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.