In artistic aspect the game is very good, good art direction, an ok soundtrack, an interesting story, note "eight" if you let only what I mentioned and changed everything else...

Now... in technical terms... the game looks like that kind of game you would buy with the money left over from the Steam wallet after taking sla, an evil Resident. The story that the studio wanted to spend here was very good, but the execution is nitída that is amateur. Game completely without shaders what reveals all the imperfections of the levels, poorly placed scenery objects, very massaging game (you have to fight with all the bosses twice at different times, and there are many), a lot of sausage filling in the backtrack, your characters along with the gameplay almost does not evolve, the minigame of rítimo is too easy and does not have a curve of difficulty to leave more fun, along with the turn RPG system that is simple and does not evolve at all throughout the game.

In short, boring, massaging, amateur game, but with captivating characters and intriguing story. I look forward to the future games of this developer, if they learn from the mistakes of this game.

An amalgamation of various game genres that just doesn't land anything in a way that feels fun or interesting to play.

Part rhythm based game, part rpg turn based game, part beat em up as well I guess? On paper, it's an interesting combination of different elements. All of which feel very surface level without much development behind them.

If this game was short and sweet, that wouldn't be a big deal but this game took me well over 20 hours to beat so this type of surface level gameplay gets so old so fast.

On top of it, the game has a lot of bugs. When I originally downloaded the game I was unable to open up the first rhythm game which is vital to open up a door in order to proceed. I had to play a lot of this game streaming it via cloud, which when you are a rhythm based game, does not feel great with some delay. This eventually went away and I was able to play it downloaded but there were other issues as well unfortunately.

On top of it, the hit detection on this game is bad. I'd be right next to something on the main stage, trying to attack boxes that were in my way to clear them, but I would oftentimes be considered too far to destroy them, even though my perspective said otherwise. Same with climbing up stairs or avoiding things, it just muddles the experience as a whole.

The main stage traversing in general has a ton of frustration with it. You constantly have things trying to attack you, unfortunately a lot of these things are just random projectiles that you just can't get rid of. When you get hit with these things you will take damage, which isn't actually that bad, the biggest issue with it though is that any time you do get hit from one of these things, you fall down and stop moving for a brief period of time. So you are constantly having to battle with the controls, hoping you're not clipping something and stop moving, hoping you don't hit something so you stop moving, it just gets so tiresome taking a few steps, getting hit, stopping, taking a few more, getting hit, stopping, etc, etc. It just feels like padding to make the game take longer.

There's a lot of that feeling throughout this game too unfortunately. The game feels like it's on the cusp of wrapping up twice before it actually does. The story isn't all that engaging or interesting too so this extension of the game and the story isn't all that rewarding and just feels like a way to make the game longer. Hell, this game uses the "fight the bad guys you fought to get here before fighting the final boss" trope TWICE.

The general turn based battling is nothing to write home about. It's serviceable but if you are not a fan of turn based type games, this is not going to convince you otherwise.

The music is solid and the guitar riffs are neat. The biggest issue is once again, this game is too long so the riffs you play to do special attacks sound good at first but quickly wear out your welcome when you're doing them over and over and over and over.

The style and art are nice as well but none of the things this game possesses as pros are enough for me to say its worth trying in the end.

It is really unfortunate that Hi-Fi Rush came out before this, since we got what a perfect action/rhythm game hybrid would look like and this... is not it.

The game looks nice, and the music is decently enjoyable, but both repeat constantly and the joy of seeing the art is lost when you've seen the same animation a hundred times.

Gameplay is also just as repetitive, do rhythm minigames, walk very, very, slowly through hazard filled areas that the game feels too sluggish to properly deal with, then fight more guys and do a little more story.

I wish there was more to say, but there really isn't. If you really love rhythm games, or like YIIK's gameplay then maybe there's something here for you, but otherwise it's best to leave it on mute.

Infinite Guitars é um jogo que me deixaria muito triste se eu não pudesse completar ele, iniciei minha jornada no jogo desde que ele entrou day one no GamePass, lá pra 30 de março, e me diverti mesmo com problemas como loop na música, bugs e coisa menores que eu nem me lembro mais porque algo maior aconteceu, na batalha contra a Maria lá pro capítulo 5 o jogo crashava, eu tentei todas as coisas e nada ia, fui no twitter e mandei o problema pro criador que disse que isso era com o pessoal do port, esperei 2 meses, abri o jogo, e vi que ainda não tinham consertado, dai abri ontem e KRL CONSERTARAM? NEM FUDENDO
E continuei minha aventura, já não lembrava de muita coisa exceto que já tinha derrotado aqueles malucos e fui em frente, o jogo continuava com bugs como a renderização das batalhas que me colocava em softlock, minigames de ritmo bugados e isso era constante, mas minha persistência foi maior e finalmente dei cabo nele
A reta final é sofrível, você passa pelo loop de ir em 3 dungeons idênticas e a cada dungeon tem o que seria a conclusão do arco dos personagens, a esse ponto tudo perdeu a graça, no máximo ainda é divertido mandar solinhos de guitarras, algo que eu não me cansei em nenhum momento no jogo
Chegando no final, não sem sofrer bugs, eu não consigo mais achar a associação com o prólogo, o texto me parece confuso e já veio o que deveria ser a conclusão seguida dos créditos
Eu não julgo a parte da história, até porque me interessei e genuinamente pretendo pegar algum dia ou ver vídeo de youtube, mas é uma pena que a experiência que até se manteve sólida até o capítulo 5 foi destruída pela reta final enfadonha e cheia de bugs
A arte é boa, tem personalidade e originalidade, as animações feitas a mão são bem bacanas e tem uma muito especial e goofy no capítulo 12, o design dos personagens, inimigos e mobs são bem bacanas, a arte geral de todo o setting é bacana
O som é bom pra krl, é um acerto louvável em um indie, principalmente de ritmo, a diversidade sonora é algo muito bom e consistente na qualidade, mas a Infinite e a Jazz é goat
A gameplay é uma mistura que pessoalmente me agrada, você tem o combate por turno, o minigame de ritmo e ainda pode desviar dos ataques dos inimigos, tudo bem básico sem muito brilho ou complexidade, o moveset é bem repetitivo, as notas no minigame são básicas e o máximo de variedade é diminuir o atk ou def do inimigo ou aumentar o seu
Ainda tem mecânicas como desviar no momento certo pra ganhar energia, ou atacar normalmente pra ganhar energia, usar sua vida pra usar um especial acompanhado do solo de guitarra e poder extender o solo ao oferecer mais da sua vida(sua vida recupera quando você acerta a nota) e dar um dano massivo baseado em algum fator aleatório que determina a fraqueza do inimigo, além de suas escolhas na história aumentarem ou diminuirem o atk/def
Infinite Guitars é potencial desperdiçado, mas ainda é bom que ele exista, se ele fosse bom ou fosse ruim poucos jogariam, e o que tivemos é a prova de que o dev futuramente pode fazer uma experiência melhor e com mais impacto, mas é inegável que há talento e alma na obra
"Mesmo com todo o sofrimento que você deixou para trás. As memórias que eu fiz em Isla são mais bonitas que qualquer paraíso que você me prometeu.
A promessa de campos verdes exuberantes, céus limpos sem fim e vida sem limites é superada por calores escaldantes, terras desmoronando e sons ensurdecedores de metais esmagando metais. Eu escolheria a felicidade que eu senti com todos ao meu lado ao invés de suas mentiras vazias"

I appreciate its spirit and the rhythm action idea it’s aiming for (Hi-Fi Rush showed a bigger budget version with more polish can be a lot of fun) but the execution is really rough and feels like a student game that’s missing even an adequate amount of playtesting/QA/polish.

The music can be fun to play along to, even when it’s a genre I don’t love, but the audio transitions between styles is erratic and there’s too much repetition of playing through the same 20 note snippets again and again. Navigating the environment is often a pain due to hectic real-time rhythm attacks combined with a 2.5D visual style that struggles to distinguish what’s traversable and what’s level geometry, plus it’s missing the input smoothing that would prevent getting stopped every time you barely clip a hard corner of that ambiguous level geometry. I was willing to push through all that for a couple of hours, including all the small distracting bugs that seemed to keep popping up, but fittingly I got trapped in level geometry and reloading saves wouldn’t fix it.

infinite guitars hurts because there's a ton of potential throughout it. the character designs rule, the music is nice, the world is open for an interesting story (instead of the really vague and confusing one they went with), and the concept of a rhythm rpg is really fucking cool. however everything after chapter 1 in this game was spent with me going "i mean i guess i'll keep going just to judge it fairly" and then regretting that decision every time i played. i then dropped it after chapter 9 (of 11?) after i lost a hour of progress thanks to autosave automatically kicking in when i accidentally selected an old save file. this was because I talked to a NPC in an area, their chatbox glitched out, and the game left me stuck in place unable to do anything but force quit.

anyways here's just a bullet list of everything I personally disliked or encountered within Infinite Guitars from what I played . [also all these bullet points are copy/pasted from discord. the ones in the second half are also kinda spoilery but not really because there's barely any plot to spoil in this game! there's still a warning when it starts getting spoilery though incase you care. very scattered and rambly though sorry]
- there’s either translation problems (no clue where the devs or from or what their first language is) or the writing is just Bad. grammatical errors and incredibly unclear plot points (one character’s motivation is “I would like to go find my sister or girlfriend it is genuinely unclear which one it’s supposed to be”. the fact they leave is literally not mentioned in the last conversation you have with them and yet every character suddenly knows it’s happened)
-lots of getting stuck on overworld objects that look like you should be able to walk through them or that are way too small and scattered around an area. fun when half of the gameplay is semi-bullet hell overworld dodging stuff!
-one thing is “running makes your screen smaller”. this would be fine and a suitable trade off for better projectile dodging and stuff if the base walking speed wasn’t slow, meaning you’ll probably be running all the time and struggle seeing stuff
-there was a bug where an enemy kept infinitely respawning so I had to fight it like six or seven times before I could escape. this is because there’s no escape battle mechanic so you’re stuck in every fight you get into
-equipment system is annoying. you can’t just swap items onto characters, you have to manually deequip any item a character has equipped and then equip a new item. why!
-there’s a weapon upgrade system at blacksmiths in each town that costs limited currency. you can’t actually check what upgrades a weapon has at any time without making the trek back to each individual blacksmith since they all have separate weapon upgrade tracking for some reason
-there’s a decent amount of songs but the game loves making you play the same few patterns to the same few songs. one area has you do the same exact rhythm game of one song excerpt four times to get through doors
-I’m on hard for overworld combat, turn based combat, and rhythm game stuff. none of the three is remotely hard. rhythm game I can understand because I am actually good at rhythm games so for all I know it’s hard to a non-experienced player, but there’s no battle strategy since every enemy dies in 2-3 hits regardless, and overworld attacks do like 1% of your health
-one mechanic is “depending on dialogue choices being aggressive or not your attack or defense will increase”. except maybe not because there’s been times where I choose the barely aggressive option and gain defense or vice versa?
-enemies respawn every screen change. more minor but also this is just annoying because enemy ai in the overworld ranges from “you are right next to me but I can’t see you” to “you’re barely on the same Y layer as me I’m gonna run and get you in a turn based fight now” [update from when i wrote backloggd review - turns out what i mistook as enemy ai was actually pathfinding that leads to the enemy walking to a place that you walk towards and then start walking in place and continually switching from looking left and right. why]
-there’s a whole system based around scrapping items you find for exp with a whole tutorial on misc. junk items. I’ve found a total of 3 junk items I could scrap so far and according to my time I should be over halfway through the game [update from when i wrote backloggd review - yeah i didn't find anything else since then]
-additionally you can scrap the Limited Upgrade Resource even though it’s Limited and also doesn’t even give exp. there’s been times where I’m scared that I accidentally hit the confirm key in the menu while scrolling past it
-there’s a few islands you move between using an airship as the hub thing. theres no actual map to check so you have to hope you remember where everything is (granted it's a small map but still annoying when you go to the wrong side and have to trek back)
-one area has you trek through like 10 rooms to make it to the boss. there’s then a dialogue exchange and you go back to the town 10 rooms back to save a character. you then have to go back to where the boss was there was no reason to kick us out. the game also then goes “oh yeah I’m a blacksmith and can do blacksmithing” but that was already unlocked when you first enter the town so ???
-in one island there's a bunch of chests that are already opened. i can't tell if it's intended or a bug. leaning towards bug because there's at least two paths where there should be some sort of reward but there's just an empty chest
- weird moving chest bug that happened twice - it just kept hovering up and down on the screen

PART WHERE RANTING STARTS GETTING MORE SPOILERY

- map is inaccurate (shows exit on the bottom right, but screen transition is all the way on the left side)
- sectors where map is just wrong (shows that there's 3 exits from a room - exit 1 connects to a room to the top left, exit 2 to a room right above it, and exit 3 to a room on the top right. however, the only two exits I could find was an exit that led to the top left and the exit to the right of it that led to the room on the top right. no sign of any exit that went to the room above.)
- "here, take our charge" dialogue but you get NOTHING {maybe gave something but not until the next screen}
- there's a room with two autosave guitars literally 5 seconds apart from each other. why.
- boss rush like 6 hours in with quick dialogue wrapping up character development ig??? (also kaylee's avatar doesn't even appear here i love bugs)
- fourth island focuses more on dialogue with a side character who does nothing than actually developing the character who joins you (who you talk to like twice total and who completely speedruns her character development within the span of a minute, going from "wow i gotta fight all these Centipedes by Myself because Power" to "yeah i'll join you guys it's what she'd want after all")
- THE BOSS RUSH INCLUDES THE BOSS YOU LITERALLY BEAT TEN MINUTES AGO
- they all just die and nobody mentions anything until you reaach The Final Boss Rush Boss Lady [update they still live why did she say that they died???]
- final boss rush boss lady attack plays the same unskippable intro animatio nevery time they attack
- every boss has the same exact "clash riff" thing happen with the same exact song. why?
- there's like nothing to buy in any of the shops. i hope you enjoy defense boost accessories even though defense is almost useless! (in hindsight i guess spending all your scrap on exp items is a good use of it??)
- same ru isa dialogue in both centipede mech fights
- sidegoals of stone cores remain even after collection
- character textboxes before ru island second boss allow you to open them, but they immediately close (and you're stuck in place unable to do anything)
- holy shit the second temple is "go in a square loop 3 times with barely altered rooms"
- overworld enemy icons don't correlate to the enemy type at all (as seen in temple 1 where there's several enemy sprites but they're all the same mech)
- can't place the orb in the thing (update: you have to run down the hall, place orb in statue, go through door, grab orb, run back up)
- lava on the island 2 revisit just isn't fun to try and roll over + the sun damage is actually annoying unlike visit 1 and there's way more forced damage/"no shade to run under" segments
- game froze after beating centipede mech fight 2, forced to quit the game and use autosave to fight it again
- several pieces of dialogue near the end of the game have the right half of the screen pure white instead of the character art that's supposed to be there
- objective tracker doesn't get rid of side goals after you achieve them in rizal visit 2
- rizal core mission is marked as "RIZAL_CORE1" in map. no way that's how it's supposed to be
- another textbox that freezes your game in rizal visit 2 town
- there's a key area in the inventory. i didn't get a single key once in my gameplay
- first third of the game has you unlock a whole two bonus attacks for characters with sidequests/npc dialogue. the only other unlocks i could find were the end of game mandatory super attack ones.

is Infinite Guitars the worst game out there? probably not. however, you'd have to kill me before I recommended this game to a single soul unless it goes through a ton of patches and changes.

Made me go "H-H-HELLL YEAHHH!" when it started, but yeah there are definitely better executions of this out there. This one just has so much personality though!

Also has music from Shady Cicada, insaneintherain, and Louis Zhou in the game, which I did not know before hand and was surprised to see as they're all great youtube composers that I've been a fan of for a long time.

Long story short it tries to be really cool with tons of style and sakuga, but the moment to moment gameplay ends up feeling, like so many other indies, repetitive and predicable.