yesterday, a friend of mines asked me to give them a hand with some troubleshooting. they’ve spoken to me how they finally wanted to give emulation a shot with their new big fancy pc beforehand, and the first game on their chopping block was um lammer jammy. we both hold the project diva series in strong adoration, so why not give the franchises that started it all a shot yknow? anyway the issue here, as they perceived it, was that the game was registering the inputs late. we both assumed it was a dreadful combination of their retroarch having some weird latency issues and lammer just being the harder game out of the psx duology. so we flicked on run-ahead, turned off v-sync, set hard gpu sync on, all that technical jargon, and we both started up parappa the rapper proper.

what preceded was the mortifying realization that these game were just like that. instinctively hitting the notes as parappa’s marker cross them only caused the game to call us out for our what it deems as bad rapping. eventually we started delaying our inputs just a few frames after the marker passes a note, and even then no matter what offset we set the game still felt disgusting wrong. what’s more is the tutorial even reenforces the notion that this game is a simple matter of timing ones’ input to the note, which, given that i went through the effort of setting up an gamepad viewer, pausing the game frame by frame, streaming it to said friend, all in a desperate attempt to prove we’re not going insane, is more than just a gross misnomer. (later found out that matsuura genuinely believed this as well and it’s not just some secret mechanic lost in translation, funnily enough within this same interview he attempted to preform a live demonstration of “how to be cool” where he failed to impress the game four times in a row. https://youtu.be/U_27Lkt-yIk )

eventually i phoned the person who gave me my passing interest in nanaoh-sha’s library and we learn that the intent here was for players to freestyle their way through the songs. believe it or not i actually welcomed this revelation! rhythm games have homogenized into this singular design approach where player expression is limited to the rudimentary act of following the notes as presented. while there’s nothing wrong with this scheme, parappa is peculiar because it aspires well above what contemporaries confine in by encouraging its audience to deviate from the chart a bit. step a bit outside the bounds the game laid out for you and, with just the right sense of rhythm, it’ll stop the game of simon-says and grant you the freedom to freestyle your own chart.

only took about ten or so attempts at scoring a cool on stage two for those wild romanticizations to be swiftly stumped into the dirt. creatively remixing the verses caused more harm than good, and harmonic improvisation pales in comparison to the score you’ll land by spamming the last note ad nauseam anyway, except, not really? sometimes the game punishes you for doing that too? sometimes it loves my incoherent remixing even though it just gave me a bad score for doing such?? who knows actually??? just follow the beat and Maybe It’ll Work Bro I Think???? such a sour mix of mechanical obscurity and variability, each attempt i make at understanding this game’s interworkings i descend further into perplexity. i’m too stubborn to let my cynical accusations towards a work sit without first trying to genuinely appreciate the design nuance and motive behind it, but, as i see it, no one has a thorough understanding of how parappa’s scoring system works and with the aforementioned live demonstration presented by its one and only director, i can’t help but feel the act of actually playing parappa is a contradictory, brutal chore that fails to hold much intrigue under the weight of its variability - a variability that even if understood is too strong for what the game demands.

that being said, i don’t have think anyone is coming to parappa for a Sound Rhythm Game Experience. one of the reasons the friend wanted to check out lammy was because they learned she was a guitar playing sheep who got sent to hell who also happens to be a lesbian. i mean, look at vivid the world artist rodney greenbalt managed to bring to fruition here, every fabric of it is downright charming. you’re a little teenage dog who’s trying to get with a sunflower, willing himself getting a driver’s license through the power of rap. there’s a place called “phat donut” that gets demolished and is renamed “flat donut” for the remainder of the game, like i can’t help but to appreciate that! even with how aggravating some of the charts can get, the track list is filled with back-to-back bangers and it’s equal parts irritating mechanically as it is cute. it’s that golden blend of brute honesty, slapstick, and humanism that makes nanah-ohsha’s games so infectious, and it’s what always drew people to their library to before any sort of mechanical ingenuity.

allow me to be a bit more formal about a game totally unconcerned about being pretentious and say matsuura is an auteur in the truest sense of the word. even discounting how his titles, even in all their rough edges, still hold a candle against games that were conceived with the backing of decades of hindsight in mind, the truth of the matter is that he codified an entire lineage of games in his first foray into an unfamiliar industry. i don’t really feel like it was a mistake that my first experience with parappa was one filled with bantering about how bizarre the hit detection is and laughing at the dog rapping to not piss his pants with a friend, because really matsuura only wanted to shatter the “wall between music and life” - and parappa more than accomplished that. oscillating between frustrating and bliss, memetic in its nature, that’s parappa.

The game follows a very game-y level-based structure (think Mario world level select). The player must liberate a specific part of the worker forces in each world. At it's core, the game is about a Workers vs Capitalism Movement that, fundamentally, does not work mechanically or narratively.

Let's get this out first: The Player Controller doesn't work. It feels sluggish, unresponsive and imprecise. The game is fully playable with a controller - don't play it with a controller (Unless you want 0 control over your squad). This isn't a Pikmin, Crowd Control like game you think it is: you are not dependent on them. You can finish each mission just by running to the right, dodging the bullets, avoiding every enemy encounter and yet you will still "liberate" the area of the game. In fact, your allies (or more like minions) are more of a burden to you than actually helping you. The game does not feel like it is designed for a crowd control/management game - it feels more akin to a Beat em' up. Especially later moments of the game require much more out of the player than the controls allow them, making it impossible to perfect a stage as you never have 100% control over your minions. The question is "Why do you even need the workers"? I have yet to find an answer to that. I get that the devs tried to answer that by rewarding the player with some new weapons, but the rewards are locked by the amount of minions you manage to get to the goal line. However, you don't need them, the basic bricks suffice and are legitimately the best weapon in the game. Boss encounters suck: I was able to just stand in one point, move my units to the back and just hit them while they couldn't even hurt me. It tries to add a bunch of new elements to make the game feel more zany and polished, but if the core gameplay doesn't work, nothing will improve or help the game.

Now narratively, it's boneless. It has nothing of substance to say. It is as if someone took the high level idea of "Workers vs Corporations" and just slammed it into the game without any nuances or thought. In the end it feels like they used the theme of the game as a surface-level bait in order to draw people into the godawful gameplay. The ending is also too cheeky and too picture perfect for my taste and just shows that the developers never actually involved themselves into this topic.

It's a lifeless, broken game that is not fun nor engaging to play. Janky games are fun to learn from and it helps to play a lot of these games level out your "gaming palette", but this genuinely wasted my time. Don't play this game.

Edit: Adjusted some writing