As most people know, a licensed game takes more than a lot of games in the sense that it has two jobs rather than one: Be fun to play, and be a faithful representation of the source material. I'd say for the most part, K-ON! Houkago Live! succeeds on both fronts. It succeeds in the visual departments with flying colors, capturing the best of K-ON it can within the PSP's abilities, and it still looks very good!

Obviously it's a rhythm game based on K-ON!. But instead of just being a straight rhythm game, it stands out by adding its own K-ON! spins on the concept: It's more of a Rock Band style game, where you can choose your Keion and play their respective instrument. Somewhat similar to what I remember of Rock Band, each instrument is also represented uniquely in gameplay too. Since this is a PSP game and can't afford to waste money making tons of plastic that's collecting dust by now, it goes for more the Project Diva approach of buttons and arrows to represent things, and each Keion having unique themeing: Yui has you press X O as well as Right and Down arrows, Mio focuses more on Arrows than buttons, Mugi has all 4 buttons but those are her primary focus, Each part of Ritsu's drums are represented by a button except for the thing you do with your foot that is played with Down, and Azusa is X and Square and uses different arrows. This is already a solid concept enough, but partway through the game you unlock 5 Player Multiplayer, meaning if you can miraculously find 4 other people with this game, you can truly relive the Keion spirit in full force. The gameplay really captures the essence of the show in this sense, as I imagine a multiplayer where everyone plays to the beat would feel great.

There are some hitches with the gameplay that rubbed me the wrong way, and that's in the presentation of the Beatmap. It takes its HUD from the opening and unlike traditional rhythm games where the beats come to a center point you have to hit, the beats stay in place and the confirm spot moves from left to right, like those Mario Party minigames. You'll have to constantly go from left to right and back again and hope that you don't get donked by a note that's either on the far end of the left as you finish the previous note on the far right, or switch your eyes back to the left side too early and get donked by a note on the very far right. Also the line of notes can be presented at a slant at times which while it looks cool and fitting of K-ON can be jarring to adjust to on the fly in a song, especially fast songs like Curry Nochi Rice where you switch between sides of the screen and slants a lot. Speaking of difficulty there are a few balance issues, most notable example being the second half of Gita no Kubittake being absurdly hard for a Normal difficulty song. Not that I failed it but ending with a C because I got bombarded with notes at a quick pace left me wanting to do better.

The track list is in general good, Fuwa Fuwa Time in my opinion is one of the most magical songs ever made so any game with that in its track list gets points automatically. It even even including each girl's character song bless you Dear My Keys, but it suffers from being made before Season 2 omitting obvious songs like Utayo Miracle and NO, Thank You! but also more key (and emotional) songs like U&I and Tenshi ni Fureta yo. If only there were a sequel with these songs...

There is of course some K-ON stuff outside the main rhythm game. There's these cute scenes of the girls interacting that you can unlock by playing, you can feed your Keions their favorite foods, give them items to decorate the club room with, take them to certain locations, have Sawa-sensei dress the girls up in costumes for you to use in Rhythm Mode, some songs just straight up use screenshots in the video to feed your love for the show, hell you can even make your OWN videos in an unlockable mode. If all THAT isn't enough for you, you can even have a K-ON alarm clock with your Keion of choice AND they'll give you a special message on your birthday! Everything you could possibly want out of a K-ON game is right here!

While K-ON! Houkago Live!! isn't the single best video game ever made, it puts all of its heart into it, and just wants to have a fun, lighthearted Fuwa Fuwa Time. It captures the spirit and essence of K-ON perfectly, and even if you aren't a K-ON fan, I would recommend this game to correct that immediately.

As most people know, a licensed game takes more than a lot of games in the sense that it has two jobs rather than one: Be fun to play, and be a faithful representation of the source material. I'd say for the most part, K-ON! Houkago Live! succeeds on both fronts. It succeeds in the visual departments with flying colors, capturing the best of K-ON it can within the PSP's abilities, and it still looks very good!

Obviously it's a rhythm game based on K-ON!. But instead of just being a straight rhythm game, it stands out by adding its own K-ON! spins on the concept: It's more of a Rock Band style game, where you can choose your Keion and play their respective instrument. Somewhat similar to what I remember of Rock Band, each instrument is also represented uniquely in gameplay too. Since this is a PSP game and can't afford to waste money making tons of plastic that's collecting dust by now, it goes for more the Project Diva approach of buttons and arrows to represent things, and each Keion having unique themeing: Yui has you press X O as well as Right and Down arrows, Mio focuses more on Arrows than buttons, Mugi has all 4 buttons but those are her primary focus, Each part of Ritsu's drums are represented by a button except for the thing you do with your foot that is played with Down, and Azusa is X and Square and uses different arrows. This is already a solid concept enough, but partway through the game you unlock 5 Player Multiplayer, meaning if you can miraculously find 4 other people with this game, you can truly relive the Keion spirit in full force. The gameplay really captures the essence of the show in this sense, as I imagine a multiplayer where everyone plays to the beat would feel great.

There are some hitches with the gameplay that rubbed me the wrong way, and that's in the presentation of the Beatmap. It takes its HUD from the opening and unlike traditional rhythm games where the beats come to a center point you have to hit, the beats stay in place and the confirm spot moves from left to right, like those Mario Party minigames. You'll have to constantly go from left to right and back again and hope that you don't get donked by a note that's either on the far end of the left as you finish the previous note on the far right, or switch your eyes back to the left side too early and get donked by a note on the very far right. Also the line of notes can be presented at a slant at times which while it looks cool and fitting of K-ON can be jarring to adjust to on the fly in a song, especially fast songs like Curry Nochi Rice where you switch between sides of the screen and slants a lot. Speaking of difficulty there are a few balance issues, most notable example being the second half of Gita no Kubittake being absurdly hard for a Normal difficulty song. Not that I failed it but ending with a C because I got bombarded with notes at a quick pace left me wanting to do better.

The track list is in general good, Fuwa Fuwa Time in my opinion is one of the most magical songs ever made so any game with that in its track list gets points automatically. It even even including each girl's character song bless you Dear My Keys, but it suffers from being made before Season 2 omitting obvious songs like Utayo Miracle and NO, Thank You! but also more key (and emotional) songs like U&I and Tenshi ni Fureta yo. If only there were a sequel with these songs...

There is of course some K-ON stuff outside the main rhythm game. There's these cute scenes of the girls interacting that you can unlock by playing, you can feed your Keions their favorite foods, give them items to decorate the club room with, take them to certain locations, have Sawa-sensei dress the girls up in costumes for you to use in Rhythm Mode, some songs just straight up use screenshots in the video to feed your love for the show, hell you can even make your OWN videos in an unlockable mode. If all THAT isn't enough for you, you can even have a K-ON alarm clock with your Keion of choice AND they'll give you a special message on your birthday! Everything you could possibly want out of a K-ON game is right here!

While K-ON! Houkago Live!! isn't the single best video game ever made, it puts all of its heart into it, and just wants to have a fun, lighthearted Fuwa Fuwa Time. It captures the spirit and essence of K-ON perfectly, and even if you aren't a K-ON fan, I would recommend this game to correct that immediately.

This game is a clash of two ideas: Strange surreal abstract sequences, and over the top anime shenanigans. Usually I like over the top anime shenanigans but in this case, I feel like it brings the story down a good deal. For example, It has a good amount of QTE fight sequences where a few people overpower many, leading to these scenes all feeling samey in both structure and narrative. I think a fight sequence against a singular opponent would have at least spiced things up, especially as our main cast is usually invincible in combat.

Our two main characters are Mizuki, returning from the first game, and Ryuki, new to this game. Mizuki is okay but suffers from a lot of retconning to make her closer to the game's plot. I won't go into it as I choose to keep my reviews spoiler free as much as I can these days, but it feels like it takes a small bit away from her in the first game. A few other returning characters suffer from this too, but theirs is worse since it's done in a "didn't you know? it was ALWAYS like this!" sense. For me, the star of the show is Ryuki, who excels when the story is focused on him and his journey, and his obsession with solving the HB Case, a series of murders where the bodies are split clean in half and found in different places.

Now to talk about the surreal, which I like. I can't go into them, but some Somniums, looks into people's dreams, can do some really freaky things. They're not all perfect as there are a few duds in there, not every sequence is perfect, but when it wants to go out there it goes out there in such a banger way. The puzzles are generally good, but sometimes Uchikoshi gets too in his head with what is considered a comprehensible puzzle, as I had to check a solution once or twice and wondered how the hell I was supposed to come to that conclusion early on. One early instance is a series where you see a bunch of numbers inbetween a series of Xs, and you're supposed to figure out a 9 digit password from that. I tried a lot of variants, but got no where near the real solution. There are late game puzzles that are a bit more egregious, but again these are more the exception than the norm of alright to good puzzles. The dreams having multiple paths to expose different information is also neat.

The journey of solving the HB case is a neat one, but things go in some odd directions. As another review mentioned, it feels like the game was more concerned with dropping big dramatic twists on the player rather than the cast. There's one in particular that gets a whole scene focused on you, and you see the twist, you might have even figured parts of it out yourself, and realize that it changes absolutely nothing as none of the cast are affected by this at all. A lot of the writing is affected in baffling ways by these kinds of twists that it gets kind of ridiculous. Meanwhile, the story itself has anime cliches wrap everything up in a super positive ideal ending just like the last time, to the point where at the big climax I'd encourage you to just turn your brain off and take it in. My biggest grievence is with Blue Silhouette Man. He exists for no reason other than to prevent you and the cast from figuring out the key players too early, even though Wink Psychs and Somniums have no explicable reason to work like that. They just do so the plot doesn't fall apart immediately.

Uchikoshi is great at the out there stuff, and I'm fine with some anime shenanigans it's just when they got too far it was my least favorite aspects of the first game. This game has more of that sadly, but the Somniums and unraveling the mysteries with a real experience that is still alright if you enjoyed the first game and wanted more.

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