Other than general recommendations and reading the title I had no idea what to expect going into this one, so diet Layton with a bunch of short rhythm games with varied gameplay was a surprise that was probably for the better. The brassy big band/aggressively french themes that color the most prominent musical motifs of the game weren't a particularly big standout for me, but I did like a handful of other songs that depart from that. The storytelling felt pretty lackluster overall with some plot threads left unresolved at the end and unlike Layton I really don't know if this is ever getting a sequel to address them. Gameplay wise I mostly enjoyed it even if there were some minigames that were just painful, and I'm not even talking about the motion control ones which mostly worked fine for me, but ones where the visuals were really non indicative of what the right timing/action was supposed to be even though that's meant to be a big thing for this game. Football kicking/dogs eating bread instantly come to mind, definitely made me go "fuck that" when I saw that the requirement to unlock the last bonus chapter was to get an A on everything. Even for a few of the others since you get one sentence's worth of explanation at most it can take a few tries just to be able to pass them, but other than those I found most of them easy to get used to. One thing that pleasantly surprised me and that I probably should've seen coming were the tribute stages to Space Channel 5 and Samba de Amigo (even if I've never actually played the latter).

Pretty gooooood. As most people have said this game is a hidden gem, albeit with a few flaws.

Gameplay: The actual rhythm games themselves are pretty fun, my biggest gripe with these, however, are the ones where you have to tilt the system. The sensitivity genuinely screwed me over at times, and I think would've just been better off, by utilizing the L&R buttons (which fun fact: do not end up being utilized until the end of the game). Thankfully, there are only a couple of these throughout the whole game, but I think it's also the only thing preventing me from trying to A Rank every rhythm game. Also, some of these get brutal towards the end, I don't know how they were ranking the difficulty. Everything outside of the main rhythm games, were alright. The little puzzles that were kinda there, neat, and most of it usually consists of walking around the map, and having to find a sound to progress with the story. Oh also, fuck trying to find those Phantom Notes, they REALLY want you to fuck up your screen (not that I did, but they want you to be meticulous).

Soundtrack: I don't have much to say, it was stellar, I saw some names I recognized being attached at the credits, and I wasn't surprised that the music was so good (Tomoya Ohtani being the main composer, he works on a lot of music for Sonic)

Story and Presentation: The fully animated cutscenes are very nice, but ending it on a cliffhanger kinda sucks cuz there's no signs of a sequel :( . I will say the artstyle is pretty nice, albeit a bit simple (in-game character art specifically) but I imagine it makes animating the lip movements easy as well as the character idles in-game. As for the actual narrative, I thought it was a pretty nice story.

Overall, I had good time with this game, I really want a sequel so they can fix some of the flaws, and even flesh out some of the overworld stuff.

Every time I play this game I'm less sure what to think of it, I love the rhythm games themselves but the way it is handled is abysmal. It's truly Sega's answer on Professor Layton except with a focus on rhythm games rather than puzzles. I love the story driven rhythm games, but I feel like the story of Rhythm Thief never goes beyond it's surface level and opportunities to do so have never materialized. The game ends in a cliffhanger, with no sequel to be seen because it's reportedly canceled.

It's a shame because the series had the potential to be the next Professor Layton if they kept it up, but SEGA threw it to the wind. If you love rhythm games it's definitely worth taking out but if you're in for a truly story driven game look someone else as you'll never be given an satisfying conclusion.

Here's one I feel bad about. I know a lot of people are fans of this one and think it's a crying shame that SEGA never followed this one up. Unfortunately, I can't count myself among that number. I'm really sorry, it's a fun story with a cool presentation, as is always the case with "gentleman thief" adventures. But this game just really rubbed me the wrong way.

Let's start with the rhythm mini-games themselves. In my notes from when I played this, I observed that I really struggled to get the timing on some of them. At the time, I couldn't account for why, but reviewing footage, I... actually kinda think it's my sense of rhythm in some places? I don't mean this as a put-down for the composer, more just my experience playing against me here.

For context, I'm not formally trained in music or anything, but I played guitar for several years as a kid and have been singing in various choirs my whole life. Timing and tempo is generally one of my strong suits, provided I have accompaniment to follow. My familiarity generally lies with European and American folk music or stuff drawing from that melodic tradition - so a lot of stuff in very basic 4/4 (Common) or 3/4 (Waltz) time, though I sing splenty of stuff in 2/2 or 6/8 as well. The most exotic I generally run into is something like 5/4 or 9/8, but then that often just reduces to split measures of (2/4 and 3/4) or (6/8 and 3/8)? Basically, my experience is in pretty simple time signatures and playing around within those - so while I do have plenty of experience with syncopation or triplets or pickups or stuff like that, I don't have a ton of exposure to more freeform time signatures like you see in jazz.

That's relevant not because Rhythm Thief's jazzy soundtrack is freeform - it sticks in Common time, so familiar territory for me - but because its prompts are on off-beats. Consider R02, for example. If you're only paying attention to the tempo of the music, the whole thing is a very consistent beat. Try counting out the tempo - you should never need to switch up your "ONE-two-three-four-ONE-two-three-four". Even with just the gameplay footage, you can apply this effect, no matter what the actions on-screen are. Now throw in the prompts, and it's a different picture. Each of the different colors has a different timing associated with it. Yellow (I think? Colorblindness is also an issue) gives a two-beat prompt, making the player pose on the third beat. Red has a three-beat prompt, with ? showing up for two and ! showing up for one, before the player must pose on the fourth beat. Blue is a one-beat prompt, with ? and ! each occupying a half-beat before the player poses on beat two. Green is usually mixed with other statues, but it looks like it offers a single beat's preptime, with just the ! prompt.

Now, I worry that this is sort-of a convention of the rhythm genre that I'm calling out in ignorance. My rhythm game experience is with stuff like Guitar Hero, Elite Beat Agents, and Space Channel 5 - games that have pretty different approaches to rhythm from this (Guitar Hero and EBA have your notes fade in, Space Channel 5 is call-and-response) - so there's still plenty for me to explore within the genre. But I dunno. I might not have a ton of direct experience with Rhythm Heaven - something that strikes me as a decent point of comparison - but I've at least seen enough of it to know how it goes. To pull a random example that stuck out to me, look at "Air Rally" from Rhythm Heaven Fever. The player is constantly doing something, but Forthington always gives the player lead-in on tempo changes, whether it's the "BA BUM Bum bum" for a rally on alternating beats or the "two-three-four" when switching back to the standard cadence. The whole point of that minigame is that the visuals are quite unimportant, so much so that the game challenges the player to keep up the tempo despite visual distractions like flying through cloud cover and Forthington zooming way ahead for some rallies. It never tries to surprise the player beyond easily-established, consistent parameters.

...I dunno, maybe that's not a one-to-one comparison. Rhythm Thief's use of off-tempo or syncopated prompts to surprise and challenge the player is clearly the intended design, one it's at least dutifully introducing right away in the earliest missions. But I couldn't really jive with it. Something like Rhythm Heaven falls much more in cadence with how I understand and listen for music. I get the impression that a person's favorite rhythm game comes down to an individual player's taste in music as much as anything, so I can accept that not holding true for me.

I'm relying on my notes a bit here since the mini-games haven't really stuck with me, but I guess I also had issues with the controls in general? The gyroscope-heavy mini-games felt less like I was mastering some skill and more like I was flailing about wildly, since the timing's always gonna be a bit fiddly with something so analogue as a gyroscopic input. I struggled a bit with some of the stylus-swiping games, like the Soccer Rallies, since nailing speed with precision swiping is... also pretty fiddly (if you're sloppy with diagonals, the game's liable to get confused). I noted that I struggled with the ones where you hold a button, since the game seemed inconsistent about if it was counting whole A-presses or Half A-presses...? Are these things other people noticed with the game, or did Past Me just need to git gud?

Something that I very thoroughly remember struggling with are the collectables. During the exploration parts of the game, you have to poke around each screen to collect odds and ends. You do this for three things - Sounds, Phantom Notes, and Medals. Medals are basically Professor Layton Hint Coints, and you can grind them out anyway by clearing Mini-Games, so whatever. Sounds are always tied to specific objects or people, and while some are story-relevant, you can generally sort out what might produce sound in a given scene, so those are generally fine. It's those Phantom Notes that really got me, though. The game hypes them up early, and a tool tip warning me that they'd disappear if I didn't snag 'em before the chapter's end gave me the wrong impression. What the game means is that you'll have to waste Medals buying them after the fact, if you miss them on your first pass, and that they're COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. What I thought was going on was that they were pretty darn important, if not necessary for an ending. So... I spent the game tap-tap-tapping each screen, searching for the little guys. And when you find one, it's actually split into five, and you have a short window to find the remaining four on the same screen before the "puzzle" resets and you have to start again from the top.

Here's something I generally don't feel the need to talk about online: I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. This informs a LOT about how I experience video games (among other things), but I rarely feel the need to qualify my perspective through that lens because I don't feel like it's important to articulate. It'd be like if I came sauntering in to every bit of commentary with "As someone who loves muffins" or "Speaking as a natural brunet". If it's relevant, it's usually self-evident, so what's the point in mentioning it?

Well... this is an exception to the rule. So I quite like Collectathons as an overall genre - there's something aesthetically pleasing and relieving to seeing that I have X of X things on the status screen, and that tension of building up to that max count makes a guy feel good. I assume most people who like Collectathons feel this way, and while I'm not so self-important as to claim that I love them more than anyone else or anything like that - there's a reason 3D platforming (which many Collectathons are) is my comfort genre. I tend to be pretty rock solid when it comes to Collectathons, and if I don't keep myself in check, I'll just... keep going and going and going with one. Even when it stops being fun, it becomes a thing to do. Even when I want it to stop, I can't stop until it is done.

The Phantom Notes, particularly as I misunderstood them, represent an instance where I could not stop. The game gave no indication for where and how I'd be encountering the Phantom Notes. Just that they existed, and I had to look for them, and I had to keep looking for them, and that I had to keep trying even after I found them, because they were in chunks. And where the Phantom Notes are hidden is not really broadcast or hinted at or anything. Any loose detail on the background could be where a Phantom Note is. I know this system is trying to invoke the Professor Layton Hint Coins (same as the Medals), but the difference there is that the Hint Coins exist purely as flavor and for hints. No content in the game is gated behind them (besides hints, which you don't need), and the highest bragging right in Curious Village only ever requires that you collect half of them. In Rhythm Thief, two mini-games are gated behind the Phantom Notes, and in fact the final mini-game requires acing every other mini-game. I didn't get that last one (I eventually did draw the line), but I did grind out every Phantom Note and had a miserable time earning that second-to-last mini-game.

This is definitely an instance where I would've preferred the game if it was just a visual novel. The story's cool! The characters are fun! This is a fun fantasy take on Paris! The soundtrack's good! I... didn't like actually playing the game, outside the mini-games that are hat-tips to other SEGA rhythm games, complete with "Vamos a Carnaval" and "Mexican Flyer" (and... some track from Feel the Magic XX/XY that I don't recognize). I'm really sorry! If you liked the game, that's great! I wanted to like it, too! Maybe I'd have a different take on it on revisit? It's just, this must be a review rooted in my thoughts surrounding that playthrough, and... well, to quote my notes from when I played it back in 2017:

"The very last thing I needed to collect in the game - the last Sound to clear out on my list - was that of a comically fat man violently farting. I hate that that's the final image I have of the game, but it probably best represents my relationship with it: something I really tried to like but was ultimately rewarded with a thoroughly unpleasant experience."