Category: Rhythm

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Game Ramblings #231 – Hi-Fi Rush

More Info from Krafton

  • Genre: Rhythm/Action
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox Series

This was one that I kind of figured I would enjoy a lot. It’s a high-style action game built around rhythm-based inputs. It should match my love of music and love of rhythm games. However, I was having a real hard time with enjoying it fully by the end, and I think I narrowed that down to a few specific things.

The main thing I’d point at is, quite frankly, the soundtrack. For a game based on rhythm gameplay, the soundtrack is incredibly important and I don’t think it hits. Importantly, I think it feels limited by the gameplay. The soundtrack feels based around two specific things – 4/4 count and a very small range of difference in the actual BPM of the songs. This is then further restricted by the music needing to loop as its the constant background beat of the levels and needing to be simple enough to not be a distraction during combat, which pushes it into sort of simple rock territory. It often feels like it might as well be a background metronome instead. For level stretches that are 30+ minutes on the same basic track with some layers fading in and out, it gets repetitive and boring.

The simplification problem extends into combat though, which is particularly frustrating. Attack combos are combinations of one (fast) and two (strong) beat attacks and that’s basically it. Some attacks have rest beats after a fast attack input that take the place of a strong attack, but there’s no more variety than that. There’s no eighth-note inputs to do more complex rhythms. There’s no attacks that are tied to the music at all. Dodge and parry take the place of light attacks on the beat. There’s so many options here to do more interesting things with the musicality that just weren’t taken, so the rhythm integration feels shallow.

I also found it incredibly annoying that quick time events didn’t start on the 1 of a measure. To me that feels like such an obvious music tie-in, but they would just start on the nearest beat to when they are triggered. It ultimately made the QTEs feel disengaged from music when an enemy attack chain that you need to block could start on the 1 or the 3 or the 4 and not care about the music track, again going back to “this could just be a single-tone metronome”. The QTEs would take five beats to show the incoming button combo, then give you a beat of gap to start inputting the button combo. It just felt all arbitrary and disconnected from the music. This is especially egregious for boss fights that used licensed music where tighter integration would have been even more desired.

I guess what it really boils down to is that I don’t think the game benefits in any particular way from the rhythm integration. I get that it is core to the story and tied up in that fashion, but I think the game would play better if it was 25% faster and using combos in a way similar to Devil May Cry. The rhythm integration just pulls down the pace of combat in a way that ends up feeling forced and kind of lifeless. This could absolutely just be a story based around a world where the music is well integrated into the world without being forced into the gameplay, and games like Jet Set Radio have proven that possibility. The platforming aspects could still be tied into the music as timing mechanisms. The visuals of the world could dance with the beat like they do now. I just have a hard time really thinking that the rhythm aspects have made the gameplay better here.

Realistically the reason that I kept playing through the end is that the stuff around gameplay is so good. The visual design of the game and the way that literally everything moves to match the rhythm of the music is incredible. The characters are goofy and fun and have great interactions with each other. The story is slightly predictable cliche science fiction, but it’s effective and fun and a perfect accompaniment to everything else. The world that they’ve built here is fantastic. The integration of secondary characters that can jump into combat for special attacks adds a nice dimension to combat. The tuning that you can do with combat add-ons gives good personalization to the way you fight.

This is one of those cases where I’m not entirely sure where the critical acclaim is from. There’s a lot I can forgive and still internally rate a game very highly, but this one makes me think I’m missing something that other people are seeing. Maybe I’m just too critical of gameplay over experience. Maybe I’ve been a musician for too long and the rhythm ties bother me more than a typical user. Maybe I want something faster paced than this just for the sake of it. Whatever it is, the biggest surprise here for me is how much this just did not click.

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Game Ramblings #125 – Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: Rhythm
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch

I sat down to play the game and immediately got smacked in the face with a sense of having played this game before. The systems that I was going through; the interface at the end of songs; the way things were unlocking. I’d done it before. Then it hit me – this is a Theathrhythm game. I absolutely love the three Theatrhythm games on the 3DS and I don’t know why I never recognized what this was before its release. Ya the name isn’t there and they moved to a rear-camera 3D view, but it’s the same developer, the same systems, and the same pattern. Most importantly, it’s just as good.

Starting this as a comparison against Theatrhythm is really the place to start. The obvious change is the switch in view from side-scroll 2D to rear-scroll 3D, and that brings some oddities. Something about that change took me a long time to really grok, and I think it came down to a couple of main things.

The first is that there’s no mark to really establish the beat on the board. Looking at games with a similar viewpoint like Guitar Hero, having that scrolling beat indicator really just helps to establish some sense of depth to get some basic timing in your mind’s eye. It also didn’t help that the enemies popping onto the board didn’t have consistent timing. Some would be stationary as you scroll towards them. Some would walk towards the screen. Some kind jumped and weaved. Because of that I also couldn’t really depend on depth perception as a tool for timing the song out.

However, I hit a point probably about a third of the way into the game where I became less focused on hitting a beat, and more focused on hitting a melody, and that drastically changed how I played the game. There’s a tendency in these songs to use a bit of a Nintendo trick. The first time they introduce a melody, it’s a bit on the easier side. You’ve got enough of it to be able to hit the notes while listening to what is playing. The second and third time’s it comes around, it’s all-in and you’re responding to the full melody that you now recognize. They do this on even the highest difficulty, so you have an inherit ramp up in the song as you go through a couple loops of it. It works really well to allow you to learn on the fly, then really come back on a second go through fully knowing the song and ready to hit that full combo.

The rest of the core systems will feel familiar to players of Theatrhythm FF. Instead of directional swipes, you’ve got joystick flicks. Instead of screen holds, you have button holds. Instead of lanes per-character, you have attack buttons per-character. Instead of slide input segments, you’ve got in-air notes to catch while drifting Sora around on screen. There’s some nice additions there in terms of allowing you to do multiple attacks at once by pressing multiple buttons, but it still all feels familiar to me as a player of the Theatrhythm games.

If there was one last thing that really caught me off guard, it’s that this game did a fantastic job actually telling the Kingdom Hearts story. Ya, I’m not lying. This game covers the story of the entire franchise so far through cutscenes and voiceovers, and it does it in about 10-15 hours of gameplay. You’ve got coverage of all the main games, the important plot points from the spinoffs, and it’s all told in a concise way. In a series that effectively prides itself on being completely baffling, I retained more in one rhythm game than I did playing the entire rest of the series last year.

Now, because this is Kingdom Hearts, they couldn’t get away with not doing some stupid plot twist, and the end of the game has some important lore that ties the end of KH3’s DLC to whatever comes next. While I do recommend playing this one, if rhythm games aren’t your thing you’ll definitely want to catch up on the new lore via Youtube. It’s definitely a very Kingdom Hearts thing to have put new story into a recap game, just because they can.

I mean, I guess this is an easy recommendation. This is both really entertaining on its own as a Kingdom Hearts recap title, and a fantastic rhythm game. It takes systems that worked really well on the 3DS, and transforms them just enough to flow really well on a TV and gamepad, once I stopped trying to treat it like Guitar Hero. It’s also a great way to go back and hear how fantastically good the soundtrack of this series has been over the past 20 years.

Plus the game has One Winged Angel. That’s worth at least a +1 on the review scores.

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Game Ramblings #89.1 – Mini Ramblings – Cadence of Hyrule: Story Mode – Octavo

Original Ramblings

A bit of a surprise expansion to Cadence of Hyrule dropped this week, a new story path for the game featuring the game’s main villain Octavo. I went ahead and did a run through of it, and while this didn’t necessarily warrant a full post, I did a bit of a Twitter-focused mini ramblings. Below is that thread.