On paper, this should be amazing. Rhythm Heaven on the Nintendo DS is one of the best rhythm games ever made, so throwing games from it and other entries in the Rhythm Heaven series together on the 3DS should be a slam dunk. Megamix is instead bafflingly disappointing.
For one, the music sucks. For a rhythm game, that is a death knell. Megamix suffers from a problem that many series did in transitioning to the 3DS system, once they were freed from the constraints of a limited sound board. The limitations of the DS caused composers to play to the system's strengths, creating strong melodies with simple instrumentation. With the advent of being able to record any and all types of music, game makers for the 3DS embraced heavily synthed and over-produced tracks that would have been impossible on earlier hardware. (The Pokemon X and Y games were especially guilty of this, having multiple climactic battles scored with lazy synth chord progressions.)
For a rhythm game, having a mushy, nondistinctive melody directly impacts gameplay for the worse. I cannot overstate how limp this game feels to play. At its strongest, this franchise has magical synergy between the musical tracks and the sounds of the player actions, helping the player feel like they are contributing to the music as much as the music is instructing them to play. Megamix has none of that synergy, instead feeling like a poorly scored game of simon says.
Most bafflingly, the mini-games are much shorter than in other entries of the series. It makes me wonder if this was to hide the fact that, while they were adapting the scenarios and graphics of previous games in the series, they did not have the ability to write or reuse compelling music to match. It cheapens the experience further, and makes me wonder what the point of this project was in the first place.
In my rating system, 2 stars represent an average, C rank game. I award Rhythm Heaven Megamix a single star as a D rank game. It is functional, but feels like an active waste of time. It has an insultingly juvenile story and set of nonsense characters that exist solely to dress up minigame selection screens with lines and lines of pointless banter. I feel sorry for and insulted on the behalf of the translator that had to come up with so many flat dad-jokes to fill the space.
Please do not consider this game representative of the series, for it is a weird aberration that feels closer to a bad fan project that somehow conned its way into having an official release.
For one, the music sucks. For a rhythm game, that is a death knell. Megamix suffers from a problem that many series did in transitioning to the 3DS system, once they were freed from the constraints of a limited sound board. The limitations of the DS caused composers to play to the system's strengths, creating strong melodies with simple instrumentation. With the advent of being able to record any and all types of music, game makers for the 3DS embraced heavily synthed and over-produced tracks that would have been impossible on earlier hardware. (The Pokemon X and Y games were especially guilty of this, having multiple climactic battles scored with lazy synth chord progressions.)
For a rhythm game, having a mushy, nondistinctive melody directly impacts gameplay for the worse. I cannot overstate how limp this game feels to play. At its strongest, this franchise has magical synergy between the musical tracks and the sounds of the player actions, helping the player feel like they are contributing to the music as much as the music is instructing them to play. Megamix has none of that synergy, instead feeling like a poorly scored game of simon says.
Most bafflingly, the mini-games are much shorter than in other entries of the series. It makes me wonder if this was to hide the fact that, while they were adapting the scenarios and graphics of previous games in the series, they did not have the ability to write or reuse compelling music to match. It cheapens the experience further, and makes me wonder what the point of this project was in the first place.
In my rating system, 2 stars represent an average, C rank game. I award Rhythm Heaven Megamix a single star as a D rank game. It is functional, but feels like an active waste of time. It has an insultingly juvenile story and set of nonsense characters that exist solely to dress up minigame selection screens with lines and lines of pointless banter. I feel sorry for and insulted on the behalf of the translator that had to come up with so many flat dad-jokes to fill the space.
Please do not consider this game representative of the series, for it is a weird aberration that feels closer to a bad fan project that somehow conned its way into having an official release.
3 Comments
@Radshyguy What’s the problem? I have 6 letter grades I like to use for tiering games, and they don’t match up perfectly with a 5 star rating system. All rating systems are arbitrary, but I feel it polite to let people know that how I use the stars of this website is a necessary compromise for my enjoyment of its other features. I appreciate that you read my thoughts to the end of what I wrote here, but do not think you have expressed a complete thought as to what you perceive as a problem. If the only impulse was born out of desired enforced conformity, I will happily stick out.
@Radshyguy I mean they've got a star rating on the review anyway.
Radshyguy
1 year ago