEKAI 2DMV of "Doctor = Funk Beat" has several references back to the original song by nyannyannya featuring KAITO, with the most obvious one being Vivid BAD SQUAD KAITO donning the original designs monocle toward the end of the song.
      • The 2DMV for "Devil's Manner" references back to Tatsuya Kitani's original MV with a hand opening each Vivid BAD SQUAD member's eye, the mirrors, and the hands counting down, among other references.
      • The odd line distribution in Wonderlands x Showtimes "Becoming Potatoes" can be seen as one, as in the original song Kagamine Len was the primary singer while Rin was inserted into parts to be his backup vocal. This is mirrored in the SEKAI version by having Rui and Tsukasa, to a lesser extent, being the "primary" Len singer, with the rest of the group plus Miku singing in the "Rin" role.
      • The 3DMV for "Ego Rock" is full of this. Everyone does the 2 main dances featured in the original MV, the chorus features the spotlights, and even the camera angles are replicated.

    Tropes N-Z 
  • Necessary Drawback:
    • You can buy an item that boosts Miku specifically in every single Sekai. It's much cheaper to buy this item in both material and monetary costs, but each one boosts her by only 0.4% per purchase compared to the 2% per purchase that everyone else gets, and the 0.2% boost for items that boost all Virtual Singers.
    • Unlike the original characters, who are limited to receiving cards in the occasional mixed event and their own units' events, The Virtual Singers can appear in any event as long as a variant of them is present in the SEKAI of the unit (or units) attached to itnote . However, due to the way the game balances the card distribution between the Virtual Singers, this also means that the Virtual Singers are fighting not only each other, but also their other variants for card slots and potential event appearances.
    • During the game's first year and into the game's second year, An was spammed as a 4☆ Gacha card across Vivid BAD SQUAD unit events until Legend Still Vivid where she appeared as a 3☆ shop card for the first time. This came at the expense of her not appearing as a banner 4☆ (or 4☆ in general) in mixed events until Wishing for Your Happiness Beyond the Blue Sky!.
  • Neon City: A lot of Vivid BAD SQUAD's early trained illustrations took place in this setting. As well, this is also the setting of the trained illustrations in close game/OFFLINE which was a Wonderlands x Showtime and Vivid BAD SQUAD mixed event.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: Colorful Stage!'s advertising isn't always true to what happens in the game, such as presenting the Virtual Singers, particularly the original ones, as having bigger roles than they do or placing certain pairs of characters in 3DMV's that they don't sing in.
  • Never Say "Die": "Disappear" is the English script's choice of Deadly Euphemism when referring to suicide.
  • Nintendo Hard: This game's difficulty is rather notorious for having an extraordinarily high upper bound relative to other comparable rhythm games available for mobile devices, with everything on the 32+ range onward competing with arcade rhythm games in terms of sheer toughness.
  • No Hugging, No Kissing: Downplayed, as Colorful Stage! doesn't shy away from teasing the potential of romance between certain combinations of characters:
    • Vivid BAD SQUAD is perhaps the most blatant example of a "ship bait" unit, as the designated pairs, particularly An and Kohane, are all but stated to have feelings for each other. The unit has gradually drifted from "questionable", to "vague" to "blatant Homoerotic Subtext" with every story progression, if one didn't interpret the unit as having the last thing from the beginning.
    • In MORE MORE JUMP!, Minori has an unconcealed crush on her teammate Haruka, who she admired for being an idol before becoming one herself. From the same unit, Airi and Shizuku are described as being an old married couple.
    • An and Haruka go on an Amusement Park double date with Kohane and Minori as their respective date partner in Time to hang out♪. The word "date" is officially used by several characters, and it plays out like one.
    • On two different occasions, the story teased the idea that actually dating was possible in the story through An, as in An's Time to hang out♪ side story she told her father and friends that she was going on a date, and the street musicians freaked out at the idea before they realized that it was with Kohane. Her friends and father also say that they have no idea who else it would be with. On the second occasion, An jokes about tricking her father into panicking by telling him she has a boyfriend, which Airi discourages.
    • Not even the VIRTUAL SINGERS escape from being teased, as Street SEKAI Rin/Len and KAITO/MEIKO get about as much Ship Tease with each other as the members of Vivid BAD SQUAD do with their respective partners. There's also the Pseudo-Romantic Friendship between Stage SEKAI Miku and Rin.
  • Nominal Importance: Outside of the NPC's that have received Live2D models, a majority of the characters the cast talks to are nameless, receiving generic titles such as "Student A" or "Student B" to differentiate them.
  • Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Clearing achievements nets Titles, which can be equipped on your profile card for other players to see during Multi-Lives. While most are cosmetic, some of them grant passive boosts to your Team Power after they've been earned.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: If you reach 1000th place or higher in an event's leaderboard, a restriction is added where your account can only be swapped between devices up to twice for the remainder of the event period. This limitation exists exclusively to curb account sharing strategies where a high-ranking player would pass their account to multiple players and reap the benefits of being able to spend abnormal amounts of time grinding points.
  • One Degree of Separation: All of the groups are connected via at least one member; two of Leo/need's members have siblings in MORE MORE JUMP! and Wonderlands X Showtime respectively, while Akito from Vivid BAD SQUAD is the younger brother of Ena from Nightcord at 25:00 Some of the characters are also classmates with each other or interact with other characters on different occasions, such as Kohane being in the same class as Minori, and Honami working part-time as a housekeeper of the Yoisaki household.
  • One-Gender School: Miyamasuzaka Academy is an all-girls school. The other school introduced in-game, Kamiyama High, is a coed school.
  • Original Generation:
    • Unlike its predecessors in the Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA series, an original cast is introduced to interact and perform with the Virtual Singers. As well, the story focuses on them, with the Virtual Singers taking on the role of guiding them into discovering their "true feelings" so that new songs will be born from them.
    • The different "SEKAI" variants of the Virtual Singers also count as this due to their differing personalities and appearances (In Miku's cast) from the original Virtual Singers that exclusively exist within this game's universe. That said, in the story, they're treated as the same person as the original Virtual Singer that they're based on. For example, Wonderland Miku is still Hatsune Miku, just another version of her.
  • Origins Episode: Someday, From the Depths of Despair goes into how Kanade and Mafuyu first met in real life and began working together.
  • Out of Focus: Focus in Colorful Stage! tends to be... uneven, so to speak. As a rule of thumb, this applies to all of the VIRTUAL SINGERS, who are largely shafted due to the game's primary focus on the Original Generation. That said, not even the original cast is safe from this. By the second anniversary, there have been too many instances of shafting in all departments to be properly listed, however, for some notable general examples:
    • For VIRTUAL SINGERS:
      • It's established in each group's unit story that the VIRTUAL SINGERS can only physically exist within the world of SEKAI, and only appear in the "real world" as projections outside of rare occasions. Despite this, a majority of the events take place in the "real world" with only brief visits to SEKAI most of the time, which often comes at the expense of the VIRTUAL SINGERS' screen time in events. At best, the VIRTUAL SINGERS can only be expected to have a few lines of dialogue before disappearing from the story if it's heavily "real world"-centric.
      • Related to the above, VIRTUAL SINGERS rarely receive focus events, with the only ones existing in the game as of the second anniversary being SEKAI's Happy New Year! and Cherry Blossoms Across SEKAI, interconnecting Our Feelings out of the 70+ events that have happened in the game.
      • Outside of Leo/need songs, most cover and commissioned songs tend to treat the VIRTUAL SINGERS as a guest singer or backup vocalist rather than a featured singer.
      • While commissioned songs try to allow VIRTUAL SINGERS to sing with each group (if they're present in the SEKAI), cover songs are not so even, as the vast majority of them feature Hatsune Miku. On the flip side, cover songs rarely feature Luka, MEIKO, and KAITO, with MEIKO and KAITO receiving the worst of it when it comes to cover song features.
      • 3DMV appearances are heavily biased toward featuring Miku, Rin, and Len as the VIRTUAL SINGERS. While it's related to the above, it also extends into commissioned song appearances, as Luka, MEIKO, and Luka have made more 2DMV song appearances than not.
    • For non-VIRTUAL SINGERS, there are instances where certain group members are shafted in one way or another:
    • For Leo/need:
      • Ichika nearly went the entirety of the game's first year without a proper unit focus banner, as the event cycle Leo/need had gone Stella After the Rain (Saki event) -> Don't Let Doubts Hold You Back (Honami event) -> Resonating with you (Shiho focus event) -> Unnamed Harmony (Saki focus event). Ichika wouldn't receive her first unit banner, A Bright Future!!, until September 2021, merely a few weeks before the game's first anniversary.
      • The other members of the unit tend to be shafted in the song department, particularly when it comes to covers as they primarily focus on Ichika, the band's lead singer, and Miku.
      • Despite "Stella" being Saki's focus song, she didn't receive an Another Vocal for it, as those went to Shiho and Honami instead.
    • For Vivid BAD SQUAD:
      • Compared to Vivids, Akito and Toya's focus in the unit story is a bit more scattered, as they don't actually show up until chapter 4 and have varying appearances from then on. They also don't go to SEKAI and meet the VIRTUAL SINGERS right away, as Akito goes in chapter 16, and Toya doesn't go to SEKAI until chapter 20, the very last chapter.
      • Vivid BAD SQUAD has two early commissioned songs in which Akito and Toya barely sing, having few solo lines in "Ready Steady" and exclusively singing the chorus in "Forward". "Ready Steady" is the group's Image Song, making their lack of focus in the song even more confusing. The Another Vocal for "Forward" also cuts Akito, Toya, and Miku out of the song completely, making it an An and Kohane duet.
      • In the SEKAI cover song department, BAD DOGS was shown a bit more favoritism than Vivids halfway through the first year, and by the game's second anniversary had received 8 SEKAI coversnote  versus Vivids' 6note .
    • Wonderlands x Showtime:
      • There's also the commissioned song "Nijiro Stories" in which Tsukasa and Emu don't sing at all despite appearing in the music video. In the actual song, KAITO and MEIKO sing along with Rui and Nene instead, making it the first and currently the only commissioned song in the game to use two VIRTUAL SINGERS in place of the group members.
      • There are also several SEKAI covers in which members of the group are reduced to backing vocals, such as "Chururira Chururira Daddadda!", which is primarily sung by Nene and Emu, whereas Rui and Tsukasa are relegated to small duet parts and chorus and "Sweet Magic", where Tsukasa and Rui exclusively sing the chorus.
  • Painful Persona: Mafuyu Asahina, a seemingly kind, helpful, and responsible honor student who is actually something of an Extreme Doormat when it comes to accommodating the needs and wishes of those around her. However, this is a Stepford Smiler persona that hides her reality: she is an Empty Shell and a Broken Ace who hates having to be a "good girl" all the time and wishes she could disappear. When the mask slips, she speaks with a Creepy Monotone, has Dull Eyes of Unhappiness, and often gives her opinions with Brutal Honesty, which is a huge contrast from her nice girl persona.
  • Painting the Medium:
    • The MASTER chart for "Teo" has a pair of hold notes rapidly swinging across both ends of the lane during the line "ユラユラ　ゆらぎを見せてよ" (show me swaying, swaying back and forth). The line "キラキラキラ　きらめいていてよ" (be sparkling, twinkle-twinkle) also features multiple small gold hold notes in the form of sparkles.
    • "Your Adventure Log Has Vanished!" MASTER likes this one, such as two hold notes shaped like an O when Len says "Oh!", two hold notes shaped like thumbs-ups during the line "so good!", a pair of hold notes shaped like a dungeon map, and a large critical hold note that resembles a cross.
    • "Just Be Friends" has golden critical notes shaped like teardrops during the line "誰かの涙" (somebody’s tears).
    • The EXPERT and MASTER maps for "Roki" has a series of hold notes spelling out "ROKI" and "ROCK N'ROLL", respectively.
    • The HARD and EXPERT maps for "Dance Robot Dance" have flick notes corresponding to the "up, side, up side down" lines.
    • Played exaggeratedly in APPEND difficulty with notes following the lyrics at various parts of the charts.
  • Palette Swap: Every unlockable MV outfit has four different color variations. The first color is available by default while the other three need to be unlocked before they can be equipped.
  • Platonic Valentine: In the Valentine's and White Day events, the characters make and gift chocolate (or some other sweets) to their friends within their unit and some outside of them, including the Virtual Singers, cross-unit friends, and their family members. In all cases, it's never indicated that they're doing it out of romantic affection for the recipient(s).
  • Player Personality Quiz: After the introductory cutscene, you're given a short three-question quiz that determines which group's intro cutscene you should watch first. Of course, you're also free to ignore the results of this quiz completely and choose whichever group you like, and the cutscenes you didn't watch are available after the intro.
  • Player Versus Player:
    • The Half Anniversary update introduced a new event format called Cheerful Carnival Event, an extension of the Multi-Live system where players join teams Splatfest-style and ally with four other teammates to compete against opposing 5-player teams for the highest score. Winning teams get additional rewards in addition to the standard event prizes.
    • The 1.5 Anniversary update introduced a proper PVP mode called Rank Match, where you compete against another player for the highest score. In this mode, Team Power and Skills are disabled and your score is determined soley by the number of PERFECT, GREAT, and GOOD judgments you earn. Winning duels moves you up a rank ladder where you can face stronger opponents at higher tiers.
  • Play Every Day:
    • The game encourages players to keep coming back with daily log-in bonus's. Launch month also has them state that they'll add new songs that can be played every day for the entirety of the month.
    • There's also a LP point ladder that rewards Crystals and Coins when certain points are accumulated. It is encouraged to play everyday to get all of the rewards.
    • The 1.6.0 update added a stamp card to Challenge Live that grants additional rewards for showing up to complete your daily Challenge Live play.
  • Pocket Dimension:
    • The SEKAI are pocket dimensions where music is born, hidden from plain sight but accessible to those who receive the "Untitled" song. The exact mechanics of the SEKAI are not explicitly stated, but at bare minimum each SEKAI must 1) be born from the strong feelings of at least one person, and 2) contain a version of Hatsune Miku in it. The game focuses on five SEKAI and the people they are tied to: the School SEKAI, the Stage SEKAI, the Street SEKAI, the Wonderland SEKAI, and the Empty SEKAI, although it is all but stated that there are countless other SEKAI out there. Feelings that are not strong enough to become their own SEKAI instead coalesce into "fragments" that drift in the space between the SEKAI, where they form a sort of physical manifestation of humanity's collective unconscious.
    • Characters also temporarily gain access to their own special SEKAI in their FES stories, which are entered by coming into contact with glowing balls of light that represent the fragments of one's thoughts. Like the main SEKAI, these SEKAI can take various shapes, such as appearing to be a place or time that was significant to a character (Ichika's SEKAI) or representing their mental state at some point in their life (Touya's SEKAI). As well, outside of the Virtual Singers that show up to guide them, representations of other characters can appear in these SEKAI, such as Airi meeting a younger version of herself or Rui meeting miniature versions of Tsukasa, Emu, and Nene.
    • There also exists a space between the SEKAI, where the core versions of the Virtual Singers reside to keep watch over the SEKAI, their counterparts, and the humans that they're connected to. Miku's interactions with the player always take place here, implying No Fourth Wall is also in effect, but this is of dubious canonicity.
  • Post-Cyberpunk: The trained art for the Cyber Sniper Gacha takes place in this type of setting, as does the trained art for the Punk Night TOKYO gacha.
  • Power Equals Rarity:
    • 4☆ cards are more powerful than any other card rarity and are notably more difficult to obtain.
    • Downplayed with Ribbon/Birthday rarity cards, which have a single pink ribbon for a rarity tier in place of stars. They are a type of limited card that can only be pulled from a special birthday banner available for around a week during a character's birthday and have a pull rate on par with 4☆ cards with the only difference being an added "fixed pity" where the card is guaranteed within 100 pulls. However, Ribbon rarity cards are functionally "3.5☆" despite their limited availability window and pull chance, as they are weaker than 4☆, have esoteric skills of debatable utility, don't have special flavor stuff like Card Stories or Costumes, and require 1000 Emotion Fragments to Master Rank compared to the 50 for 3☆ and 2000 for 4☆.
  • Power Up Letdown: Each SEKAI has an item that can be used to boost Virtual Singers. This sounds like it would just universally boost the stats of any Virtual Singer character... except it doesn't; it works the same way as the Unit boost items in that it only boosts non-unit Virtual Singer cards. Prior to the Evillious Chronicles collaboration this essentially made the items virtually useless since there were no Virtual Singer Unit 4★ cards besides Miku's ColorFes card; with the Evillious Chronicles collab all Virtual Singers have a Virtual Singer 4★, but the cards are still Awesome, but Impractical for tiering in events.
  • Powered Armor: A particularly humorous scene in the "Exciting Picnic!" event has Rui going off on a very wordy and rapid tangent about an exoskeleton he invented that would augment the wearer's physical strength. It was apparently designed so Tsukasa could wear it and swing across the stage on a rope Tarzan-style.
  • Precision F-Strike: "Dappou Rock" by Neru and "Ego Rock" by surii both have "fuck you" in their lyrics, but in either case the pronunciation is mangled enough that it's hard to tell it's being said unless you already know the lyrics. In the former case, it's sung by Tsukasa in the SEKAI Ver., while in the latter Len says it.
  • Product Placement:
    • All of the instruments used by members of Leo/need and their respective Virtual Singers are modeled after real instruments.
      • Ichika: Fender American Original '60s Telecaster in lake placid blue.
      • Saki and Rin: KORG KROSS 2 61-Key Synthesizer in gray-orange
      • Honami and MEIKO: Yamaha Stage Custom in Cranberry Red
      • Shiho: Fender American Elite Jazz Bass in ebony/ocean turquoise
      • Miku: Fender Stratocaster
      • Luka: Fender American Standard Precision Bass
      • MEIKO: 1960 Mosrite The Ventures in candy apple red
      • KAITO: Gretsch G5655TG Electromatic Center Block Jr. in azure metallic
      • Len: Gibson Custom 1958 Korina Flying V
    • In Journey to Bloom "STELLA", we are given a shot of Ichika's phone when she first discovers "Untitled", where it is in a playlist of other songs with their names and producers on display. All of the songs on-screen are real Hatsune Miku songs, all of which are not playable in-game and some of which are very obscure. These include "Unite as One" by Hachioji-P, "United" by MisomyL / Takenoko boy, "Universe" by Wonder-K, "unnoticed" by picco, "Unveiled" by nanahoshi orchestra, "urban hallucination" by keisei, "Vagueness" by Clean Tears, and "VIDROAPE" by Sohbana.
  • Production Throwback: To both CraftEgg's BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! and SEGA's CHUNITHM:
    • "The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku"'s MASTER chart appears to be inspired by its Chunithm MASTER chart.
    • The EXPERT chart of "Rokuchounen to Ichiya Monogatari" is essentially the Expert and Special charts of the same song in BanG Dream combined, which according to the developers was intentional; the intention was for players to "grin in response to the charting".
    • The SEKAI version of "Lost One no Gotoku" EXPERT recycles more than a few chart elements from its BanG Dream EXPERT chart, which is also a Lv. 26.
    • Many parts of "End Mark ni Kibou to Namida wo Soete" MASTER are copied wholesale from its CHUNITHM MASTER chart.
    • Several sections of "Hmm-Ah-Ah" MASTER appeared to be copied from its maimai DX MASTER chart, up to the jacks at the ending being copied from the spins from its ''maimai DX’’ MASTER chart.
    • While not mentioned by title, likely due to possible issues with the trademark, it's heavily implied that Nene and Emu were playing Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade in Nene's "I Won't Let the Target Get Away" side story.
      Emu: Nene-chan, look! This game lets you play various songs!
      Nene: Ah, it's a rhythm game that has Miku's songs in it. (...) ...Ah, hold on, Emu. That's the EXTREME difficulty you're choosing.
      Emu: (...) It's Miku-chan! Nene-chan, look! Miku-chan is dancing!
      Nene: The MV is nice, but pay attention to the icons! Look! Press the buttons that have the same icons as the ones flying on the screen!
      Emu: (...) Nene-chan, look! I messed up a bit, but it says "CLEAR" right there!
      • In close game/OFFLINE's follow-up 4koma "Heated! Exciting Game Tournament", it's also implied that Nene was playing a version of Project DIVA on her home console, as the requirement for clearing the game was getting all "COOL's".
    • "folern"'s APPEND chart is almost copied wholesale from its CHUNITHM MASTER chart. For added appeal, Trace Notes are used to mimick the raised appearance of Air Notes.
  • Pronoun Trouble: Due to the use of Ambiguous Gender, Mizuki's pronouns are hard to pin down; they are generally referred to gender-neutrally by other characters, while Mizuki themself uses "boku", which would normally convey either a male disposition or a Bokukko but in writing this is explicitly spelled in katakana instead of kanji, leaving the matter muddy. Most English-speaking fans use they/them, and COLORFUL STAGE! evades the question by having different characters use different pronouns according to how they perceive Mizuki's gender.
  • Pronouncing My Name for You: Emu's first attempt at pronouncing Ena's last name comes out as "Shinononome", with one extra "no". When Ena tries to correct her, Emu instead says "Shinonomeme", so Ena just tells her to call her "Ena".
  • Punny Name: Leo/need is named after the meteor showers of the same pronunciation (which is also why their band logo has a shooting star). The name of their theme song is also just the band name in reverse and the "o" dropped.
  • Pun-Based Title: Occasionally, event titles will pun on a unit's name. For example, Vivid BAD SQUAD has "STRAY BAD DOG", which is derived from Akito and Toya's BAD DOGS. There's also Legend Still Vivid and The Old Vivid Tale, which are derived from both Vivid BAD SQUAD and An and Kohane's unit "Vivids".
  • Real Men Wear Pink: The "Beat Eater" 2DMV has Vivid BAD SQUAD decked out in pink and black attire, including Len, Akito, and Touya. Touya even sports a big, fluffy pink hoodie.
  • Real-Place Background: The game is set in Shibuya, and while most of the places they visit in it are fictional, scramble crossing is an almost exact replica of Shibuya Crossing.
  • Recycled Premise: A Sorrowful Farewell to The Curtain Call takes the premise of Resonate with You, which was about Shiho getting recruited away from Leo/need by an NPC from a popular band, and applies it to Rui almost getting recruited away from Wonderlands x Showtime by the leader of a popular theatre troupe. Both characters were reluctant to accept and were reminded that their place is with their original group in the end.
  • Regional Bonus:
    • In lieu of the Colorful Pass, which rewards a small amount of Paid Crystal and gameplay enhancements for 14 days with bonus Paid Crystal for renewing multiple times in a row, COLORFUL STAGE! has "Colorful Plus", which features a "Basic" tier (identical to Colorful Pass) as well as "Standard" and "Deluxe" subscription tiers that offer additional gameplay bonuses on top of Colorful Plus Basic and more materials and Paid Crystal in exchange for higher fees.
    • COLORFUL STAGE! had shorter events to allow the game to catch up to being a year behind Colorful Stage!, but event shops are 10% cheaper in return. The Korean version also followed suit, aiming to be at the same place as other foreign versions.
    • COLORFUL STAGE! is also the only version to receive timed-exclusive songs, so far either coming from Western producers or from Miku Expo's theme songs. Additionally, it was the only foreign server to receive "Awake Now" earlier compared to the Japanese version (albiet a few weeks after Bout for Beside You due to technical difficulties).
    • The Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese versions occasionally get mini-events interspersed between the real events that give additional prizes, such as materials and Coins.
    • Both the Korean and Taiwanese versions of Colorful Stage! have their exclusive pass outfits. The Korean server also hosts mission pass contests with different themes from the ones hosted on the Japanese server, along with having mission pass outfits from that server.
    • The Korean and Taiwanese servers also have unique stamps that can only be used on those servers, some of them coming from contests held in their regions.
  • Relationship Values:
    • Clearing certain tasks corresponding to each character earns Character EXP, which improves Character Rank when enough EXP is earned. In addition to providing small stat boosts, ranking up a character provides rewards such as Crystals and Vocal Tickets, which can be used to purchase Another Vocal Ver. songs at the music store.
    • The December 2021 update introduced Kizuna Rank, a system where playing songs earns Bond EXP between the Leader (a card set in the first slot of the team) and the rest of the team, with the Subleader (the card in the second slot) earning a higher amount of EXP. Leveling up Kizuna Rank between two characters can earn prizes such as new voiced interactions, items, and special combo titles.
  • Revenue-Enhancing Devices:
    • Connect Live, a large-scale version of a Virtual Live that features full-version songs (including songs that don't have 3DMV's), more fluid models and choreography, and characters reacting in real-time to messages that you send to them, requires you to buy a virtual ticket with paid crystals to attend, unlike the standard Virtual Lives. The Live Ticket alone costs 1980 paid crystals while the full concert set that features in-game merch costs 3980 paid crystals. You have to buy more than one ticket for multiple viewings at the same fixed price, and tickets are not refundable under any circumstance unless the developers have to delay the live for any reason. Non-paying players can opt to attend a "Rehearsal" version of Connect Lives that only charges 100 Crystal for entry, but features fewer characters and game-size songs, and only lasts 30 minutes (compared to the full 3-hour concert).
    • The first-anniversary Gacha outfits are this as well, arguably. Unlike the Miracle Ticket Gacha, which at least gives the players a 4☆ Gacha ticket that allows them to pick any non-limited 4☆ in the game up to Awakening Beat, the player is allowed to use 10-roll which costs 3000 paid crystals for one outfit per unit and all of its color-swapped versions as a "bonus". The outfits are locked to the unit on the banner as well as the Virtual Singers, meaning that unlike the shop outfits and outfits unlocked through the Gacha, they can't be crafted and worn by other characters. As well, the outfits being obtainable for the Virtual Singers only really benefits the female ones, as they can wear an outfit from every unit while the male Virtual Singers only have outfits for their unit, Vivid BAD SQUAD, and Wonderlands x Showtime, solely because those 3 units have male characters to assign outfits to. Essentially, the banners are just another way for Colorful Palette to make money and don't really benefit the players to roll on unless they care about dressing up the characters or simply want to collect every possible outfit the game has to offer.
    • Birthday cards. They're the rarest kind of cards in the game due to only being available at the time of the characters birthday week, though their debatably useless skill, lack of an outfit, the fact that they're available in the gacha at a 4★ rate and the expensive Master Ranking requirement make them not worth rolling for unless you really like the character, want to read the side story, or are a collector. On the other side, they clearly exist as a new way for developers to earn money along with the other things that were announced during the first anniversary.
    • The change from two outfits per banner to three. While at first glance this seems like a good decision to some as it gives players more reason to want the third banner 4★ for more than just it's a skill, it also serves as a way for Colorful Stage! to up the number of limited cards that are released in a months period since limited banners now can have three limited cards instead of just two, which would earn them more money from the banner, especially in scenarios where the third 4★ is a popular character.
    • Version 3.3.0 added Side Story Tickets, which can be purchased for 500 Paid Crystals each from the shop. A single Side Story Ticket can be used to unlock all of the Side Stories for a single event en masse without paying the requisite material costs, although Part 2 stories must still first be unlocked by reaching max level with the respective cards.
  • Robinsonade: The members of Wonderlands x Showtime get temporarily stranded on a deserted island in the event story A Desperate Situation!? Island Panic! after a boat accident.
  • Running Gag:
    • Kanade attempts to turn the Empty SEKAI into her private workspace, also complaining about the lack of power outlets in the Empty SEKAI, which would help her use her PC.
    • Street SEKAI Miku's sandwich disaster that began from Legend Still Vivid onward. KAITO in particular is still haunted by the incident as he was forced to eat her failed attempts. He's so much so that he's afraid whenever Miku asks him for anything.
    • Akito never being able to get away with something he did, as he'll always be exposed by someone who witnessed it right after the subject is brought up. In most cases, it's usually Toya doing the exposing, though innocently.
  • Set Bonus:
    • Unit items and type-boosting foliage give double their stat bonus if every card in the team is of the same unit or type, respectively.
    • The 4★ Virtual Singer cards introduced in the "Cherry Blossoms Across SEKAI, Interconnecting Our Feelings" event gain an additional 10% score bonus for each card in the same team of each character's corresponding unit, up to +50%; however, as they are of the Virtual Singer unit, fielding them requires you to give up your actual set bonus.
  • Shout-Out:
    • One of the yonkoma panels shows Nene controlling the Nene-robo like a video game character, with the Nene-robo performing a Shoryuken.
    • The scene of Nene-robo flying in at the start of the second verse of "Tokugawa CUP NOODLE Kinshirei" is framed like a Super Smash Bros. character cut-in.
    • Also from "Tokugawa CUP NOODLE Kinshirei", any time Rin and Len chime in with the "Uma uma!" line, they pop in doing the "Caramelldansen" dance.
    • One of the games Nene/Emu and Akito/Toya end up playing in the close game/OFFLINE event story is the falling block puzzle game Puyo Puyo, which is also owned by Sega. The avatars make an appearance in Toya's untrained "Handling the Puyo's at Lightning Speed" card and are the two group options to pick from during the Cheerful Carnival segment of the game ("Green Puyo" vs "Garbage Puyo").
    • An official sketch from Colorful Palette to go with the close game/OFFLINE event shows Nene playing a game that appears to be Splatoon.
    • The rocket first seen on Rui's Colorful Festival card◊ (and later on in other official media) is a reference to the Georges Méliès film, A Trip to the Moon.
    • Mizuki has a toy Twinkle Stick in her room.
    • One episode of the anime has a Chiyu Sawaizumi look-a-like watching a tablet.
    • Strangely, the Copy Ability sound effect from Kirby used in "Zunda Party Night" was left in the game, although difficult to hear.
  • Sick Episode: In the "Mirage of Lights" event, Mafuyu falls feverishly ill and passes out in the park. Kanade accidentally finds her and brings her to her apartment to nurse her back to health, where Mafuyu has a flashback to her childhood.
  • Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: Almost completely towards the "characters" end, as virtually the entire story of the game is character-driven.
  • Socialization Bonus: Playing Multi-Live/Co-Op with other players rewards significantly more goodies at the end of each song, and if you're not strong enough to get high ranks yourself, doing Veteran/Pro multiplayer can help get those elusive high ranks on songs. There are also titles tied to how many players you have on the Friend List.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad: As explained in Out of Focus, the game isn't very good at "balancing". As of the game's second anniversary, there have been too many instances of "spotlight-stealing" to record, pertaining to the song, card, lyric, and even banner focus distribution between the characters.
  • Small, Secluded World: Being a Pocket Dimension, every SEKAI is implied to be this to some degree. For example, School Sekai has all the functions of a proper school, including a rooftop, and several classrooms. Though, it's implied that there's nothing else beyond the school.
  • Strong Family Resemblance: Saki and Tsukasa have similar hair and eye colors, making them look almost like gender-flipped versions of each other. Subverted with the other two sibling pairs, Shiho/Shizuku and Akito/Ena, who look almost nothing alike.
  • Suddenly Shouting: Tsukasa's attempt to communicate with an American girl has him shouting in broken English. Even for his normal volume, it's so aggressive that the already-upset child just cries even more.
    Tsukasa: HEY!! GIRL!! My name is TSUKASA TENMA! I am STAR! I am WORLD FUTURE STAR! DANCE! AND! SING!!
  • Super-Deformed: As implied by the title, this is the art style for Petit SEKAI. Amusingly, Nenerobo looks exactly the same in the anime due to already being chibi (well, for a certain measure of "chibi") by default.
  • Suspect Is Hatless: In the accompanying yonkoma for the "Intersecting Melodies, Glowing Warmth" event, Ichika paints a vivid description of Kanade for her friends, such as describing her sports jersey and luxuriously long white hair, which Honami secretly picks up on. The scene then cuts to Kanade, who is struggling to provide any accurate description of Ichika whatsoever to her friends besides her jet-black hair.
  • Take That!: NayutalieN engages in a bit of meta-humor in "MORE! JUMP! MORE!", whose bridge pokes fun at the insane amount of Emotion Fragments you need.
    "Now just a few more, a few more Emotion Fragments! Even if it's not enough, we'll keep moving forward!"
  • Tech-Demo Game: The game effectively doubles as an advertisement for Crypton Future Media's "NT" series of voice bank software, their in-house counterpart to Yamaha's Vocaloid software. All of the Crypton characters use the NT software for speaking and have had their tuning redone in NT for SEKAI Ver. songs, including those that haven't had their software released yet.
  • The Ghost: Any non-Crypton Future Media Virtual Singer. They occasionally appear on music jackets as cameo characters, and their songs have been featured in the game's song roster, but the characters in the story never acknowledge that they exist when discussing Virtual Singers.
  • There Are No Therapists: Many of the problems that the cast face are dealt with exclusively by the main cast despite the fact it's blatantly clear that some of the characters really need professional help. Especially if it involves Nightcord at 25:00 Considering that the main setting is Japan, this trope is probably justified, since Japan doesn't have a good view regarding mental care.
  • Three-Stat System: Subverted. The game originally gave cards three different stats: Performance, Technique, and Stamina. However, the latter two stats were functionally useless and didn't do anything, meaning they only existed arbitrarily. The Brand New World update removed the three stats and consolidated them into a single "Performance" stat as a result.
  • Title Scream: The title screen features the cast saying the name of the game.
  • Totally Radical: COLORFUL STAGE! tends to have this "problem" of using outdated slang when translating character dialogue and titles. For example, "Feels", "[X] is life", and "Mad Skillz" have all been used in titles.
  • Tragically Misguided Favor: In the Vivid BAD SQUAD story, Akito and An agree to hold a friendly competition at a live event, but Kotaro, in an attempt to allow BAD DOGS to win, sabotages the event during Vivid's performance by cutting the sound. While An manages to rerail the event even without the music, Kohane is left extremely shaken from stage fright. However, Akito takes credit for the sabotage and claims that he was trying to prove that Kohane wasn't ready for the big stage (in a Cruel to Be Kind manner).
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: Shizuku is impressed by Honami's drawing of a person picking up litter, calling it "abstract". Honami is forced to hastily convince Shizuku against using her own drawing due to sheer embarrassment.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Birthday/Anniversary Cards have the dubious honor of having the best healing skills in the game... which means little since the value of healing and PERFECT Lock skills diminishes drastically if the player simply improves at the game. Aside from that, they have an incredibly mediocre PERFECT score boost, which is worse than most dedicated healer cards.
  • Utaite: The characters are essentially Utaite, as a majority of the songs covered in the game are Vocaloid songs, as are a majority of the commissioned songs for units. However, the term is never used to describe the characters, despite units like Leo/need being known to perform covers of Vocaloid songs in in-story events.
  • Vague Age: None of the characters in the main cast have their ages outright stated, except for Kagamine Rin who is said to be 14 years old in an early side story, same as her base character age. Interestingly, the official Twitter account has confirmed the ages of some of the NPCs in the cast. For example, Shiraishi Ken, An's father, is 43 years old.
  • Virtual Celebrity: While this is a given for them in real life, Colorful Stage! is unique in that it also applies to the Virtual Singers in-universe. The story quickly shows that they're more than just virtual, however.
    • As of Connect Live and Colorful Live, in-game and out-of-game (respectively) concerts in which the characters perform for and interact with a real audience, this applies to the Virtual Singers as well as the original generation.
    • The original characters have collaborated with and endorsed real brands alongside Hatsune Miku, such as Nissin Top Ramen and Pocari Sweat, all while still being their fictional selves.
  • Virtual Paper Doll: The player is given the option to dress up the characters in a slew of different unlockable MV outfits. More outfits are added as gacha rolls out.
  • Vocal Dissonance: The characters in MV's are interchangeable even if you set the sound so that only the virtual singers are singing. Therefore, you can have the male characters singing in the female roles, the girls being mismatched with the voices etcetera.
  • Voice-Only Cameo: Non-Crypton Future Media Virtual Singers such as GUMI, IA, and vflower have had songs featuring them as the vocalists added to the game's song roster.
  • Wedding Episode: The mixed events A Song of Vows for You, Dressed in Pure White! and Wishing for Your Happiness Upon the Blue Sky!. That said, none of the characters get married and are instead called in to help out at the chapel while dressed up in wedding outfits.
    • A Song of Vows for You, Dressed in Pure White! has Toya called in to replace Tsukasa as the extra at the wedding chapel, where he, alongside two others, ends up playing the role of a man that wants a last chance with the bride and attempts to impress her with his unique skill to win her over. The bride will reject them and declare that she only has eyes for the groom, and the group will sing and dance to celebrate the couple's love for one another. The absurdity of the concept is lampshaded by the characters in universe. Rui is brought in to be the events director in the absence of the original, while Aktio, and later, An, are brought in to be backup dancers. Wonderland Len also shows up to commentate.
    • Wishing for Your Happiness Upon the Blue Sky! has An be called upon by Kawasaki, the photographer for the aforementioned event, to pose as a bride in his photoshoot. Shizuku is brought in to pose as the groom, while Airi and Kohane are bridesmaids. MEIKO shows up briefly to give An and Kohane advice.
  • Wham Episode:
    • Light Up the Fire: An and the rest of Vivid BAD SQUAD discover that An's older sister figure, Nagi, had actually passed away years ago from pancreatic cancer and An never found out because everyone on Vivid Street had a mutual agreement to cover it up. Shaken but undeterred, the group attempts to show how far they've come by challenging Nagi's brother Taiga to a music duel but wind up on the reciving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle, showing just how far they've yet to go to surpass RAD WEEKEND.
    • Saying Goodbye to My Masked Self: The event's climax involves Mafuyu finally telling the truth about how she feels about her mother and running away from home to live with Kanade, with Mafuyu's mother swearing vengeance against Kanade for "corrupting" Mafuyu.
  • Wham Shot: The end of the "Guiding a Lost Child to What Lies Beyond" event has Mafuyu's mother making a call to her school to cross-check Mafuyu's claim of being sick and missing the exam, hinting that the next N25 event may be focusing on the rest of N25 having to face Mafuyu's mother in one way or another.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: Colorful Stage! at times borrows event plots from it's sister game BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!.
  • World of Jerkass: While everyone in the main cast and even some of the non-playable characters appear to be decent enough people, and if they aren't they at least have a reason for their personalities, the background characters of various age groups in the story of each unit can be pretty vicious and are the primary reason a good portion of the characters that have issues have these issues.
    • In the Leo/need storyline, Shiho was bullied for being antisocial and abrasive, with numerous rumors being spread about her being a bully, while Honami was bullied into being depressed for not wanting to pick sides during conflicts. And if her Colorful Festival story is anything to go by, Shiho still receives a lot of In-Universe hate for turning down Iori's offer to join STANDOUT and choosing to stay with Leo/need despite their lack of experience, with people criticizing her for wasting her talent and a girl she encounters in her Fragment Sekai belittling her for her decision and calling Leo/need amateurs.
    • In the MORE MORE JUMP! storyline, Airi's agency staff pigeonholed her into becoming a variety show talent and never let her perform onstage to the point where nobody saw her as the idol she wanted to be, and her manager eventually made the decision to phase her out of being an idol entirely, outright telling her to her face that she doesn't stand out as an idol. Meanwhile, Shizuku was ostracized by the rest of Cheerful*Days as a result of jealousy over her getting more attention due to her looks, and when it gets to the point where she leaves the group due to their hateful comments, they still have the audacity to complain about it because they think she's making them look bad by quitting. When Airi later confronts them for their toxic behavior towards Shizuku, it turns out they have zero remorse for their actions and are glad to be completely rid of her.
    • Mizuki was outcasted and subjected to bullying for being different in a way that hasn't been revealed to the audience yet. Even the background characters that pretended to be their friends would talk badly about them while they weren't around, causing Mizuki to become paranoid about the actual friends they made in Nightcord at 25:00 either abandoning them once their secret is revealed or treating them differently as well.
    • Rui was likewise bullied even in elementary school, with the vast majority of his peers being put off by his antics and shunning him for his outlandish ideas and creations, outright calling them "insane."
    • In the Vivid BAD SQUAD storyline, the way Akito and An are treated by the background characters in their respective focus events and backstories is like night and day. While An is loved by the people of the city and respected by everyone, Akito in turn has been mocked since his official debut into the world of street music, openly talked badly about, and viewed as a weak link to his partner Toya once they began performing together. And even while Toya is seen as the better of the two by the background characters, even he doesn't escape the scathing criticisms of their performances. What's worse is that, unlike the above examples, some of these background characters are actually adults.
  • Write What You Know: Invoked by Wonderlands x Showtime during the "Wonder Magical Showtime!" event, whose park-wide show is a recreation of Phoenix Wonderland's history and current state. In it, a young girl is entrusted by her dying mentor with the amusement park he created after a war but believes that she can't keep it running as he did. However, with the power of everyone working together, she eventually makes the park shine brighter than ever.
  • Writing Around Trademarks: Averted Trope, as ColorfulPalette has made a point to avoid mentioning the Yamaha-trademarked term "Vocaloid" at any point in the game despite it being heavily implied that the software exists in the universe. The Virtual Singers are exclusively referred to as "Virtual Singers", even by the Original Generation.
  • Word Salad Title: The Vivid BAD SQUAD event title Bout for Beside You. Even native English speakers struggled to figure out what it meant.
  • Yonkoma: An official one is released alongside the game updates. Panels from the comics can also be seen during the in-game loading screens.

Alternative Title(s): Project Sekai

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