Despite my repeated assertions that I don't "get" music and that I have all the rhythm of a boulder, I again tried to play an early 2000s rhythm game. See, my good pal Larry Davis holds Gitaroo Man in pretty high regard (we met in a penal colony and have matching prison tattoos of Puma), but I've never given it much thought. That is until I picked up a PS2 and realized I could finally play this - and other games like Parappa the Rapper 2 - without emulation-induced input lag.

However, even with lag out of the equation, Gitaroo Man is an incredibly precise game that is built for more talented people than I. Following "trace lines" while tapping buttons to the beat of the song just doesn't come easy to me, and some of the late game tracks (the Sanbone Trio in particular) are challenging regardless of my own personal shortcomings. I spent a whole afternoon trying to clear that stage, and although I was too weak to clear the subsequent fight against Gregorio, I still consider this an accomplishment.

To cut myself a little slack here, I don't think all of this is on me. There are some large and very abrupt difficulty spikes that will trip up new players, even those who are more experienced with early-aughts rhythm games. I was also playing with a third-party controller that came with my PS2, and I can't pretend to know if the dead zone on the analog stick is any different from a first party pad, though the game is good about locking you onto a trace line roughly 20 degrees relative to where it appears. Still, anytime it twisted around I found myself struggling to keep the analog aligned. I feel like I need to play this game with one of those robots used for micro-surgery...

Which is why I called in a ringer. A Gitaroo Man surrogate. Larry Davis was kind enough to stream the game for me over Discord, allowing me to see everything past Gregorio III, and witness what it looks like to play Gitaroo Man competently. Did you know if you actually hit all the notes you can hear a full song? Crazy, I know!

Leaning back and watching someone else play did at least give me a better appreciation for what Gitaroo Man is going for tonally and narratively. The acoustic Legendary Theme U-1 plays for Kirah is much better when U-1 doesn't immediately start hitting every note out of time like he's never held a guitar in his entire life, and it was nice being able to drink in all the action happening behind the trace line. However, I do feel I missed out somewhat by not being able to experience the penultimate battle with Kirah, during which the Legendary Theme is reprised to a very effective degree. I am glad I at least got to see the rest of Gitaroo Man, though, and being able to see the final fight against Zowie was all the proof I ever needed that I am physically incapable of finishing the game. Lary is a wizard on the X's and O's and was able to do it on a freaking emulator. They say God gave him a gift, but I think he made a deal with the Devil...

Gitaroo Man is delightful. The music is great, it's aesthetics are beyond charming, its story has a lot of heart, and the gameplay is fun as hell despite some uneven difficulty pacing. If you aren't lame and actually know your way around a beat and did not previously suffer from tendonitis that you are still experiencing the longterm effects of, then I think you should give it a shot.

Shelved because I do see myself messing around with it some more in the future, but I also do not expect to ever beat it. That's fine. I can just play the tutorial over and over and pretend I'm a real Gitaroo Man. Got a B rank on that. Pretty impressive!

FUCK YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

BEST GAME.

GAME MAKES ME VERY SWEATY WHEN EVE4R I PLAY IT BUT THAT'S OK

I want to write more but i can't really think of anything.

I don't get it.

Gitaroo Man is okay. Those are the strongest feelings I can muster towards it.

I'm left grasping at what people actually like so much about this for it to have the reputation that it does. I've heard a lot about the story, and the gameplay, and the music, and I'm wondering what it is here that connected with others and didn't with me. It's as if we've all played different games. What I've seen isn't worth much celebration, but that hasn't stopped the party from raging on without me involved. I'm lost. What is it about Gitaroo Man that I've missed?

The gameplay is finicky. Timing windows feel just a little out of sync no matter how much I fiddle with the delay. The Dualshock 2 analog stick was not designed for the precise movements that the game implies you're meant to be doing. Every whammy bar sequence where the line wobbles actually fails if you try to wobble along with it; you just keep holding the stick down through the middle of the the line, and the game automatically compensates and wiggles it for you. The Charge/Attack/Final sequences are an interesting touch, but all they are in effect is the ability to prematurely end a song if you play it well enough. It's still an engaging and difficult enough loop to justify playing through all ten stages, but it's not something that impressed me.

I feel as though any piece of Japanese media with a child character in it will immediately have a legion of fans who give it acclaim as "a story about growing up", even if that doesn't apply in the slightest. I don't mean to vaguepost about any reviewers here — Lord knows I probably am anyway, but I've very purposefully avoided reading anyone else's words on Backloggd about this — but everything I've seen elsewhere online is full of people who can't stop insisting that it's about maturity, or the joy of being a child, or whatever. I don't see it. A loser kid gets powers and goes on an adventure where he comes back a little cooler. You couldn't have a more basic Saturday morning framework if you tried, and this one is as simplistic and boring as a wall painted beige. Gitaroo Man gets unduly hailed as one of the most moving stories in video games solely for the reason that there are two good songs planted right at the end of it.

The soundtrack is...fine, mostly? The Legendary Theme fucking rocks, as does Resurrection, but there are some pulls on here that are just mediocre. Twisted Reality, Born to be Bone, and VOID are the especially goofy-sounding songs. Flyin' to Your Heart has the double dishonor of being the worst track here and being the longest by three entire minutes. If we're being honest, the last two songs in the game are good enough to justify the existence of the entire soundtrack, but they're pulling a lot of weight.

And that's it. There isn't anything left to talk about, and there isn't anything here that I've loved. I don't know. I get the distinct feeling of being stupid. Of missing out. But I really just don't see what everyone else sees in Gitaroo Man. I'm disappointed, but it's probably my own fault. Maybe I just had unrealistic expectations. Everyone else got a pleasant surprise, and I created an unattainable standard in the wake of its reception.

I wish I'd gotten the same experience as everyone who loved this.

I've thought a lot about the passion that drives some games to be made. The "soul" behind it, if you will. It's hard to find in the wider gaming space, almost disheartening when stewing through the mountains of shlock motivated primarily by marketing and profit. But, sometimes, you find That kind of game. A game that gets you racing, unable to put it down, always excited for more. A game that holds an emotional depth that touches you deep in a way you'd never expect. A game that is so passionate, so inspired, and made by people who really cared and wanted to make something great, it lights a fire in your heart and inspires you like nothing else in the medium. A game that, in it's short runtime, feels like it was able to really, truly, honestly affect you. Gitaroo Man is That kind of game.

Full disclosure, I played so much of iNiS's Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan trilogy as a teenager that my parents sent me to a psychiatrist when I was like 15, and the dude was like, "Yeah, she's prolly on the autism spectrum".† So it kinda goes without saying that Gitaroo Man has been a game I've been looking forward to playing for the past 15 years or so, I just never really found the opportunity or time to get around to it. Nowadays I have a pretty good PC that can run pretty much any PS2 game perfectly, so I decided to finally take some time to sit down and play this while I was on a rhythm game kick. And man, if I had actually been able to track down this game as a teenager (I spent a lot of 2007/2008 hunting down copies of this game, Pikmin 2, and Path of Radiance, but only ever managed to find a slightly overpriced Pikmin 2), it would have absolutely ruined my life.

Gitaroo Man is raw as fuck, and I don't mean that in the broadly positive colloquial sense -- I mean it's an experience that's clearly indicative of nascent talent with all the good and bad that entails. It makes PaRappa look like a baby game by comparison; if Gitaroo Man were an arcade cabinet iNiS would have been fucking rolling in money -- this game's normal mode knocked me down, kicked me into a ditch, and spat on me. But I almost feel like it's not fully intentional, some levels are a bit of a pushover, and others are so overtuned I question if the game had any QA at all.

Most of the pain points in Gitaroo Man lie with the controls and rhythm-based visuals, and while some of that is probably due to imperfect frame pacing in the emulation, modern controllers, or just skill issue on my part, it's the one thing that's really held the game's mechanical greatness back for me. The guard sections would have really benefitted from being presented in a less confusing manner (the cross formation just makes the button prompts completely unparsable for me when there's a large amount of them from all four directions coming at once), and using the analog stick during the attack/charge sections is so unwieldy that I almost wonder if they had at some point wanted the game to have its own specific peripheral. Of course, we wouldn't all be here talking about the game these days if it required a peripheral, but I feel a lot of issues would be smoothed out with a standardized controller with more finely tuned controls.

Despite all that, it's difficult to not love Gitaroo Man's full experience, and when the controls work god fucking damn it's so fucking cool. I haven't felt this sort of rhythm game high doing the hardest levels in Ouendan on the secret invisible rhythm circle mode that was only available from like, gas stations in Japan but I used a cheat engine to unlock it in my game somehow. It's an experience that you cannot get from any other game that I've personally encountered (please give me suggestions if you're actually reading this) when it's at its strongest, and it legitimately boggles my mind that reviewers from the early 00s derided it as a standard rhythm game.

And even if you could argue there's nothing special about the gameplay, the aesthetic, music, and sound design set it apart so starkly that you almost forget it's largely borrowing a lot of elements from PaRappa and Beatmania (and everything else of that era really, it's kind of the Star Wars of rhythm games if Star Wars got left in the dust as a cult classic). I want to put this game in a blender and just fucking chug it; everything down to the box art of the NA version just WORKS for me -- I very badly wanted to love this game. But I think I ended up merely liking it, even if I DO love the soundtrack, character design, and artstyle in general.

On some level Gitaroo Man is my dream rhythm game: adventure structure, anime battles, ultimate rhythm game power fantasy, and amazing music, but it's been rough getting my grips with the game as a whole. But it's really clear how much they were able to learn and refine in their Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents series, and I at least deeply appreciate it as this raw, unfiltered creative vision for a rhythm game that helped provide the seeds for my personal favorite rhythm game series. Gitaroo Man didn't quite land for me as the immaculate work I see people heralding it as, but I would say that it certainly lives up to its Legendary status, and when it rips it REALLY fucking rips. I hope someday I'll be able to play this on actual hardware with a PS2 controller to see if that turns this game from lost potential into one of my favorites of all time. Either way, it's a game infused with empathy for the world and love for life, and the older I get the more I value that the most in my media.

Could personally do without stages 4 and 5 though.
___________________________________________________________

† Okay okay, it was more complicated than that, and frankly my parents were way outta line, but it's kinda funny that iNiS's rhythm games indirectly lead to an important psychiatric diagnosis for my young self.

Jogo de ritimo extremamente charmoso

Esse jogo tem alma

quase chorei

8/10

I coincidentally happened to play this a few days after playing Sin & Punishment for the first time. These are the same fucking game. Yeah okay, one's a rail shooter and the other is a rhythm game, but let's look past the superficiality of "they look and play completely different". Released within a year of each other, amateurish 90s anime dub included, they're heartfelt, passionate spins on their genres in the most ridiculous ways possible. They're each like 1-2 hours long with a nice arcade tightness, and yet that 2 hours is jam-packed with setting after setting and fight after fight. Uncontainable fever dreams. Oh, and you'll be grooving hard to both.

Seriously, the soundtrack here is incredible. It's all just one band? And yet they genre-hop like nobody's business. Does Eurobeat even normally have guitars? The answer to that question of course being: Fuck you, this is a Gitaroo, they're not even remotely the same thing. The band here, COIL, (no, not the one that did "The Ape of Naples") completely understands that, and it's easy to believe that they've become one with the Gitaroo and are the coil pickups facilitating the fucking lightning beams shooting out of the thing. One of the songs here is literally just... Just. The Radiohead song. That song fucking owns.

Gitaroo Man's ONE flaw is that it has too much confidence in the Dualshock 2. That controller fucking sucks and tilting the stick even just a couple millimetres will ruin any inputs here. After like an hour of struggling on the final boss, I booted up PCSX2 (which has recently had some of its input lag fixed? cool) and beat it first try, no issues, on an actually good controller. I read online a bit and saw people having more success plugging in a Dualshock 1 too. Maybe they should've shipped a plastic Gitaroo.

I gave Sin & Punishment a 4.5 too but honestly it's tentative and shorthand for "I think it's fucking amazing but I don't know exactly how it'll hold up for me on replays". Just know that these are the best kind of game. I wish I had a dog that could turn into a boombox.

Edit: Also Master Mode is ridiculous LMAO it's fun though
Edit 2: Upon further reflection yeah this is one of the best games I've ever played. Also I may have unfairly trashed the Dualshock 2 a good amount, it may have just been my setup or me having to get used to using it for this game specifically

They will never make a better rhythm game than Gitaroo Man

INFINITY==================
Not in a hundred-million years!
===============IMPOSSIBLE

When I've been away from Gitaroo Man, I always have a tentative worry. Does it still hold its power? Have I lost it? By the end of Flyin' To Your Heart, I'm back in. I am the True Gitaroo Man. "We've forgotten this sound for so long!"

Gitaroo Man seems self-aware in a way that its contemporaries don't. I don't just mean in its fun, jokey tone. It knows how to be an hour-long game. Each level presents a new storybeat, and a distinctive musical genre in this shonen anime fairytale musical, introducing enough to keep each idea fun and peppy without ever detailing anything too deeply. It's bright, exciting and fantastical, and that brief running time is the key to so much of that.

The thing that draws you in is how good the music is. It's proper game music. So often, I'll play a music game, and feel let down over how little thought was put into the music. They're often either not very musical, or negligent of how they'll feel to play. Gitaroo Man's music is brilliantly structured for gameplay, with distinct phrases for the moments they're complementing, and the whole thing's so inherently videogamey. Levels are split up into CHARGE, ATTACK, DEFEND and ENDING phases, with the music working so well to convey the drama of each section. Charge sequences have you building your life bar, calmly gaining strength through long, sustained notes. Defend stages have you dodging vicious staccato attacks, that come in the form of rapid button prompts that zoom in from each side of the screen. Attack and Ending phases are the catharsis, with you taking revenge, sustaining long notes to do maximum damage, but if you miss any entirely, that's a knock against you. You've got big Street Fighter life bars at the top of the screen. I don't think there's any piece of imagery you could conjure that could so effectively illustrate the nature of a battle to videogame players. The gameplay mainly takes the form of following "trace lines", which are big bendy lines that converge onto the centre of the screen. You have to react to each one, right on the beat, and follow their bends with the direction of the analogue stick. Bending guitar notes swoop and curve around the screen, in synchronisation with the music, and when you're playing well, you feel like you're nailing a solo, trying your best to resist making Steve Vai faces. It's a similar system to Keiichi Yano's later Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents games, but it feels so much more aggressive with all of the prompts zooming into the middle of the screen. It's combat, it's war!

There's a crucial hook to the game, and something that's deeply undervalued in it. Gitaroo Man adapts to how well you play. It has about a million alternate music bars up its sleeve, determining which would be the best to throw at a player of your skill level. In most levels, you'll very rarely hear the same song twice. I've been returning to Gitaroo Man over and over again for around 20 years, and I still don't think I've heard every bit of Bee Jam Blues hidden on the disc. It's exciting every time, and really encourages multiple playthroughs. This stuff rarely gets talked about, but it's a real feat of both game design and musical composition. You never feel like a phrase is being pulled out from a list of suitable candidates and loaded in. It's all seamless, and given its response to your skill level, it feels both rewarding and emotional. It's the feeling of getting lost in a solo. I have little doubt that the lukewarm response to Project Rap Rabbit's failed Kickstarter pitch was on the fault of the public's ignorance towards this aspect of Gitaroo Man.

It's clear that the game never would have been made without the precedent set by PaRappa the Rapper, and back when PS2 games were all at the same RRP, I can see why so few would have been willing to take a chance on something they'd already dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty, but Gitaroo Man is so much more thoughtfully designed and satisfying to play. 326's artwork doesn't have the broad appeal of Rodney Greenblat's funny animal people. Ignoring the wild rendering techniques of PaRappa and just focusing on what the artists drew, Gitaroo Man's designs are weirder, and pulls more from eccentric 70s robot toys and gag manga. Everything's covered in colourful dials and buttons, and all the faces are bizarre. The visual style is both geekier and cooler than PaRappa, and I've really grown affection for it over the years, but who doesn't love Puma?

The game is so aware of its length. It knows how to use ten levels to tell a Hero's Journey. It never gets too full of itself, or takes itself too seriously, but that doesn't prevent it from doing something beautiful. The story is broad, silly and simplistic, but that's great for a short, E for Everyone game that you'll come back to again and again. The adventure takes the form of one of those Wizard of Oz-style dream scenarios, only a little more ambiguous, where we're returned to the status quo at the end, but one where the hero has learned their lesson. For me, the real ambiguity is in whether or not we're supposed to think U-1 punched Kazuya in the face.

The downsides? Uh... the compression in the FMV cutscenes is a little much. The game makes a great argument for concave analogue sticks, as you might find your thumb sliding a lot on an official Dualshock 2. I don't like that you have to navigate to the Options menu each time you want to load a save... Look - not only is this a 2001 PS2 game, it's a fucking KOEI game. It's amazing that the game came out nearly as slick as it did, drowning out developer talk from the Kessen offices next door.

Gitaroo Man was lightning in a bottle. I don't think we'll ever get a better collaboration of game designers, concept artists and musicians again, and if we do, it won't be with this budget or freedom. I mean, unless the Splatoon team decided it was time to do a narrative-focused Squid Sisters rhythm action spin-off. I don't know. Maybe Nintendo don't have the guts to become the hero.

Intergalactic guitar hero

I can remember writing my initial thoughts on Gitaroo Man Lives! during a rainy spring afternoon earlier this year and nearly the year's end I find myself coming back to it with a replay of the PlayStation 2 version. It's not much different barring the missing additional content, better resolution and framerate and quality of life (and also Flyin' to your heart in English in the PSP version) but it still has the same beating heart as always. I thought initially that I felt I didn't have too much to say about Gitaroo Man during my initial thoughts but as time moved on, the words swelled and expanded into more intricate thoughts on why I love this game. It's truly something special.

The story of Gitaroo Man feels ridiculous and yet extremely personal at the same time considering I could see myself easily sympathizing with U-1 during his journey of fully establishing himself in this universe and proving to the world that he isn't this awkward loser but someone with a soul, winning them over like a hero would, like a true Gitaroo Man. You battle objects, animals, a man in a bee outfit up until the spitting image of your worst enemy in playing the gitaroo (guitar) and proving your worth each time. An endless battle accompanied by some of the most emotional quiet moments making Gitaroo's Man short runtime something easy to come back granted you have the skill to beat the stages as intended.

Rhythm disguised as a battle, Gitaroo Man relies on a phase system followed by tracing for attacking and button inputs for defense. Starting most of the battles with gathering your strength, followed by the main event in which you fight it out with the finale being essentially a victory lap you can still screw up. The main three things you have to do is tune your analog stick in the right direction and hold down circle (or any face button really) to attack and rely on quick button prompts for defense. What it becomes is this surprisingly hectic experience after a while as this game can be pretty difficult if you don't have good enough reflexes to be able to defend yourself and quickly get knocked out, it'll take a bit but you can always get up and try again. Something to note is that Gitaroo Man Lives! (The PSP version) is known to be an easier version of the game so if completing it is your true goal, there's that option for you.

I always felt like music is something that improves a game more than just merely enhancing it from a general perspective. I really enjoy great video game music in general and Gitaroo Man is the true exception that without the music the game has, it wouldn't nearly be as good as it is. COIL managed to do an excellent job creating the soundtrack with various types of genres here. Traditional rock to reggae to even a little bit of shoegaze, I can say essentially every song here is a banger and the crown jewel of it all is the Legendary Theme. The fact that this this theme not only lives up to its name but also plays during the right time in the story turned this game into one of my personal favorites, I haven't really ever had an experience like that in a long time. The art is also extremely unique and creates this saturday morning anime vibe from the early 2000s that seems accurate considering when this game actually came out too.

Gitaroo Man is something I wished I played as a kid. I understood what it was like to be bullied and called a loser as a kid. There really wasn't a lot of media that gave me an idea on how to overcome that stuff nor really anything I could do but I felt like if I played this game, my life wouldn't be different but it would've been a little more bearable. It would be something I'd able to come back to when I was feeling little of myself and realize again and again that I have some worth in the world. I think that's why Gitaroo Man really hits it home for me purely on a personal level. It also helps that the music is amazing and the gameplay although challenging feels satisfying to pull off against these evil agents that only want to put you down, just like the bullies in real life. It's not just a game, it's honey-love.

The Legendary Theme is the greatest piece of VGM ever composed. No fucking cap, this song hits hard, it's a simple but emotional tour de force whose electric version is a killer power ballad and whose acoustic version is a bittersweet campside masterpiece. It's rousing and calming all at once, and if the game was just the two versions of this single, masterful song, I'd be pleased.

The fact that The Legendary Theme came packaged with a bunch of other fantastic songs, a killer cartoon aesthetic, and a quirky, off-kilter, FLCL-esque coming of age story is just a bonus at the end of the day. 5/5.

At a young age, Little Michael had very few aspirations, but he had one very big and important one. He wanted to be really cool, he didn't care how. He wanted to be cool so he could attract the attention of the opposite sex. Little Jeremiah however, lacked drive, vision and ability. So instead of doing something cool, he practiced not practicing his guitar for as long as possible. Then when he turned 8, he used his art degree (real) and his callous, well practiced hands to play the guitar.

The female of his dreams ultimately ended up reciprocating, then rejecting, then reciprocating with our hero Little Walter once again. This says a lot.

Advantages of the game: It has achieved maximal prowess in videogame storytelling and gameplay integrals. I often look back at my own life, think about all the times I did nothing and got everything I want, and then I think about how pathetic Little Earl is with his shitty art degree and fake hallucinated guitar. This game brings me a most great and earnest pleasure.

Disadvantages of the game: The dog speaks. I do not think it is funny or cute or adds anything to the game. Sorry.

(i like the psp version more)OHHHHHHH GO AHEAD MAKE LOVE TO MEEEEEE
AND THE MASK IT FREES US FREEEEEEE
WITH YOUR RINGLET METRONOMMMMMMMMME
AND I KNOWWWWW WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST DOUBTTTTTTT
THE CYBORG AND ANDROIDDDDDDDDD
WILL MAKE THE PERFECT MATCHHHHHH
OH BABY, BABY