This game mixes the textual and metatextual sense of spectacle in an admirable way.
Combat aside, it is very little spontaneous, despite being an action game. Everything has its tempo, and that leads to a routine.
Jump here when the obstacle allows it, shoot at this grid target, destroy the wall when the circles say so. Not my ideal adventure.
But
Overthrowing a megacorp requires a plan, and in the capitalist world there is very little room for freedom, for expression, to explode with music and colors... Does it have any aesthetic sense?
Poetry is made through its structure: the idea of ​​visuals that seem to be ripped from a Jetix mid 2000 show in an explosive and colorful action game, driving a happy and carefree protagonist who literally has music in his heart and perceives The world through it, fight against machines and managers through offices and automated production floors brandishing a guitar made of scrap, which, strangely enough, takes on a pristine and ideal appearance the more we fight.
Although of course, it is better if we stick to the tempo that the world marks us (literally).
wow.
A very current dichotomy for those of us who grew up in the 2000s with the new wave of 3d action games -the misnamed """"hack n slash character action game stylisssh""" - with the new music distribution formats through Internet, the anime fansub booms and, above all, with the promises of a better future, social, labor and technological.
It doesn't matter if we look back in the days or to the future, now it sounds like utopia.
-----------------------

- Remake in the form of a mashup is something that attracts me. I see it as more honest reinterpretation than trying to be "the new standard" by holding on to past ideas.
It allows authors/programmers to be recognized as people and establishes links of understanding with them and with a medium without a real canon.
For me, Hi fi Rush is closer to Bravely Default, Tunic, Assault Spy or Spark The Electric Jester 3 than Hollow Knight, Drainus or anything from Team Ladybug because it rips off a piece of time and to articulate a fantasy that goes back to a happy and fleeting time (the truth is that at the governmental and economic level the 2000s were pretty fucked up in their last stretch) not to entrench themselves in them, but to introspect how memory is intermingled with the present. and it only takes a couple of hours of gameplay to understand this.

I guess I see it similar to all those people who say "wow its like ps2 game!"
maybe.


I haven't had a chance to play Astral Chain but I think it's beautiful that Taura ripped a piece of Japanese pop culture from Tokusatsu and Sci-fi anime (misunderstood as "cyberpunk") and made a game where the simple activity of watching and walking the streets is on the same level as the action.
Build their universes based on formative references or young fetishes. Because nowadays, how many adults have time to discover and be as passionate as when they were children? It's not vulgar nostalgia, it's the sad life cycle that some people find themselves in.

-Although I think that the planning of the game and its fiction point to the precarious and inhuman reality in which we live, articulated as a capitalist critique for children (this is good), everything is too scripted. Not condescending, patterned.
Navigating the stages is a tedious low-key and unsophisticated score, while the combat is a good jam session where finding your own rhythm and fitting it in with the world becomes a wonderful thing.

Although to be honest, this part of combat is not something new
At least if, like me, you grew up with Bloody Palace and God Hand while your mother listened to bootleg CDs of Sleater Kinney and Linkin Park at high volume?
I don't know, I don't see this being the game I return to repeatedly with my mixtapes... in a few years maybe

But I like this game, it's not the passion project they're trying to sell us, but it certainly has passion on it.
and bonus points for using Whirring as a killer track.
lovely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2BUEzdjfpY