Review: Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

I'd like for my blog here to be funny video game and other kinds of reviews :) so let's start it off strong! edit: i forgor. images..... sorry. wall of text be upon ye.

I recently got the latest Theatrhythm game! I still haven't fully played all the tracks yet, but I'm making my way through it and have a good chunk of it under my belt so I feel confident in writing this!

My only other played entry in the series is the very first one on 3DS, and I had a blast with it! Though I felt it was very limited in what it had to offer. There just weren't enough songs, and I never did check if it got any DLC packs. I never got to play the arcade cabinets cause they were swamped at the few cons I'd seen them at. I've been missing it terribly through the years, being a big Final Fantasy fan. I didn't even know Final Bar Line released until I'd seen it online at launch! I was lucky to find a copy the day afterward, and wow, it delivered!

The amount of music is incredible, and there's even side games included that were just outside of my radar! The entry with the most amount of tracks is XIV, which isn't a surprise given how insanely popular it's become and how amazing the soundtrack is. It still leaves me wanting for more with how much content is in that game alone. It leaves me even more wanting for the other soundtracks to get similar treatment, but that'd easily double if not triple the amount of songs in the game. I'm just greedy and love my video game music. The DLC that's available as of right now is really cool, opting to branch out of FF and into other Square franchises like the Chrono and Mana series! There's also two Nier DLC packs, which I'm planning on snagging after I'm done with the base game.

The way they translated the gameplay from 3DS to Switch is very fun and feels natural, outside of the FMS tracks that make it nigh blatantly obvious they're better played with a stylus. There's a decent amount of difficulty there too, with some tracks going beyond the standard third level and having a fourth as well. The accuracy can be both forgiving and punishing, following a fairly standard set of ratings until you hit the perfects which are 'criticals', having both a golden and rainbow critical depending on how accurately you hit the note. I play rhythm games casually, if you can call playing every song at least once "casual", so I personally don't have a need for this distinction. However, it could be pretty useful for people looking to be as on beat as possible. The maps themselves are super fun, and it's great to see maps from the original game have gone mostly unchanged. There's a little bit of a two layered nostalgia to it, hearing music from a game I played when I was 10, but my muscle memory reacting to the note chart I played when I was 17.

There's multiplayer! I haven't touched it at all since I'm not especially competitive regarding rhythm games, but that's such a fun mode to add and another way to play beyond the series quests or plain rhythm game!

The iconic Squenix chibi art is beautiful and gives it a sort of storybook feel, but the animations are pretty stiff to go along with that. Less animation makes it easier on the eyes when trying to focus on the rhythm game, maybe I'm just more used to Guitar Hero's method of throwing literally all the cool shit onscreen during gameplay.

The amount of characters included is incredible, most fan favorites are in and playable! I can only complain about Alisaie being excluded even though Alphinaud is right there, lol. And G'raha. I wish G'raha was there. I would've loved to see Lulu, Wakka, and Kimahri in X's cast, too. The character loadouts are pretty customizable in this, with plenty of stat boosting items and scrolls to learn new abilities that characters might not naturally acquire. It feels like home being able to build your perfect FF party even in a rhythm game.

Overall, I'm having a great time with it! The library of music is fantastic, the chibis are cute, and the rhythm game is the right amount of difficulty that I feel so pleased with myself when I full crit combo and I make horrible stress noises when I fuck it all up! 

8/10 no more professionalism i wish the animation was cooler but this games consuming my time atm so its Up There