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.