Vib-Ribbon is honestly a strange little rhythm game released for the PlayStation One in 1999. During gameplay, the player controls Vibri, a rabbit made up of nothing more than crude white vector lines, as it runs along a line filled with obstacles that correspond to the beat and rhythm of the current song. Helping Vibri avoid these obstacles consists of correctly hitting one of four buttons (L1, R1, X, or Down), with each button corresponding to a shape or obstacle present on the line Vibri is following. If the player taps the corresponding button and times their button presses correctly, Vibri will hop, jump, or vault over the obstacle, but failure results in a squeal of pain from the tiny rabbit and the lines making up its body begin to bend and squiggle out of proportions. Continuing to fail will result in Vibri becoming more and more unrecognizable until the player gets a game over.

While this all sounds strange when considering other rhythm games, it does work very well here and can pose a significant challenge on harder difficulties. Unfortunately, the base game of Vib-Ribbon is incredibly short with only six songs divided into bronze, silver, and gold courses containing two songs each. This lack of content to play, however, is really only a problem on the PSP version, as the PS1 and PS3 version of the games allows players to insert their own music CDs and play stages generated from the tracks contained on the CD. The UMD Drive of the PSP obviously makes this impossible, but the feature would provide tons of playable content over the base game.

Overall Vib-Ribbon is a fun but short time on the PSP. I feel it would have been a much better and richer experience on other Sony consoles like the PS1 and PS3. If you absolutely want to play Vib-Ribbon then I suggest doing so on those other consoles and avoid the PSP version.

Nana On-sha once again makes a banger rhythm game that pushes the boundaries on how you can interact with music. Rather than trying to gamify improvisation like parappa and lammy, the point of this is more experimentation through other songs. While the default tracklist for this game is decent enough, the real meat and potatoes comes from the ability to play this game with any music CD as your soundtrack, and the game algorhythmically generates a beatmap for that track. It basically becomes a game of experimentation as you try out different CDs with different genres of music to see what kind of map the game will make, and allows for the game to have infinite content. The charm of the vector graphics and vibri's character is just icing on the cake.

Trying to get this emulated was probably the worst part of the game. ITS SO GOOD. Once I was able to get it running and figured out how to make files for custom songs for it I had a hell of a time. It's hard to explain other than it fired off every part of my autistic brain.

The gameplay is nice and simple, but I admit it can get to be a bit overwhelming at times. There are just times where I can't seem to get the timing right. This is made doubly frustrating when the tempo picks up or when I've messed up so much that the whole stage shakes and I can't read when I should press the prompt. If I mess up, it's a downward spiral for me. I think this game is also slightly made harder with the fact that I played with the English PAL version which means 50 Hz gameplay, baby (average PAL experience). I tried the NTSC hack with Duckstation and that seems to make the gameplay better but that messes with the timing of the high score dance. Seriously, why was this not released in North America? I guess we just don't deserve anything good huh 😔. Otherwise the gameplay is very basic but fun with its charming vector graphics.

I also want to quickly appreciate the bundled soundtrack. I have no idea where it came from or what its inspiration was but I am in absolute love with it. It's nowhere close to any other song I have heard from 1999. Instead, it sounds closer to the songs I listen within the indie scenes of modern day. And it works so well with the courses, too. No notes, the Parappa devs always got bangers.

Of course, the crowning jewel of this title is being able to load any music CD and it making a course based on that song. Genuinely insane for its time, and it's even more insane now with the prospect of being able to listen and download anything you want. I can imagine playing this game as it came out and having fun with burning mixes onto CDs to try and create the most challenging courses with my choices as I swap them with my friends as a way to challenge each other (and as a way to gauge who has the best music tastes). Of course, I can still do that very well with friends online, but there has to be some sort of charm of playing with CDs that I'm missing out on.

Even if I'm not playing the tracks due to them simply being too challenging for my current skill level, I enjoy seeing Vibri hop, skip, and roll along the obstacles laid out for her. Seeing her bounce along in a black void so carefree is soothing to me. Especially when I'm playing songs that I really enjoy and connect to me on a personal level. I can almost interpret that meanings onto Vibri, as if they were talking about her. In one track, she's a trans girl named J, and in another track, she's a phone line connecting online friends to each other. At the end of the day, though, she's such a lovely happy-go-lucky character that seems to be down to listen to any music you play for her. If anything bad happens to Vibri, I will kill everyone with my bare hands /lh.

Overall, amazing game that doesn't seem to garner much meaning but gathers its value from the fun that you make with it. Strict gameplay prevents me from giving it a perfect but I am addicted as hell.

Me: I played through 10,000 Gecs on vib ribbon.
Random horse: Nuzzles me
Me: laughs Easy now.

Do you think there's a dude who listens to all of his music through this game? Like "Yeah dude the new peggy is great but lemme tell you "Steppa Pig" makes a TERRIBLE Vib-Ribbon level!"

Maybe i should become that person...

An exceptionally cute and fun rhythm game created by the same geniuses that made Parappa the Rappa.

Vib-Ribbon is an endless runner before endless runners were a thing, that utilizes the unique feature of the PS1 to store memory on the console itself in order to allow other disks to be played in replacement of the original game disk. This, in turn, allowed every single musical CD you have to be its own set of courses. No, they are not randomly generated. Each song you load up from a disk is a unique, set in stone course that will not change no matter how many times you play or copy onto another disk.

And somehow, the absolute mad-lads that ported the game to the PS3 were able to get it to work the exact same way, and in an era where CD burning is the easiest it's ever been, that means you can build whatever song courses you want with whatever songs you own.

I don't play rhythm games very often. However, with how endlessly replayable this game is, how customizable it is, and how adorable Vibbri is, you cannot go wrong with this title. Pick it up before copies get stupid expensive, or before the PS3 PS-Store shuts down.

this game's soundtrack has to be one of the biggest formative pieces for my music taste after i found out about it via the caddicarus video when i was like 14, though somehow it took me until yesterday to actually go and play the game. i think it must have settled in the "fact of life" section in my brain rather than the "games i want to play" section just from the soundtrack being so outstanding.
Anyway, goated game. classic easy to learn hard to master, and finally another good use case for me having a CD collection in 2023.