[GO10s] #10: Rhythm Heaven Megamix

Aaand we’re opening the list with a remaster/repackaging. Decade’s looking great so far!

Jokes aside, my only previous experience with the series was the DS “Rhythm Heaven”, and I haven’t played the Japan-only GBA “Rhythm Tengoku”, nor Wii’s “Rhythm Heaven Fever”, so this entry allowed me to catch up on all the great games I’ve missed. Moreover, Megamix has also added as many new minigames as it borrowed from every previous iteration, not to mention the new “Remixes” (songs where player jumps from minigame to minigame), so I think it has enough new content to merit its placement on lists like these.

So what is this whole Rhythm Heaven series all about? Well I’m glad you’ve asked, perhaps you’ve heard of the somewhat-more-popular WarioWare games? The two series share a lot of staff working on them, have a similar aesthetic, and the core game design isn’t entirely alike either. To be specific, Rhythm Heaven asks you to learn a new rhythm game for every song you’re going to play - you have to acquaintance yourself with a unique set of audio-visual cues, remember how to respond to each of them with inputs, and then you play the song with those mechanics. Variety of settings used for them is endless - from a cat and dog playing badminton while flying planes, through a robot factory, to an animated basketball court shooting hoops. Ultimately all you’re doing is either pressing or holding one or two buttons, the rest is the matter of your sense of rhythm.

One noteworthy thing that makes the franchise interesting is it’s approach to scoring. There are no failstates during songs and player receives no numerical score - you either get failure, a silver rating or a gold rating, depending on how well you did. Getting a “Perfect” works a little differently - every now and then, the game will give you few attempts at Perfecting a randomly chosen song. If you fail, your chance is lost and you have to wait until the game selects a song again, sometimes the same one, sometimes a completely different one. Weirdly enough, getting a Gold score can be more difficult than Perfect as the former judges your exact accuracy of hitting every note exactly on beat, while you can hit sloppy notes and still get that “P” as long as they were close enough. It’s a very unorthodox way of scoring by the genre standards and I think that says something about the type of game Rhythm Heaven is. It isn’t your classic arcade-y “select a song and try to get the high score”, it adapts the minigame philosophy of WarioWare and arguably the spirit of Parappa, turning rhythm into this magical force that permeates through every activity on Earth, creating a musical about the most random things in life.

This all feeds into a structure where the player unlocks consecutive songs/minigames by clearing the previous ones, and achieving Gold and Perfects gives coins which are spendable in a store that offers art, trophies, additional songs, and most interestingly, “toys”. The way they work is that we get a really simple task, such as “flip a coin and catch it after 3 bars” and are asked to repeat it as many times as we can without failing. At first we’re assisted with a melody and metronome, but after each throw the help gets reduced - the click disappears and melody starts cutting off, until we reach the point where there’s no sound and we have to count the rhythm entirely internally. If we are still able to do it, then the process gets restarted with different BPM and continues for as long as we can last. I never got deep into any of those games, but I’ve always enjoyed testing myself in that way - just a neat little addition to the product.

So, what is it exactly that makes me consider this game to be at that very pantheon of 2010s’ interactive entertainment? Well one thing you should know is that I love variety - and “Rhythm Heaven” is a case of a game that consistently hones one skill while seemingly offering something new every few minutes. It’s almost like going to a flash website into “rhythm games” category and browsing through dozens of short titles with cute, appealing graphics, catchy songs and easily graspable mechanics. Every new game filled me with genuine joy. Most rhythm games are sort of like platforms for scoring and constantly improving your ability to read the beatmaps and the mastery of controls, with unattainable perfection as the end goal never to be reached. “Rhythm Heaven: Megamix” is a game with a start and finish, telling little stories about people, animals, robots, forces of nature and concepts, immersing us through the extraordinary power of music.

Let me tell you about just three of my favorite ones. Exhibition Match is an example of a game that is able to build a narrative with just little differences in animations and the song, changing the timing of a repeating process and leading into a grand reveal that gives new context to the entire thing - and then asks you to keep going even once you know what’s been really going. Ringside is a simpler case to explain, as I just really like the sound and tempo of the questions asked by the interviewer that serve as sound queues for our masked wrestler to answer, flex or pose. Finally, Cheer Readers has a very endearing concept of a cheerleading squad encouraging students in their learning. The song is great and there’s a bunch of cues that the player has to answer very rapidly, so playing it was extremely satisfying.

The cheerful atmosphere and pleasant aesthetic are a constant throughout gameplay, which played a big part in earning the game this spot. I greatly enjoyed the variety in songs and visualizations and I was very satisfied once I finished all that the game had to offer.

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