PaRappa 1 suffers from a lot of PS1 jank.
Sure, the music is FANTASTIC, but the hit registration is iffy at best, and I feel that getting this right is an extremely important aspect of any rhythm game worth it's salt. People will praise PaRappa 1 while totally overlooking the fact that most of the mapping is an absolute MESS. I am fully, wholly convinced that people who played the PS1 version of PaRappa and consider it better than this game have never kept a beat or experienced the flow of a good rhythm in their life.
BUT IT GETS BETTER, because PaRappa 2 isn't just good because it's better than PaRappa 1. It's just a fucking GOOD GAME.
Firstly, a rhythm game lives and dies by it's soundtrack, and PaRappa 2 is coming out swinging. FANTASTIC tracks like Romantic Love, Big, and Hair Scare kept me coming back and replaying the game over and over again.
And there's a lot of game to play! While the game may only feature a handful of songs (7 if I'm counting correctly), where this game really shines is in how it handles it's difficulty and mapping.
In PaRappa 2, you will be squaring off against a teacher of some sort, who will give you a phrase of notes that you will then have to repeat back to them. Very simple gameplay in this regard. HOWEVER, it's where PaRappa 2 does this differently that makes it shine.
PaRappa 2 has a freestyle system.
All of the teachers that you will be facing over the course of the game have a signature style. This influences the kind of lines they will give you, and what types of rhythms those lines will embody. You, as the player, can repeat these lines back like the game tells you to. And, that's a perfectly serviceable way to play the game. But if you want more, and you want to take the extra step to become a COOL GUY, you can make up beats on the fly.
You just DON'T FOLLOW THE MAP AT ALL. And, if the rhythms you produce make sense within the song and the teacher digs it according to their style, the game takes it as a win for that line! Most of the fun of playing PaRappa 2 is figuring out how much you can get away with freestyling in any particular song, turning what was a simple back and forth rhythm game into a brilliantly dynamic and ever changing system of augmenting and recreating the music that you're hearing, LIVE, where no two playthroughs will turn out the same way by nature of how you like to freestyle.
And the difficulty settings are to die for. PaRappa has 17 fucking different difficulty levels. After you go through a "cycle" (or, completing every song on a certain difficulty), you will be leveled up to the next difficulty. This changes the mapping of all the songs in the game from that point forward, which just unlocks new rhythm ideas for you to freestyle against, trying to get the most out of your line and still make it sound as funky and fresh as possible.
AND THEN THERE'S MULTIPLAYER. It's a two player gamemode where one person will receive a line that they will have to repeat. The goal is to freestyle over your opponent's line, and if the game likes it, that becomes the new line that the other player will then have to match, or augment, hoping to score more points and force the other person into a rhythm that they can't complete. It's INCREDIBLE fun, and will VERY QUICKLY expose who out of your friends have rhythm and who doesn't.
GO PLAY THIS GAME. If you like rhythm games and are interested in trying something different, you should give this a play. It is very much in the shadow of it's first entry, and the rerelease of that entry, but it is just as worth playing as that is, maybe even more so.
Sure, the music is FANTASTIC, but the hit registration is iffy at best, and I feel that getting this right is an extremely important aspect of any rhythm game worth it's salt. People will praise PaRappa 1 while totally overlooking the fact that most of the mapping is an absolute MESS. I am fully, wholly convinced that people who played the PS1 version of PaRappa and consider it better than this game have never kept a beat or experienced the flow of a good rhythm in their life.
BUT IT GETS BETTER, because PaRappa 2 isn't just good because it's better than PaRappa 1. It's just a fucking GOOD GAME.
Firstly, a rhythm game lives and dies by it's soundtrack, and PaRappa 2 is coming out swinging. FANTASTIC tracks like Romantic Love, Big, and Hair Scare kept me coming back and replaying the game over and over again.
And there's a lot of game to play! While the game may only feature a handful of songs (7 if I'm counting correctly), where this game really shines is in how it handles it's difficulty and mapping.
In PaRappa 2, you will be squaring off against a teacher of some sort, who will give you a phrase of notes that you will then have to repeat back to them. Very simple gameplay in this regard. HOWEVER, it's where PaRappa 2 does this differently that makes it shine.
PaRappa 2 has a freestyle system.
All of the teachers that you will be facing over the course of the game have a signature style. This influences the kind of lines they will give you, and what types of rhythms those lines will embody. You, as the player, can repeat these lines back like the game tells you to. And, that's a perfectly serviceable way to play the game. But if you want more, and you want to take the extra step to become a COOL GUY, you can make up beats on the fly.
You just DON'T FOLLOW THE MAP AT ALL. And, if the rhythms you produce make sense within the song and the teacher digs it according to their style, the game takes it as a win for that line! Most of the fun of playing PaRappa 2 is figuring out how much you can get away with freestyling in any particular song, turning what was a simple back and forth rhythm game into a brilliantly dynamic and ever changing system of augmenting and recreating the music that you're hearing, LIVE, where no two playthroughs will turn out the same way by nature of how you like to freestyle.
And the difficulty settings are to die for. PaRappa has 17 fucking different difficulty levels. After you go through a "cycle" (or, completing every song on a certain difficulty), you will be leveled up to the next difficulty. This changes the mapping of all the songs in the game from that point forward, which just unlocks new rhythm ideas for you to freestyle against, trying to get the most out of your line and still make it sound as funky and fresh as possible.
AND THEN THERE'S MULTIPLAYER. It's a two player gamemode where one person will receive a line that they will have to repeat. The goal is to freestyle over your opponent's line, and if the game likes it, that becomes the new line that the other player will then have to match, or augment, hoping to score more points and force the other person into a rhythm that they can't complete. It's INCREDIBLE fun, and will VERY QUICKLY expose who out of your friends have rhythm and who doesn't.
GO PLAY THIS GAME. If you like rhythm games and are interested in trying something different, you should give this a play. It is very much in the shadow of it's first entry, and the rerelease of that entry, but it is just as worth playing as that is, maybe even more so.