It's just a demo for now, but this game is so full of charm and I love the aesthetics. It clicked very quickly for me as a big fan of Parappa, which this game's mechanics seem to take heavy inspiration from. The animation is so full of life, and the music is pretty catchy too. It is still pretty obviously in early development, but I will definitely be keeping tabs on this game's progress. If I had one complaint, I'd say that I found myself getting lost and directionless in the game's hubworld while playing the "story" despite its short length, so maybe some arrows or map would alleviate this. I pretty much just stumbled onto Nami and McWave's segments by complete accident.

I feel like this is a potentially good game. The main things holding it back are its weird control scheme, input system, and soundtrack.

The art, "story", and charm of this demo is super cool. I really like the vibe this game uses. The issue comes when you actually play it. I played it on keyboard and you have to use both the Q,W,E,A,S, and D keys with your left hands, but your arrow keys with your right hands. This control scheme is not intuitive at all and, at the time of writing this, there is no way to change it.

Not that it would help all that much anyway because the game's input system is just completely incorrect, inputting hits later than they should. This combined with the lag and the control scheme makes playing this a genuine nightmare.

The other main issue is that the music is.... not great. Nami.wav is good, and Stir & Mix is okay, but the idea of using tts and utau banks for a parappa style game just does not work when implemented like that. I think if they were at least tuned, it would be better, but the way it is executed, especially in Grease Poppin' sounds like shit.

Lastly, and this has nothing to do with the game itself, but I personally hate how the online reception to this game is to basically Nickelodeon All Star Brawl it to make people hate fnf, when they are two completely different games. It is a genuinely stupid thing to do and you stupid for doing it.

There are some smaller issues like the UI being confusing or the overworld being basic and hard to navigate, but I know these are being changed in the future. And that's the kicker. Since this is a SAGE demo, this could very much improve in the future. And I hope it does, because the stuff that work, really really work.

I pray for this game's success.

Hell naw, adoro lo juegos de ritmo en serio, y ver cómo evoluciona este título en específico me da vida, los dos nuevos niveles que han añadido están super chulos y son MUY creativos, uno un partido de tenis que además de ser como el Parappa también tienes que acertar el darle a la bola después de cada línea, muy buena muy buena. La otra novedad es una canción que hace referencia al Puyo Puyo y dios… Qué buena… Muy rollo disco, con unos visuals chulísimos y referencias muy guapas como que cuando la tía canta y 4 notas son iguales se elimina porque así funciona el puto Puyo Puyo jsjs, dios, qué genio el desarrollador.
Si os molan los juegos de ritmo probadlo que es gratis y ahora en total tiene 6 niveles.

This log is for the update they released for SAGE 2023 (and the bugfix version as opposed to the launch version to be specific) because after experiencing it WOW I HAVE to talk about it.

This update was just AMAZING. Prior of playing it a friend said that this was 𝘴𝘰 much different than the prior versions and my god, they weren't kidding at ALL like JESUS CHRIST A FULLY 3D WORLD, like, don't get me wrong, I liked the 2D world it went with, it was fun and was done pretty well (albeit if I did feel the Keyboard skating felt a bit limited for it) but THIS? This is like, So MUCH was completely REMADE entirely. Rooms, interiors, doors, added easter eggs, etc. It makes the world feel SO MUCH more ALIVE than before, and even adds a feel of progression by having a bit more of limited visibility on things like the feds at the beginning. It adds SO MUCH heart and soul to this world it's just nuts. In a way the visuals of the world kind of remind me of the visuals of UNBEATABLE [white label] which is FAR from a bad thing as it looks GREAT. Not to mention the newly added lightning and use of 3D models is just, 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘧𝘧'𝘴 𝘬𝘪𝘴𝘴.

And as for the songs like JESUS CHRIST they did NOT need to go to this extreme but they DID, basically doing a LOT of changes to these songs (with the first one being basically a completely NEW one) was just amazing. I do kind of miss the originals a bit since I'm a bit used to them in my mind more, but these ones are still amazing and gave me just as, if not MORE of a great time listening them for the first time, as the original versions did for the first time as well. Like they even added completely NEW segments to the 1st one and redid art to make it more fitting within the graffiti they were making! Like this is just one of many signs of LJ LephemStar going ABOVE and beyond to deliver an AMAZING update.

Oh, and the brand NEW songs? Oh, they're just unbelievable. Like, the added animation, the beats to them, the Tennis and Puzzle game set up, and the fact that they're TWO SEGA references back to back of SEGA Superstars Tennis 𝐀𝐍𝐃 Puyo Puyo? Like this is just amazing and amazing touches for this being unveiled at SAGE 2023 and released as the demo of that event. Just absolutely wonderful.

A cool idea I have in terms of the original songs, once the full game releases, I think it would be really cool if the original versions of these songs were available as unlockables after beating the game or S ranking their respective 𝘯𝘦𝘸 versions for the first time. Like, THAT would be amazing.

I do have a few nit picks, like I kind of miss the og loading screen with Melodii jumping over the record player's stylus, like that was pretty cute, but the new one is still pretty clean and nice to look at so not much of a complaint, I feel like it's missing a walking animation in before the jogging and piano board animation, but I also understand why it's not in since I'd take a long while to get it set up accounting for joystick sensitivity and whatnot. And also, one weird thing, is that they removed the crowd complaining about the poor service in the McWave stage when you get a game over. Like that was one of my favorite parts of that stage and it's weird that it got removed. Fingers crossed that it's not permanent and just to make room for other stuff to then add back later. Oh and also it not starting immediately in full screen but that's VERY minor tbf, and also some control issues I had and they were 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺 on my end so that's my own damn fault, but I feel that they should allow for face buttons to have more than one command as mapping the confirm and go back actions to the triggers, while worked perfectly fine and I got used to it fairly quickly, kind of made me wish I could have used the buttons instead after a bit.

And also, this isn't something I experienced, but my friend also told me that the launch version of this demo was 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 buggy on launch. As I said I played the bugfix version and as far as that went I didn't experience any bugs so in that regard, yeah the bugfix version pretty much cleaned everything up and is the way to go, but I do hope that for future releases they can make sure that there aren't as many bugs on future releases as possible so that people who play them first and foremost (like my friend as they 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 like this game) can have a solid experience without any bugs in the way. I understand no bugs is practically impossible as these demos 𝘢𝘳𝘦 a work in progress after all, I just wish that hopefully for the future there's a bit more balancing in that regard.

But yeah other than that, I had a BLAST with this demo. Like it's clear how much effort, work and PASSION went into this update. Like, even the MENUS got a massive overhaul and they look great as well, super quick to navigate and have a vibe that REALLY complements the Title Screen and Menu theme. Like this is just a delight.

This new update turned an experience that I 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 thought was quite great even with how little was there at that time and couldn't 𝘸𝘢𝘪𝘵 to see more, into honestly, one of the most 𝗙𝗨𝗡 experiences, I've HAD this year. And for that alone, I HAVE to give it an extra something at least. There's just something about it, how the art looks, how the sound effects when improvising sound, that make me feel lost in a good way when playing it. I EAGERLY await what comes next for this project and my best wishes and luck to LJ LephemStar and the rest of the team!

I don't know man, this game has like... no tangible identity of its own? It's Parappa and Friday Night Funkin in a blender but it lacks the style, groove, and uniqueness of both. Parappa's weird, absurdist motion-capture animation gave the characters that inhabited that game a charming and almost puppet-like sense of movement, and FNF is like the ultimate amalgamation of every splashy Newgrounds cartoon combined into something digestible and graffiti-esque. You could look at these two games in a vacuum and identify them probably off of a single glance.

By comparison, Scratchin' Melodii frankly looks a little shitty and hastily thrown-together. It tries to combine these psychedelic, uncanny 3D graphics alongside a reductive, cartoonish 2D artstyle, and it just... doesn't work? Like, at all? When you start the game you're introduced to these strange, oversaturated yet VHS-filtered alien music things that speak to Melodii with Utau Vocaloid voices. The tutorial makes you think "oh, okay, this game's gonna be on the weirder side, it'll be trippy and psychedelic throughout." But the moment the tutorial ends and Melodii wakes up in their room, the artstyle suddenly turns into a cutesy Saturday Morning Cartoon that feels like the lovechild of Rhythm Heaven and Bee & Puppycat. It's just fucking jarring, and the game never manages to combine these two worlds comfortably at all. The characters stand out and contrast against the psychedelic, vaporwave-y cartoons too much and it makes the entire game feel kind of amateurish, like it's trying desperately to recreate the 2D-3D hybrid style of Parappa but without understanding what made Parappa's artstyle tick (which was the fact that everything was consistently off-kilter and cartoony, not just certain things). It's just strangely unpleasant to look at and I can't even quite put my finger on why. If it had honed in more on either the 'vaporwave absurdism' or the 'kid-friendly cartoon' end of the visual seesaw I'd like this game's presentation more, but it feels like it's trapped between both worlds and neither style gets a chance to really stand out as a result.

And frankly, the music's not much better. The vocal tuning on the Utau synthesizers used for each character is... not good. You can't understand what most of the characters are saying without the handy subtitles, and for some reason the quality of those vocaloids notably dips in the last song, "Grease Poppin". The characters literally sound like they're singing in 144p, why does it sound so shitty??? Also, I swear to god Melodii's own Vocaloid changes during this song to a completely different one. Why?????? Was-- was this a bug? How do you fuck that up? The only song that sounds all that good is, go figure, the only one with an actual singer & voice actor. "Nami.WAV" is a tropical, trippy bop with the smoothest groove in the game, and it makes me wish every other character other than Melodii had original voices of their own because the tuning is so consistently shitty throughout, especially during the first and last songs.

(I will say, I actually quite like the BGM in this game. I found myself nodding my head or humming along to the overworld songs and some incidental music. It's honestly kind of embarrassing how the background tracks outshine the actual standout songs in my eyes, but that's what good mixing & mastering will do for your music, I guess).

The control scheme on computer is also unintuitive and awkward-feeling, the UI could use some work on making it more comprehensible, and this game's got some notable lag & input problems. I'm willing to bump this up by a half-star, though, because I actually really, really dig the idea of the game prioritizing freestyling over simply hitting the notes. You'll get a better score if you experiment and play additional notes & melodies so long as you stay within the confines of the rhythm, and I actually really like that, it encourages creativity and experimentation while also testing your rhythm chops. That hook alone almost makes the game cool, but practically everything else drags it down apart from the feel-good, quirky attitude the game has (and even then the vibe this game has isn't exactly 'unique', it's just wholesome).

I don't want to judge this too harshly given that it's basically just a demo, but like... even for a demo, this game feels blatantly unfinished, especially in the music and presentation department. Demos are supposed to hit you with a strong first impression but Melodii didn't leave much of an impression on me at all. The visual style is confused and mismatched, the four vocal songs are poorly-mixed and the composition is subpar minus one standout track, and it just doesn't feel all that fun to play thanks to a muddled UI and control scheme. This needs some more time in the oven. I want it to succeed because, again, that freestyling thing is fucking cool, not enough rhythm games have tried doing that before. But as it stands... yyyeah, it's got potential but that's really it.

Nami best girl. 2.2 / 5.