Never has a game's tagline been more accurate. It's important to note that PaRappa describes itself as "the original music video game" and not "the original rhythm video game," because being on rhythm punishes you more often than it awards you points. Or, at least, that's what it feels like- it's part of a scoring system that somehow triumphs over the human capability for pattern recognition. There's certainly a logical explanation as to when you'll actually be rewarded for pressing each button, but it continues to elude me, and I think I prefer not knowing how exactly it works. If I did, I wouldn't have any reason to try and experiment, to try and improvise, which is clearly how the game wants you to approach its rap battles. On this chain of thought, never has a genre pioneer been further removed from the games it ended up inspiring. PaRappa obviously paved the way for the likes of Beatmania, Guitar Hero, and Ouendan, but only in the superficial sense, really. Familiarity with any of these titles only makes you worse at PaRappa, because you've been primed to think that there's a correct timing for every individual button press. If you think about it, there's something perverse about how music, arguably the premiere form of self-expression, spawned the single most authoritarian video game genre. "Perform this exact input on this exact frame or else you lose!" That's not to say that PaRappa presents the solution to this problem (I've neglected to mention that it's pretty much unplayable) or that it's even a problem in the first place (rhythm's probably one of my favorite genres) but it's an avenue that feels more than worth exploring. However, I can't even conceptualize what an expressive but still structured music game would look like. It seems apparent that anything like this would inherently be at odds with its scoring system, no matter how advanced, but choosing not to have one would mean it's just a music simulator instead of a game. It's a challenge that feels like it would require an extreme amount of out of the box thinking, and at this point in time it definitely seems impossible, but what can I say... ya gotta believe!