It's got your expected warts of a first-entry in a flagship series: some inconsistent tiering for songs, so many bad fake outros, a wonky hammer-on/pull-off system, iffy hit detection, and a lot of graphical ugliness among others (Neversoft style > Harmonix style imo). But overall it's impressive how quickly they were onto what made this series so magnetic in its day (before it was milked to death, of course). Injecting traditionally eastern rhythm gameplay (at the time) into a traditionally western frame was a genius move - and even if master recordings will always be superior, I'll be honest... I've always found a sort of charm to these early GH covers. They're not that bad! And the ones that are are at least uniquely and humorously so. The fact that this is still so playable even today should perfectly showcase how airtight the formula is. Pandora supremacy 🤘

Reviewed on Jan 27, 2024


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