Hi-Fi RUSH has a lot of charm to it. It has a very genuine feel to the writing and overall I think a lot of real love for various action and rhythm games, as well as other forms of media like cartoons, comics, anime and manga, as well as just other videogames in general (That Xenogears reference WTF??) went into this, with it's own twist to the mechanics you may expect from either kind of game. Played on hard with none of the accessibility features on as I'm relatively used to both action and rhythm games, expecting that to be the actual "normal" as is the case with a lot of modern AAA games but it was actually pretty challenging; I died about as much, maybe even more than I would have playing most DMC games on Normal/Devil Hunter for the first time. If you aren't already too familiar with either genre you may want to stick to normal or easy to get a grasp of the mechanics first, although there also seem to be lots of great accessibility options like an optional constant visual BPM indicator. Overall, this game rules and it's crazy that Tango Gameworks was just holding onto it for a shadow drop.

For people curious about playtime, it took me about 10 hours to beat the main story on Hard, although there is also post-game content including a Bloody Palace mode.