A love letter with typos.
I played the first Theatrhythm about a decade ago while it was still on 3DS, and I remember being very fond of it. A lot of the games on that system didn’t really strike relevant with me; the general over-reliance on technical feats like the 3D screen-doubling or Play Coin collecting usually left other elements feeling kind of weak, unless they completely ignored the hardware gimmicks and went all-in on the game proper (ala Shin Megami Tensei IV). Theatrhythm was one such game where it felt like the gameplay wasn’t compromised by its platform, rather being enhanced by the system’s hardware and touch-screen capabilities. There were clear compromises in the amount of songs that could make it in, or how long said songs could be played for, but it was solid. When Final Bar Line was announced to be dropping on the Switch, I was excited. A Theatrhythm entry no longer bound by being on a handheld, joyous day! Surely now we’ll get even more songs, and they’ll all be their full length, and the charts will be the most solid yet, and the controls will feel great!
Two of those four things were true. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations.
Gameplay remains strong even after its transition to a controller format, and the core divide of FMS and BMS stages still feel fresh as the two main methods of playing the game. Getting to pick any buttons on the controller for your hits and flicking whichever analog stick you want at a given time leads into a free-form playstyle where you can basically play the game however you want at no penalty to yourself. Charts are less consistent. There are some that are incredible, and your fingers will be dancing along the buttons in perfect sync with every thump and crash; there are some that are really, really bad, swapping between melody and rhythm at what feels like complete random, rushing your oncoming notes at such a weird pace that you will inevitably wonder how what you’re playing even remotely relates to the music that you’re hearing.
For what’s clearly intended to be (and often successfully is) a celebration of the history of Final Fantasy, this game is revisionist enough to make Eduard Bernstein blush. Why are there so many arranges of the classic songs? When I put on some tracks for Final Fantasy III, I want Final Fantasy III. What I don’t want is to hear the composition rerecorded three decades later with more modern instrumentation and bombastic orchestral hits. No! No, don’t do that! Make it sound crusty! Give me all five channels of the Ricoh 2A03! Let me hear it the way that it was, not the way that it could have been! These are games that struggled against their budgets and technical limitations and came out on top. If you make them indistinguishable from the new titles, you roll right over the legacy that they’ve left behind. This philosophy extends to a lot more than just the music in Final Bar Line — I can’t imagine a more boring way to play the original Final Fantasy than by slogging through the new remakes that fix all of the bugs and jank and NES-era graphics — but it’s blatant enough that I expect even people who have never heard these tracks are going to be put off by the inclusion of arranges over the originals.
Furthermore, I get why the developers are hesitant to include the full versions of a lot of these songs — the ones that don’t loop, at least — but come on. Not being able to play the entire Dancing Mad fugue is one thing (though I maintain it should be an option for the people who want to), but clipping off both the starts and ends of massively-popular, fan-favorite tracks like Answers or Who Brings Shadow is strange. The concatenated versions of these songs often stop just in time for them to get to “the good part”, and it can lead to some pretty flat-feeling conclusions. A full-version toggle would be more than welcome here. I know that Square Enix can’t afford to let the people in the arcade get fifteen minutes of playtime off of a single quarter, but this is the home version of the game. It costs a hundred dollars for the Premium Digital Deluxe Version. Let the console owners indulge in the full tunes.
The skeleton of Theatrhythm is still here, and these are strong, healthy bones from a body that got a lot of calcium. It just also happens to be a game that doesn’t feel like its evolved much in the past decade in ways that would have made it truly shine. As it stands, Final Bar Line is just more Theatrhythm, for all of the good and bad that entails.
And Quest Medleys were way cooler than Series Quests. Endless World does not fill the void.
I played the first Theatrhythm about a decade ago while it was still on 3DS, and I remember being very fond of it. A lot of the games on that system didn’t really strike relevant with me; the general over-reliance on technical feats like the 3D screen-doubling or Play Coin collecting usually left other elements feeling kind of weak, unless they completely ignored the hardware gimmicks and went all-in on the game proper (ala Shin Megami Tensei IV). Theatrhythm was one such game where it felt like the gameplay wasn’t compromised by its platform, rather being enhanced by the system’s hardware and touch-screen capabilities. There were clear compromises in the amount of songs that could make it in, or how long said songs could be played for, but it was solid. When Final Bar Line was announced to be dropping on the Switch, I was excited. A Theatrhythm entry no longer bound by being on a handheld, joyous day! Surely now we’ll get even more songs, and they’ll all be their full length, and the charts will be the most solid yet, and the controls will feel great!
Two of those four things were true. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations.
Gameplay remains strong even after its transition to a controller format, and the core divide of FMS and BMS stages still feel fresh as the two main methods of playing the game. Getting to pick any buttons on the controller for your hits and flicking whichever analog stick you want at a given time leads into a free-form playstyle where you can basically play the game however you want at no penalty to yourself. Charts are less consistent. There are some that are incredible, and your fingers will be dancing along the buttons in perfect sync with every thump and crash; there are some that are really, really bad, swapping between melody and rhythm at what feels like complete random, rushing your oncoming notes at such a weird pace that you will inevitably wonder how what you’re playing even remotely relates to the music that you’re hearing.
For what’s clearly intended to be (and often successfully is) a celebration of the history of Final Fantasy, this game is revisionist enough to make Eduard Bernstein blush. Why are there so many arranges of the classic songs? When I put on some tracks for Final Fantasy III, I want Final Fantasy III. What I don’t want is to hear the composition rerecorded three decades later with more modern instrumentation and bombastic orchestral hits. No! No, don’t do that! Make it sound crusty! Give me all five channels of the Ricoh 2A03! Let me hear it the way that it was, not the way that it could have been! These are games that struggled against their budgets and technical limitations and came out on top. If you make them indistinguishable from the new titles, you roll right over the legacy that they’ve left behind. This philosophy extends to a lot more than just the music in Final Bar Line — I can’t imagine a more boring way to play the original Final Fantasy than by slogging through the new remakes that fix all of the bugs and jank and NES-era graphics — but it’s blatant enough that I expect even people who have never heard these tracks are going to be put off by the inclusion of arranges over the originals.
Furthermore, I get why the developers are hesitant to include the full versions of a lot of these songs — the ones that don’t loop, at least — but come on. Not being able to play the entire Dancing Mad fugue is one thing (though I maintain it should be an option for the people who want to), but clipping off both the starts and ends of massively-popular, fan-favorite tracks like Answers or Who Brings Shadow is strange. The concatenated versions of these songs often stop just in time for them to get to “the good part”, and it can lead to some pretty flat-feeling conclusions. A full-version toggle would be more than welcome here. I know that Square Enix can’t afford to let the people in the arcade get fifteen minutes of playtime off of a single quarter, but this is the home version of the game. It costs a hundred dollars for the Premium Digital Deluxe Version. Let the console owners indulge in the full tunes.
The skeleton of Theatrhythm is still here, and these are strong, healthy bones from a body that got a lot of calcium. It just also happens to be a game that doesn’t feel like its evolved much in the past decade in ways that would have made it truly shine. As it stands, Final Bar Line is just more Theatrhythm, for all of the good and bad that entails.
And Quest Medleys were way cooler than Series Quests. Endless World does not fill the void.
2 Comments
Square-Enix, like many other publishers, seems to leave specific track credits/attribution for a product's album release, not featuring that info in-game. VGMDb doesn't have audio samples for obvious hosting-related reasons, but that's where I'd start in order to pinpoint which tracks are from where. This kind of info ought to be in rhythm games, though, given they're a major part of the product.
DJSCheddar
1 year ago
I have always been confused/annoyed by the arrangements standing in for original songs too, for all the reasons you mentioned, and also they don't even credit them! Like, what games are these versions from? Who did them? I'd love to know! That stuff's not even in the sound test, right?
That weird omission coupled with straight up removing fun stuff like the descriptions off the backs of the Collectacards makes this feel kind of lazy and cashgrab-y instead of a Smash Bros-style celebration of the series which it easily could and should have been.
P.S.: listen I don't know what you're complaining about re: song lengths, we got an interminable 7 minute version of One-Winged Angel from Advent Children, and I'm pretty sure all the 37 versions of Battle at the Big Bridge add up to like 2 hours, what more do you want