Final Fantasy is my favorite video game franchise, with its consistently excellent music being a primary reason why. And as an avid rhythm-game-enjoyer since the heyday of Guitar Hero, I was really excited at the announcement of Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, featuring soundtracks from all mainline FF games and countless spin-offs alike.
I vowed to Full Combo every song in the game, and while this turned out to be a massively difficult task, I did get pretty close. In the end I got 1,697 out of 1801 Perfect Chains across all difficulty levels (including DLC), mostly missing some of the most brutal charts in the game. The All-Star Carnival version of Battle at the Big Bridge is easily the hardest of all, I genuinely think I have a better shot at a Through the Fire and Flames full combo.
Rhythm games live and die by their control scheme, and Theatrhythm's seemed unusually simple to me. Just four lanes, normal red notes can be hit with any of the face buttons or triggers on the controller, green notes are just sustained versions of that, and yellow notes are reserved for the left/right sticks. It has often been typical for major rhythm games to be entirely designed around some sort of unique controller peripheral, whether it be a DDR dance pad, a Guitar Hero guitar, or even DK bongos, so playing on an everyday Switch pro controller felt like a step down in quality, especially as notorious for stick drift as that platform is. (I know this game is on PS4 as well and it's probably better there, but I'm just going off my experience.) The optimal way to play faster and tougher charts ends up being utilizing the L and R buttons for the vast majority of the work, allowing thumbs to be kept on both sticks at all times. Surprisingly and most importantly, this is still a ton of fun. Legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu's work (and others) play a large part in that of course, but I've played this game with friends who weren't even big Final Fantasy fans, and they still enjoyed it. Just goes to show that it really doesn't take much for this style of game to be fun, hitting notes in rhythm games is just a naturally addictive dopamine rush.
My biggest complaint with this game as Final Fantasy VI's strongest soldier, is of course the mistreatment of Dancing Mad. A work of art comparable to The Mona Lisa or The Statue of David, this ~17 minute long final boss odyssey has been reduced to about 2 minutes, just from the fourth movement. And it stops before it even gets to the best part of the fourth movement. I'm not saying that all seventeen minutes should be one long song, but the usual ~10 minute version would have been nice, or at least include each of the four parts separately. In fact, nearly all of the music that was also in Curtain Call is just two minute tracks. This made sense in that game stuck on the 3DS with less memory, but with Theatrhythm upgrading to Switch, this just feels like a lazy amount of copy/pasting. Even new tracks that weren't in Curtain Call feel trimmed down unnecessarily, like The Airbuster from the FF7 Remake. This is made more insulting by the Advent Children movie version of One-Winged Angel being its proper six-minute length, or The Dance of Silver and Crimson clocking in at 3:32. Shadowlord from the NIER DLC is also 4:32, just as another example.
Another issue with the track list and piece of evidence that the bulk of the setlist was copy/pasted is the selection from Final Fantasy XIV Online. This ongoing MMO had received the Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringer, and Endwalker expansions all between the release of the previous Theatrhythm game and this one, and yet the majority of the FFXIV songs are still from the original A Realm Reborn. The current most popular Final Fantasy title, with over ~24million registered users as of 2021, should have been handled with more up-to-date care.
Still, the overall track list is massive with most of the important Final Fantasy bases covered. DLC music from other Square Enix titles like Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, and Chrono Trigger have since been added to make the catalog feel even more complete. There's even story-mode type missions with unlockable characters that have different attributes and moves, but its mostly just bells and whistles and hardly the focus of the experience. A whole game centered around the most stacked musical lineup in gaming may be incapable of being bad, and even as an FF superfan I still found music I had never heard before. But to those who are anything less than big fans of Final Fantasy, this one probably isn't for you.
3.0/5.0
I vowed to Full Combo every song in the game, and while this turned out to be a massively difficult task, I did get pretty close. In the end I got 1,697 out of 1801 Perfect Chains across all difficulty levels (including DLC), mostly missing some of the most brutal charts in the game. The All-Star Carnival version of Battle at the Big Bridge is easily the hardest of all, I genuinely think I have a better shot at a Through the Fire and Flames full combo.
Rhythm games live and die by their control scheme, and Theatrhythm's seemed unusually simple to me. Just four lanes, normal red notes can be hit with any of the face buttons or triggers on the controller, green notes are just sustained versions of that, and yellow notes are reserved for the left/right sticks. It has often been typical for major rhythm games to be entirely designed around some sort of unique controller peripheral, whether it be a DDR dance pad, a Guitar Hero guitar, or even DK bongos, so playing on an everyday Switch pro controller felt like a step down in quality, especially as notorious for stick drift as that platform is. (I know this game is on PS4 as well and it's probably better there, but I'm just going off my experience.) The optimal way to play faster and tougher charts ends up being utilizing the L and R buttons for the vast majority of the work, allowing thumbs to be kept on both sticks at all times. Surprisingly and most importantly, this is still a ton of fun. Legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu's work (and others) play a large part in that of course, but I've played this game with friends who weren't even big Final Fantasy fans, and they still enjoyed it. Just goes to show that it really doesn't take much for this style of game to be fun, hitting notes in rhythm games is just a naturally addictive dopamine rush.
My biggest complaint with this game as Final Fantasy VI's strongest soldier, is of course the mistreatment of Dancing Mad. A work of art comparable to The Mona Lisa or The Statue of David, this ~17 minute long final boss odyssey has been reduced to about 2 minutes, just from the fourth movement. And it stops before it even gets to the best part of the fourth movement. I'm not saying that all seventeen minutes should be one long song, but the usual ~10 minute version would have been nice, or at least include each of the four parts separately. In fact, nearly all of the music that was also in Curtain Call is just two minute tracks. This made sense in that game stuck on the 3DS with less memory, but with Theatrhythm upgrading to Switch, this just feels like a lazy amount of copy/pasting. Even new tracks that weren't in Curtain Call feel trimmed down unnecessarily, like The Airbuster from the FF7 Remake. This is made more insulting by the Advent Children movie version of One-Winged Angel being its proper six-minute length, or The Dance of Silver and Crimson clocking in at 3:32. Shadowlord from the NIER DLC is also 4:32, just as another example.
Another issue with the track list and piece of evidence that the bulk of the setlist was copy/pasted is the selection from Final Fantasy XIV Online. This ongoing MMO had received the Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringer, and Endwalker expansions all between the release of the previous Theatrhythm game and this one, and yet the majority of the FFXIV songs are still from the original A Realm Reborn. The current most popular Final Fantasy title, with over ~24million registered users as of 2021, should have been handled with more up-to-date care.
Still, the overall track list is massive with most of the important Final Fantasy bases covered. DLC music from other Square Enix titles like Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, and Chrono Trigger have since been added to make the catalog feel even more complete. There's even story-mode type missions with unlockable characters that have different attributes and moves, but its mostly just bells and whistles and hardly the focus of the experience. A whole game centered around the most stacked musical lineup in gaming may be incapable of being bad, and even as an FF superfan I still found music I had never heard before. But to those who are anything less than big fans of Final Fantasy, this one probably isn't for you.
3.0/5.0