For being one of the very first rhythm games it's honestly incredibly impressive what they tried to accomplish. The timing windows seem pretty strange and jank at first, where sometimes hitting the buttons exactly on beat won't get the game to count it whereas sometimes mashing buttons randomly will get you rewarded. In fact, the only way to reach the "COOL" rating in your raps on the second playthrough is to break the conventions and do things outside of what the game tells you to. It encourages finding your own rhythm and freestyling, which is something that to this day not a lot of other rhythm games really do. That being said though, giving a quantative value to something as subjective as freestyle quality is extremely difficult so it makes sense that the game feels jank as a result. Despite that the game is still worth a play just to mess around with. It's short, the plot is funny, the characters and world are charming, and the songs are great. Give it a play!

I really respect the fact that Parappa the Rapper was a milestone for rhythm games on console and I kinda appreciate the uniqueness in visual presentation, but for me it was really quite obnoxious to play: a rather confusing timing of the inputs completely disconnects the sound track, Parappa's key sounds, and the visual cues, leading to an extremely messy and disjointed experience that is especially annoying in a genre that is supposed to be truly precision-oriented. Interesting from a historical point of view and certainly a unique object, but for me no longer sufficiently valuable anymore in this day and age.