i love you, short, quirky 90's rhythm games.

I enjoyed Bust A Groove (or Bust A Move, as I played it) a nice amount. About as much as I was expecting to, really. The gameplay is pretty simple once you actually figure out what they're asking of you and it doesn't take any longer than an hour to finish up a single character's campaign. At the moment, I've only seen Strike's ending, but I'm sure I'll be returning to this game occasionally to try out the rest.

The music is great and easy to follow, as should be the case with any rhythm game, though I think I would have appreciated a little more experimentation when it came to each song's tempo. Combos tend to blend together once you get far enough in, as much as I tried to vary my timing a bit, especially since there isn't all too much variation to the actual input strings themselves.

Other than that, I can't think of much else to say. It's a very arcade-y feeling PS1 game, and I enjoyed my time with it, most likely will enjoy my time with later down the line as well. For now, though, I also have to play the sequel. Thank you Ptcremisi for the recommendations.

My enjoyment of this game is mostly based on nostalgia. I don't know when or where I got this game, but I was VERY young when I played it. I remember I could never win a round, mostly because I had no idea how to even play the game.
Coming back to it many years later, its charm was not lost on me at all. The character designs were still memorable to me, and I even remembered the lyrics off a couple of the songs (especially Hiro's!).
That being said, a lot of the tracks were quite corny and aren't as memorable, but there are a couple of earworms.
The gameplay is interesting in that it actually relies more on rhythmical cues as opposed to visual (how about that for a rhythm game?). Depending on your sense of rhythm, after a couple of rounds this becomes second nature and the game becomes a sort of cakewalk. There are a couple of things that the game doesn't teach you such as how to use your Super or dodge the opponent's super (I personally couldn't find anything on this in the manual), but the general gameplay loop is quite simple.
I might revist Bust A Groove from time to time, but there are many other rhythm games higher up in my priority list.

O melhor: Os personagens e as excelentes músicas de cada um deles
O pior: O jogo pouco oferece além do modo principal
Bust-A-Move: Quem teve a "brilhante" ideia de dar esse nome para a série Puzzle Bobble no Ocidente? Isso é pior do que a confusão de Balrog, Vega e Bison...

Bust A Move/Groove nasceu como um jogo de luta e isso é bem perceptível quando se entende o gameplay. Diferente de boa parte de jogos musicais que consistem em apertar um botão quando um icone passa por um ponto específico de uma trilha, BaG exige mais atenção no ritmo de cada música para executar um comando a cada quatro "batidas" marcadas na tela, esses comandos vão ficando mais complexos conforme os combos do seu personagem, mas no momento em que o jogador domina esses combos, dá para completar todos as fases com as mesmas sequências, o que torna o jogo bem simples em termos de gameplay. A única coisa a mais para se preocupar além do ritmo é com a opção de atacar e esquivar dos ataques do adversário, o que é algo diferente para um jogo do tipo, mas também algo simples de dominar.

Visualmente é um jogo bem charmoso, os personagens são todos bem únicos e muito bem animados (o mocap do jogo para um jogo de PS1 é excelente, esse vídeo mostra como fica alguém fazendo as danças do jogo). Os cenários são mais simples, apesar de um ou outro efeito conforme o progresso da fase. Mas o grande destaque, obviamente, vai para as músicas. O jogo navega por vários estilos diferentes e é impressionante o quanto cada música combina com cada personagem (e como elas grudam na cabeça também). Há algumas diferenças entre as versões japonesa e americana, mas mesmo as músicas traduzidas eu achei que ficaram muito boas (vale a pena ouvir as duas versões).

O maior porém de Bust A Groove é que ele não oferece quase nada além do modo original, estilo Arcade com 12 fases. Há um modo Versus, uma opção para assistir as danças dos personagens ao completar o jogo com cada um deles, além de alguns personagens secretos. Poderia haver uma possibilidade de rever cada final (mesmo eles sendo bem curtinhos), pelo menos. Mas, apesar de em poucas horas ficar a sensação de que já se viu tudo do jogo, aprender a jogabilidade única dele e curtir cada música valeu muito a pena.

This is prime one-off game night material: worthy of a quick round for groovy jams and groovier dancing models. Also at its core a fun hybrid between fighting game inputs and rhythm gameplay. I like that you can test your skill with trickier combo inputs and how you can plot an attack against your opponent relative to when their solo is coming up.

It's mostly lacking in the polish and variety of the action. A lack of markers for inputs, timing that will make your head scratch once in a while, not much spectacle or variation in the stages outside of the fabulous models doing their thing, and a lack of varied modes besides the normal single and multiplayer. I can see a follow-up or successor really squeezing out the juices of this one, but what's here is totally worth a rerun every now and then, especially just to let that smooth OST play. Also, I love that stupid hamburger rap.

Having beaten 1 Player mode with all characters (including the unlockable dancers), I think it's safe to say I have mastered this... I mean, wow. I discovered this game on a whim and having actually gave it a chance, I am so glad I did. It's actually one of my favorite games from recent memory. No, I had no idea this existed prior to a week ago, and it's all I have been playing ever since.

I went through the wildest arc with this game. At first, I didn't understand at all how to play. I was literally missing every single beat while my opponent was styling' on me. A part of me wanted to give up and play a different game, but that stubborn part of me was hooked by this game's indisputable charm.

The characters are so whacky and flamboyant, that you could literally just skim through the character selection screen and immediately spot a character where you'll say "That's my DUDE" (even if its a girl) and you only grow to love them even more as you play them. My personal favorites are Shorty and Kitty-N, but Hamm is also my duuude.

The soundtrack is also phenomenal. Of course, I was playing the American version, so most of the songs were translated into English (with I think only one exception, though I could be wrong) and I actually think the songs are better in English than in Japanese. Yeah, it really is a preference at the end of the day - but in my opinion, the best song is... I don't even have one, I love them all. There's literally a banger for every stage, and I cannot stress how cool that is. I can guarantee you that once you've played through this game, there will be at least ONE song you listen to outside of it.

So having already been too attached to the game I knew my only choice was to learn the game. I thought it'd take me at least a day to actually figure out how to do anything. Nope, once I had the arrows appearing I had it down. After that, I started to notice how less frequently I would get misses. The journey towards improvement was actually incredible. Finishing 1 Player mode with not only one character, but all of them was such a good payoff.

I love it when all I can say negatively about a game are nitpicks, I have a few for this one. I think the absence of a point counter is annoying because I can't really gauge whether or not I'm on track for a Fever at the end. Speaking of which... I am pretty sure this game gets harder the more fevers you rack up. I got fever 7 times in a row, and in my 8th round I got completely decimated. It's like the AI's older brother took his controller back from the little sibling and was "You're doing it wrong; THIS is how you style on a fool". It made progressing at a steady pace a lot harder than anticipated (I play on Normal btw), but I guess it does egg me on to do better than I did previously. Well not really encourage, per say, but force because the AI goes crazy. This game will humble you if you pop off too much.

Needless to say, I have completely fallen in love with this. You can bet this game will be passed down onto my children, and their children for generations to come. I recommend this masterpiece to anyone who has ever played PaRappa and said "Hmm, this game is cool... but what if it had a giant dancing robot for a final boss?" Which; let's be honest - was all of us... admit it.

gas-o.....

vs

GASSSSSSS-O!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a lot of childhood nostalgia for Bust a Groove which will of course colour my opinion but almost 25 years later this game still slaps! The character and stage designs are so fun and every song is still an absolute banger.

It takes a little while to get the rhythm back and I'll never master those combos like I did when I was 10. There was never a whole lot to the gameplay overall but in a way that's what makes it a perfect little package that's very enjoyable to pick up and play all these years later.

there is one thing about this game that bothers the shit out of me. the game is complicated. you'd think it plays like a bust a groove 2, and it should, but what you'll notice after a few songs is that sometimes both you and the CPU will miss a note at the same time. and it will always happen either right before a solo, or at the end of a song.

this is because any dance move that ends a combo (a Freeze) requires 4 beats to complete. if there are 4 or more beats before a solo, the character does their Cool/Chillin/Freeze move, does a pose in which you don't do an input for a beat, and then starts the combo over. it rules. it feels good to hit those. however, if the solo is coming up on the next beat, the move will automatically miss regardless of your timing.

so how do you get around this? unlike BaG2, BaG1 allows you to enter the input for any part of your combo any time you want. for example, say the first move of your combo is just Circle. the next move is Down Down X, the third is Down Left X. at any point, no matter where you are in the dance, you can press Down Left X and go to step 3 of your combo. why does the game let you do this? because you have to know, before the verse starts, how many beats there are between the start of the song and the first solo. a full combo is 32 beats (8 measures), and if there are 9 measures between the start of the song and the solo then you're good to go; just push your buttons. but if there are exactly measures left, you can't just do your normal combo. because if you try to hit the end of your combo on that 8th measure, the game will give you a miss.

so you need to do some manipulation here. you can kill a note by attacking or whiffing a dodge, so that on the 8th measure you end up on the 7th measure of your combo. you get less points for not getting all the way up to Freeze, but it's an easy fix. but the best thing to do is to skip one of your steps. instead of pressing Down Down X when it appears on the screen, press Down Left X instead. the game will skip the 2nd step and go straight to the 3rd. now you're one measure ahead; your combo will end in 7 measures, with the 1 extra measure the game needs to accept your Freeze move.

so far this is weird, but it's not that big a deal: just memorize what songs require you to skip a beat and remember an easy, two-button input to enter to skip one of the early steps. but then the math changes when you want to attack or dodge. say you don't skip a step, because you know you've got 9 measures before your solo and all you need are 8. but then Heat chucks a fireball at you. you gotta dodge that. but now you're one measure behind where you were initially; you're on pace to hit your Freeze on the last note before the solo. that's a miss! so you have to know what the next step of your combo is, wherever you might be in the chain. if you're 4 moves in, you need to do the input for the 6th. is it DUD Circle? is it DDRLL Circle? you have to memorize all 35 possible combinations in order to do this optimally. i've been playing this shit casually for like 20 years and I haven't done that. so usually you just attack, or whiff a dodge, or bite the bullet and watch the points from your perfectly timed Freeze slip away.

what kills me is that the game designers knew that this would happen. they designed this giant memory game that required them to unify every input in the game and give the player the freedom to choose their place on the combo chart provided they memorized all 35 possible combinations that can appear outside of a solo. they did this, when all they had to do was just let you do a cool pose at the end of the song. nothing happens during that measure anyway. Bust A Groove 2 does this. you even get a special pose if you do the timing right. it's like they identified a problem and chose to solve it by implementing a system that i bet the overwhelming majority of people playing the game never even noticed was there. they did it just to spite the literal one person on earth obsessive enough to care. they did it to spite me.

5 stars.

Bust a Groove 1 review

Time to get your groove on and Bust-A-Move!

Bust a Groove is a typical rhythm game with some added elements taken from fighting games. The gameplay mainly involves around the beat of the song, requiring the player to match the inputs on the screen every fourth beat; you can also perform a “Jammer” attack on your opponent to interrupt them, and similarly you can also avoid their attacks as well. The gameplay is overall fairly simple to learn: aside from what was mentioned above, arrows corresponding to the directions on the D-Pad may also need to be matched before every fourth beat, alongside having to decide what dancing “paths” for further inputs you want to take. but mastering may require more practice; while matching inputs every fourth beat sounds easy on paper, each input becomes increasingly more complex the more you get correct, you need to decide on a dance path on the fly, and you also need to get a feel of the speed of the rhythm of each song. Thankfully there’s a practice mode, so that helps. You also need to avoid attacks from opponents, lest you want your ongoing combo ruined. The game provides more motivation to replay the game in the form of unlocking the secret characters and the dance routines for the character you play as.

There’s a total of 10 characters to choose from alongside four more secret characters, each adopting a specific kind of dancing style. This, and their designs, I feel manage to make the characters a fairly memorable bunch, whose attacks and stage music give a better sense of their personality as well. But even wackier are their backstories: I assume more detail is given in some manual or such for the game, but what’s present in-game definitely can come across as quite odd. Its namely conveyed in the form of CG ending cutscenes each character has, revealing some aspect or backstory of their character.

The main appeal of the game is very clearly the music. The entire OST is honestly just such a banger and makes playing to the rhythm of the beat super exciting. It's easy to find yourself picking a favourite among them, and the distinct style of each song and how well they complement their respective character’s dance routine also helps them to stand out from each other. I definitely find myself coming back to the music every now and then, so even if you decide the game is not for you I would still suggest checking out the soundtrack at least.

The game has its rough spots. The most major issue is certainly not being able to tell if you’ve inputted the arrows correctly: they flash with each beat, but aside from that it's a bit of guesswork to know if you managed to do them correctly before the fourth beat comes around. For me personally, it also made it a bit hard to keep track of what arrows I’ve done the input for so far as the dance paths become more complex. You go through all 10 characters as well as 2 of the secret characters each game session, which can be a bit exhausting for some. The game provides a visual indicator of which beat you’re at in the top left and right of the screen in case you lose track before the next input, but personally I didn’t find it that helpful as my attention was mostly directed towards the inputs shown on screen, and these indicators also act as the number of attacks you have left and disappear once used anyways.

Overall, Bust a Groove’s a simple, fun game with banger songs. I definitely suggest giving it a try if you’re itching for a rhythm game.
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Some extra notes: the english localization changes a few things, the most major being that about four songs were re-recorded in English. They still sound great like the originals personally, so I’d say pick the version of the game that lines up most with your preferences.

Bust-A-Groove does not have much content, its not the most polished graphically or even gameplay wise. But its very fun and simple, which is the most important thing to me for a video game. The characters have fun designs, the music is fantastic (of course), and the gameplay is actually pretty innovative and challenging for a rhythm game. Its pretty difficult to get the hang of and master. But mastering make everything feel a whole lot better! One last thing to note is that the all of the dance moves look tight af. Its such an underrated gem of a series and I love it just the way it is :)