One of the Least Known Gems on 3DS (Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure)

     In the year 2012, rhythm games had already gone out of style. Gone were the days of a new Rock Band game every year, the most recent game in that series as well as Guitar Hero had come out in 2010. Other than a few weird ones that peeked out every now and then, such as Nintendo's bizarre but incredible series Rhythm Heaven (which has ascended to be considered a cult classic at this point), the rhythm genre had gone away. I'm here to talk today about a little game that I've actually never heard a single other person talk about in my life. It's a game called Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure. This game is so crazy and fun, I was almost convinced that I had dreamed it up. Surely someone else had played it though, right? Well, after a cursory examination on Youtube as well as the internet as a whole, a lot of people do remember this game, and very fondly at that! This game has a 76 on Metacritic, so clearly the critics weren't all in agreement on this being a great game, and the user reviews are at 8.1, which is also not phenomenal. In my mind, however, this may be one of the best rhythm games that I've played, and I lovingly refer to it as "Professor Layton with rhythm games instead of puzzles." I'm going to be honest, it has been quite a few years since I played this game, and as such, I don't remember a lot of the plot elements, but what I do remember, I'll happily convey to you all. So get your thieving clothes and dancing shoes, because we're headed to the streets of Paris!

                        

Just a normal day for a Rhythm Thief!

    This game starts off swinging for the fences. Several guards are inside a catacomb in Paris, when one yells out that the casket of Napoleon Bonaparte has been stolen. We quickly see a cultist somehow able to raise him from the dead, and boom, we have a solid wacky story. Sega has quite a history with rhythm games, as they made several of them for the Dreamcast, most notably Samba De Amigo and Space Channel 5, and this game's story is clearly just as wild as those (although Samba didn't really have a story). Napoleon is somehow alive again and now he has magical powers and an army of undead soldiers to help him take over Paris. Our protagonist for this story is named Raphael, he's an average boy who lives in Paris, but with a double life by night. He's secretly the renowned thief, Phantom R, who's been the enemy of the Paris police force for some time. This is a classic "thief with a heart of gold" premise, and though I can't remember why he steals art from the Louvre, I think he gives it back. Raphael's father left when he was really little and he's constantly looking out for clues as to where his father may be, or even if he's still alive. Along with his loyal canine companion, Fondue, Raphael looks all around for clues of his father's fate, which ties into what treasures and artwork that he steals. This all comes from the very opening, and I don't exactly remember where it goes. As I said, it has been a long time since I've played this game so I don't remember a lot of the details involved, but the presentation is phenomenal. This game plays out in a similar way to the Professor Layton series, with a lot of beautifully animated cutscenes to set the scene and get you really attached to the characters involved, as well as the city of Paris, which we see a lot of in the game. The story and the animation are both great, but both of these take backseats and allow most of the time to dwell on the music, of course.

Lights up on Paris!

    Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure is very obviously a rhythm game, so you'd imagine all of the music to be pretty spectacular, and it really lives up to that expectation. There's a lot of jazzy and upbeat tracks in here, most of them I would say fit the same basic meter, but there are quite a few exceptions to that rule. The villain of this game, Napoleon, mostly relies on songs played on Harpsichord, including "Fugue in G, BWV 578" by Bach. The accordion and other instrumental cues really lend to the setting of Paris, and also reminds me again of the music of the Professor Layton series, which also used a lot of accordion. There's a lot of variation in the tracks, though most of them definitely have a jazzy beat to them, and I have to say that I've been listening to the soundtrack almost the entire time I've been writing this. I know I will never be able to listen to the "Blue Danube" waltz the same way again! There are solid tracks all the way through this game and they're all tied to very smooth and intuitive rhythm minigames. The minigames are actually more varied than the music, as they cover so many different story beats. Some challenges just have you dancing along the streets of Paris, some task you with breaking into the Louvre, facing off against a powerful rival, and many others. The gameplay matches perfectly with the music, and these great songs really make for a satisfying gameplay loop, even whenever some of the minigame styles get reused several times over the duration of the game. There are some special scenarios that I think deserve some extra attention though, and these are the ones that stuck out the most to me whenever I was playing the game several years ago.

A Musical Blast from the Past!

    Earlier in this post, I mentioned that this game pays homage to several of Sega's previous rhythm games, such as Samba de Amigo and Space Channel 5, and that's because of these few minigames. Samba was a game where you played as a monkey with maracas and a sombrero as he played along with lots of latin inspired tracks. The Dreamcast game came out in 2000 with a pair of electronic maracas, effectively starting the plastic instrument peripheral craze 5 years before Guitar Hero hit store shelves with its guitar. You had to shake the maracas in time with the music playing, as well as holding them at the right angles, with each of them registering high, medium, and low notes. There was another game in this series in 2008 for the Wii, but that just used the Wii Remote and Nunchuck. Anyway, there's a minigame in Rhythm Thief where Raphael is involved in a carnival and they play the theme from that game, "Samba de Janeiro," and you play along with maracas. It's a great nod to a weird game that isn't remembered that much either. The other reference of this sort comes directly from Space Channel 5, a game released for the Dreamcast that puts you in the high heeled boots of Ulala, a sassy reporter in the future who has her own news show. She dances her way through her reporting and saves civilians who have been mind controlled by the Morellians to dance. If my description sounds unique and bonkers, well, that's because this game is just weird from start to finish. Also, Michael Jackson is in the game. That's not a joke. There's a sequence in Rhythm Thief where an impostor Phantom R shows up and you have to beat him in a dance off like how Ulala dances off against her rival reporter, Pudding. They even play the original song from Space Channel 5 during this minigame, which made me extremely excited, as the game is weird, but it definitely holds a special place in my heart.

    Rhythm Thief is a great game with a lot of heart, and also a few similarities to other games that have come to be better known to the masses. I'm not sure why this game fell into such obscurity, but I really hope that we'll see another game like this again soon. In doing research about this game, I discovered that there was an IOS game that came out called Rhythm Thief and the Paris Caper that was essentially a port of the original game with a few tweaks and added features. This was apparently short lived, as an article from Eurogamer from 2014 announced that it was released in January 2014, then taken down the next day to deal with an "unexpected problem" and then reuploaded again once whatever problem had been resolved. Unfortunately, according to a report from Destructoid in 2015, the game was pulled from the IOS app store on September 28, 2015, and since it was an online only game, it no longer would work even if you had already downloaded it on your device. I checked the IOS store to be certain, and there were no results. Sadly this may mean that Rhythm Thief's adventuring has come to an end, though who knows? There was definitely a tease for a sequel at the end of the original game, but considering almost no one remembers this little gem of a rhythm game and that we've not seen much of Raphael since then, it seems unlikely. It seems difficult to get your hands on this game nowadays as well, as on Amazon there are only 7 listings for it, and they start at $133. Your best bet is to just maybe look up a walkthrough of this game or pull up the soundtrack on Youtube, like I did. The music alone is worth your time for sure, and I hope you'll discover some new favorite tunes from this.

    Thanks so much for reading this article, friends. I was thinking the other day of ideas that I could write about and this game suddenly popped into my head again after forgetting about it for a few years. It's a very fun and stylish game with great music to boot. I hope you're all doing well this week. I hope you all know that you mean a lot to me, and I truly thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time today to talk about a weird game that I liked a lot. I've been your Self-Proclaimed Rhythm Thief, and I'll talk to you again next week!