Robot Fueling: The Musical

The rhythm game genre wasn't always all about dancing and playing plastic faux instruments. At the genre's beginnings, games like PaRappa the Rapper and Space Channel 5 were the Broadway musicals of the gaming world, telling simple, sweeping stories with the aid of catchy songs; evocative "set design" and basic, call-and-response, button-tapping gameplay. Rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have turned this quirky niche into a mainstream obsession. As much as I love those games, though, there's a part of me that's been longing recently for more of the absurdist rhythm-game musicals of a decade ago.

Well, Rhythm Heaven certainly satisfies that need, cramming 50 tiny variations on the classic form into its tiny silicon wafer. Nintendo's take on the genre is so old-school that it actually throws out the kind of minimal stories that held PaRappa and SC5 together, opting instead for dozens of disconnected micro-stories -- each just as absurd as those of a rapping dog or a dancing space reporter. In one, military cranes (like the bird, not the heavy machinery) train for an unseen war. In another, Easter Island's moai statues sing love songs to each other in gibberish. Dumpling-eating monks, dolphin-riding synchronized swimmers, robotic ping-pong players, ninja dogs, gopher-destroying beet farmers, lovesick chemists, race-car photographers, karate masters and soccer stars all feature in their own mini-dramas. They each stick around barely long enough to establish themselves as characters through some crude graphics and extremely expressive animation.

And through the gameplay, of course. It only takes two basic touch-screen controls -- a tap and a flick of the stylus -- to control the entire rogues' gallery of characters and situations crammed into the game. For many gamers, this is no doubt a welcome change from the rows of fret buttons and drum pads that crowd other rhythm games. The gentle feeling of scratching the stylus against the touch-screen adds an important, tactile element to the gameplay, putting you more directly in touch with the fantastical situations you're controlling. It might sound silly, but flicking the stylus to swing a ping-pong paddle, pick a beet, or chop a vegetable in mid-air is just more satisfying than pressing a button to do the same thing. It's a little awkward at first, and it requires a precision that may be too much for some arrhythmic players, but for most the controls will feel as natural as tapping out a rhythm on the car steering wheel.

This mini-game actually includes the instruction "Tap to shut your yap."

Of course, the danger of such simple controls is that they could cause a similar simplicity in the gameplay, with each mini-game simply putting a new coat of paint on the same combination of rhythmic patterns. Rhythm Heaven avoids this problem impressively, weaving together an amazing variety of ingenious rhythms with the small selection of inputs. Some mini-games require consistent tapping of a steady beat, with a few variations thrown in. Others ask you to mimic complicated patterns of taps and flicks. Still others require you to essentially "fill in the blank" on a set of beats, or respond to a subtle musical cue with a specific pattern of taps and flicks. The variations are introduced slowly and with ample training, allowing your brain to slowly rewire to the multitude of combinations required.

This rewiring reaches its peak in the "remixes" that come after every fifth mini-game. It's here that the disparate mini-games are merged into a larger whole, where the gameplay switches situations and control methods at a moment's notice. These remixes bring a whole new set of skills to bear, as you have to quickly recognize each new situation and change your strategy based on it, much like the WarioWare games. The transitions can also bring about some interesting synchronicity, as when you transfer from kneeing a soccer ball to controlling a massive march without changing your tapping rhythm in the slightest. It's in these moments that the disparate mini-game parts of Rhythm Heaven come together to form a symphonic whole greater than their sum.

The game's varied selection of catchy music stands on its own as well. While most of the tunes follow a specific tradition of rock-influenced Japanese pop music, careful listeners will hear blues, hard rock, doo-wop and even Latin influences in the soundtrack. Each tune starts with the kind of strong hook that will stay in your head for days, adding small variations and flourishes to prevent it from becoming too repetitive. The only sour note comes from the few songs that stubbornly insist on using awkwardly translated and delivered English lyrics. Lines like "Hey now, here is my song/For you, yeah that's right," may have worked in the original Japanese, but they come off as clunky and nonsensical in the translation.

TWANG!

But there's more to the songs than just catchy beats. The musical cues that hold the gameplay together are all hidden there in the beats as well. The audio cues are so strongly integrated that you can literally look away from the screen and still tap out a perfect rhythm with relative ease. It's a testament to the game's design that the songs hold up both as memorable tunes and as the core to the rhythm-based gameplay.

It's this melding of music and gameplay (along with a strangely compelling, simplistic art style) that makes Rhythm Heaven truly interesting. It's like a piece of complex jazz that sounds like inscrutable randomness and noise at first. It's only when you really embrace it, absorbing the notes and patterns over and over -- until they become they become part of you, and part of a larger whole -- that it really starts to click. It might be a little hard to explain to an outsider, but the more you listen, the easier it is to understand.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher in this demo.