Theatrhythm Difficulty

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy has three different game modes. It has a series mode where you play through 5 songs from a specific Final Fantasy game. The prelude, the ending theme, a battle song, an overworld map song, and an event song. It has a 'dark note' mode where you take the fight to Chaos. You play an overworld song and a battle song with the aim of accumulating all the treasure from the monsters. (I believe this is where character stats really come into play.) Finally, it has a challenge mode where you can play any previous beaten song on your choice of difficulty level. Easy, medium, or hard.

On the surface this all seems great but there's a real problem here. Series mode is entirely on the easy difficulty level. Dark note mode is entirely on the medium difficulty level. If you want to play on hard you have to go song by song in the challenge mode.

Now, I'm not a god amongst rhythm gods but I'm at least in the pantheon. (Especially in what essentially boils down to a one button game. Go Thumbo!) Easy mode is very boring. I love the songs so it's not the end of the world that I have to play them on easy to unlock some things but it feels like bad design. I should be able to play through all the songs from a game on any difficulty that I can handle right from the start. (I'd pick hard and lose some of the time for sure!) On the other hand, forcing dark note mode to be medium difficulty could be terrible for someone who likes the music but isn't very good at the game. I'm not sure what I did to unlock the Dancing Mad song but I did it in dark note mode. It's possible someone bad at the game can never get access to that song. And now that I'm getting practice with the game medium is pretty easy for me. I'd set dark note mode to hard if I could and it would be a lot more fun.

I want to be challenged. I want to risk failure and be rewarded for good play and getting better. I feel like I can't get that out of this game. I can only play the hardest versions of the songs by completely ignoring all of the extra frills and stuff which doesn't feel good. *frowns*

Theatrhythm Characters

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy was described to me as Elite Beat Agents with Final Fantasy music and some RPG elements. That description is pretty accurate thus far, but it's the RPG elements that have most impressed me thus far. You build a party of 4 characters from the main characters of each of the 13 Final Fantasys featured in the game. Each character has a different stat progression (you have 6 stats: hp, cp (used to equip abilities), strength, magic, agility, and luck) and learns different abilities as you level them up. The game describes what the stats and abilities do but it's a little unclear how relevant they actually are. (I switched from a party with levels 30-23-23-21 to a party of levels 30-1-3-1 and didn't really notice a difference.)

What most interested me was the 13 main characters picked to be in the game. For me I feel there are 11 obvious main characters and then 2 which are up in the air:

FFI - Generic warrior of light
FFII - Firion
FFIII - Generic onion kid
FFIV - Cecil
FFV - Butz
FFVII - Cloud
FFVIII - Squall
FFIX - Zidane
FFX - Tidus
FFXII - Vaan
FFXIII - Lightning

FFXI is a tricky one since it's an MMORPG. Everyone who played the game built their own character and chose their own leveling path as they played the game. You could screw around like with FFI and FFIII and go with some generic 'hero' but at least in those games you had to be the same race! In FFXI you could be a TaruTaru (cute little midget) or a Mithran (cat woman), or a Galkan (huge male ogrey thing) or a more generic elf or human. What they ended up doing is taking one of the major plot NPCs (I think she had an expansion pack designed around her on top of being one of the starting Windhurst quest givers) and slotting her in as the main character. Seems reasonable enough. And since our first 11 choices were 10 males and 1 female we clearly needed to bring in a female from FFXI in order to hit our quota.

FFVI on the other hand is a game where I feel there are a few different characters that all compete for the glory of main character. I think there are three real contenders:

Terra - first character you see in the game, a focal point of the plot since she's half-human and half-esper
Locke - first character you actually get to name, is the central organizer of the party in the first world
Celes - first character you control in the second world (Terra and Locke actually don't join your party for a long time in the second world and have pretty involved side-quests to get them back)

I've always thought of Locke as the main character since he's the one I named Nick and clearly as a male gamer the main character should be the one that represents me. This is something I'd thought about a fair bit over the years and I'd mostly come around on Celes being the main character of the second world for sure. And since she does play a pretty important role in the first world as well... I could see her being the main character. Especially for a compilation like this where we're on the short end of the female spectrum.

They ended up putting Terra in as the main character. I can somewhat see it in the context of FFVI as a whole but I'd put her in 3rd of the 3 choices I think. However, Shantotto from FFXI fills our 'little girl' quota by virtue of being a Tarutaru. Lightning fills the uncharacteristically strong bill. So we need the third archetype for Theatrhythm and that's the role filled by Terra. Also she has green hair so she'd stand out more. (Assuming you don't mix her up for Rydia, anyway...)




At any rate, my starting party was Squall and the three ladies. You get a scoring bonus when playing a song for using the right character for that song so I've been cycling around a little bit. I tagged in a team of Squall, Warrior of Light, Cloud, Onion Kid and was surprised to see an 'all male' scoring bonus. I wonder if there's a similar 'all female' bonus? There are only 3 female characters to start but I've been accumulating crystals to unlock more characters and maybe some of those are female... You get a shadow outline of the character (so you can guess who is coming I guess) and I think one of them might be Eiko from FFIX. Which would really surprise me since I can't imagine there are a lot of Eiko fans out there and there are so many other characters that could be added... Like Kimahri! He needs experience you know!

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm

Today brought the release of Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for the 3DS. I randomly remembered it came out today and convinced Andrew to have lunch at the mall so I could buy a copy from the EB Games there. Turns out they had copies in. And it turns out that they had more copies of the preorder version than people who preordered it so they hooked me up with the bonus stylus/stickers! Woo!

I'd stopped taking my 3DS to work (I'm playing FFV on the PSP) so I couldn't play right away. But I needed to decide if I was even going to play at all. It would slot in at the very end of my marathon, after all, and I haven't been letting other new (to me) games cut the line. Dissidia is sitting in a pile on the floor just begging to be played, for example, but I've held strong because I need to play everything in order or I'll just never play things like Final Fantasy Adventure or Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. That defeats the whole purpose of playing everything and I had a lot of fun playing them. On the other hand I've really been looking forward to this game and _really_ want to play it.

I got home and immediately popped it into my 3DS. Screw my ideals, I want to listen to Final Fantasy music.  It would seem the basic part of the game involves playing 5 songs from each of the first 13 core FF games. A prelude and the ending theme for each game and then an overworld map, battle, and event song for each game. I started with FFI, of course, and then took a trip to FFVIII. The battle song from this one is The Man With The Machine Gun which may be my favourite FF song. Woo! My sister will be happy to hear that Ronfaure is the overworld song for FFXI.

One thing I discovered is that it shows clips from the ending of all the games when you play the ending music section. This is great for something like FFVIII where it actually played Eyes On Me. It might be terrible for something like FFXII or FFXIII where I actually haven't finished the games! I'm now debating if I should leave those sections unplayed...

Theatrhythm Localization!

Four months ago I posted about a new Final Fantasy game I'd read about: Theatrhythm. The idea of the game is that you tap the 3DS screen (ala Elite Beat Agents) in rhythm to music from the Final Fantasy series. It looked absolutely amazing but was only scheduled for release in Japan. I'd searched around a bit at the time to see if I could find info about a potential US release but there was nothing. What I did find were a lot of critics and reviews on various gaming websites which were all neutral to negative. The comments on those reviews were even worse. A lot of people really, really hate the idea. Mostly they seemed bitter than FFXIII didn't meet their expectations and felt like Square-Enix was wrecking the series and just trying to milk people for extra money while having no good ideas. Things were even worse when it turned out to be the first DS game with downloadable content that you had to pay for.

And then the game came out in Japan and blew all the critics away. Apparently people lined up at stores in Japan to get their copies and many stores sold out on the first weekend. It's been out barely more than a month and only in Japan and is already the 48th most sold 3DS game. By pretty much any metric it was a success. I had high hopes that it might still get ported...

Then Andrew pointed out to me yesterday that they'd announced localizations! No exact date yet, but it will be out sometime this summer. I find it pretty unlikely I'll be at the end of my marathon by then... I don't think I'll care! Final Fantasy music is too awesome to delay.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy

I was updating my list of all Final Fantasy related games yesterday and noticed a new game that's coming out in February of 2012: Theatrhythm! The name is a portmanteau of theatre and rhythm and the game appears to be a 'tap the touch screen' game in the style of Elite Beat Agents or Beatmania.

The interesting twist? All the music in the game is from the Final Fantasy series. 50+ songs, apparently! Each of the 13 core games will have at least three songs. One for battle, one for an event (like the dance scene in FFVIII), and one for the field. The following trailer shows a bunch of clips of each of the three types. Including One Winged Angel!



Now for the bad news... It's currently only slated for release in Japan. Square-Enix did trademark the name in the US so there is some hope that they'll announce an English version of the game in the future but for now my hopes were merely raised and then dashed on the rocks.

I entertained the idea of importing a copy of the game from Japan. It's a music game so I can't imagine the language of the game really mattering all that much. Unfortunately it turns out Nintendo put region locks on the 3DS. Even if I had a copy of the Japanese game I wouldn't be able to play it unless I also had a 3DS from Japan. I really want to play this game but I don't know that I want to play it so badly that buying a second 3DS makes sense. Probably I'm just going to have to be patient and hope they release it over here since it seems awesome.