This is a rhythm game for the Nintendo Switch. Other than maybe five minutes of the original Game Boy Advance game 20 years ago I don’t think I’ve played any game in this series before. This must be made by some of the same people who make the WarioWare games, the graphical style is so similar and the gameplay has some obvious parallels. There is a lot of charm and joy in this game, it’s bright and colourful, and the music is infectious.
There are 16 stages in total, the first 15 are broken up into four levels, plus one remix that brings all four together in a mashup. The final stage is made up entirely of those remixes. The levels are all short and have simple controls, usually only involving one or two buttons. You have to listen to the music, pay attention to the screen and press the buttons in time with what is happening.
The windows for the button presses are small, it can be very tricky to get them right. In fact the game has a tool to help deal with the latency on modern TVs, you press the button when an icon flashes on the screen for a little while for it to judge how much of a delay your particular TV introduces. It even warns that using wireless headphones may be a problem, that you should use wired ones if you have them.
The game tries to throw you off all the time, there are distractions in most of the levels. In one you are playing as a crab bouncing fruit into a hole on a beach, and at one point someone puts down a drinks can in front of the screen, blocking your view of what’s happening. I think they want to make sure that you’re actually joining in to the music, not just using the on-screen action to time the inputs. This is very different from most other music games, ones like Guitar Hero and Parappa the Rapper end up with you staring at a bar on the screen pressing buttons when some icon hits the right spot. There is no HUD in any of these games, you only have the graphics and music of the particular level to go off. It makes it feel like more of a music game to me.
The levels in this game are fantastically silly and inventive. In one you are a bodybuilder on a beach bouncing fruit off your biceps, in another you are little ghosts running past a gap in a fence whenever the moon sneezes, in another you have to hit the A button whenever the letter A flies past the screen in a word. It’s a lot of fun just seeing what comes next. Each level also gets a sequel as you get further in the game, some of them add in new controls or things you need to react to, though some of them just make it faster. I particularly liked that in the pre-level practice session for the daruma dolls level it just spends a little time explaining what they are and why you should get some since the controls remain the same. The whole game has cute little touches like that.
In one of the remix levels there is a section with the bicep fruit man, I was happily making fruit bounce across the screen when it switched to the daruma dolls. Usually, the switching between games in the remix level throws you off because you need to mentally change to a different rhythm or input, but in this one it blended straight from one to the other. You carry on with exactly the same input, at the same speed, and you’re bouncing along. Quite quickly, though, I needed to do the roll move in the daruma level, and I completely flubbed it. It felt like a very clever idea, you get in the groove of what you’re doing, and then get asked to do an input from something unrelated. You never get the chance to stop and think “now I’m playing this game”.
There is a completely separate single-player story mode in this game where you need to fight monsters by casting spells. You do this by pressing particular buttons in time with the beat. It’s a little like the StreetPass mode that came with the 3DS, where it’s extremely simple one-on-one fights. I did a few levels of this game, but it didn’t catch my attention at all. It felt cumbersome and simplistic.
My biggest complaint for the game is that in some levels the music is louder than the sound effects. Some of the levels you really need to listen carefully for the different cues, and even with the Switch’s volume on maximum I was struggling to hear them.
I honestly didn’t think that I would finish this game. I found the later stages a real challenge, particularly when it’s asking me to follow some off-beat rhythms. I’m glad I persevered, though. The final remix levels were fantastic.
