Another musical celebration for the series! (Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line in review)

     Honestly speaking, there are very few video game series with more impressive and beautiful music than Final Fantasy. So many love the games, and for good reason, as they're well made, turn-based RPGs (though the recent entries have been less turn-based in nature), but I've never been huge on the old school RPGs, no matter how many times I've tried. However, I do definitely love rhythm games. Most people hear the term and think of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or their slightly older contemporary, Dance Dance Revolution, but I'm happy to report that the genre is still alive and kicking. The plastic peripherals have mostly gone away, but I think I'm actually more into it now than I was when a plastic guitar adorned most game rooms. The Theatrhythm Final Fantasy series started back on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2012 with a game of the same name, followed by Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call in 2014, also for the 3DS. I picked up Curtain Call when the Nintendo Eshop was getting ready to shut down on 3DS late last year, and I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it a whole lot since I've picked it up. The series went dormant for a long time, but it has fortunately come back early this year. The most recent version is Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line, which is quite a mouthful, no doubt. I've been playing this game a lot recently, and I figured I should talk a bit about it this week! Please make yourself comfortable, kick off your shoes, and stay for a while as I fill you in on this musical masterpiece that is nearly as fun to watch as it is to play.

An RPG in 4/4 time!

    One of the more interesting elements of this game is how the whole series is represented through the way it works. Just like a classic Final Fantasy game, you start by selecting a party of four members. This game is a bit special, because as it's celebrating every game in the series, you have lots of characters to choose from. They all have their own skills from their games, and by playing through songs with them in the party, they're able to gain more experience to unlock more skills, and ultimately level up their statistics to become stronger and more durable. Classic enemies will pop up for them to fight, and the heroes' skills will activate based on certain triggers such as how many standard notes you hit, or how many slide triggers you hit. These skills vary from casting a lightning spell like Thundaga to healing the party when the song is half over with Pray. Some of my favorite skills are the unit-exclusive ones that only one person can do. Of course Final Fantasy VII is one of the most popular in the series if not the most, and Cloud is obviously one of the characters that can be chosen. Since he's a physical unit, he gets a special physical attack (called Omnislash, which is one of his limit breaks in the original game) when a boss appears. Defeating enemies in the Music Stages sometimes nets you a treasure chest with helpful items in it. Honestly the item economy is kind of complicated, but even without using it too much, the game is a lot of fun. Some characters are more powerful than others, and sometimes it's fun to just play with random characters that just look like they would be cool to have in the party, but with the pseudo "story mode," called "Series Quests," there are times when you really need the strong units.

    Series Quests as a mode allows you to play all the way through games and experience the battles from the games, but just through the music. The main challenge of this mode, however, is the addition of quests, one per level. Some missions aren't too bad, such as "Finish the stage with 60% Good or better" which basically just means, "don't fail this stage." Some quests are much more complicated though, such as defeating a certain boss which has three times the health of regular bosses. To complete a quest like this, I've been looking up a lot of guides to see which characters would be best for what quest. One of my strongest teams right now is comprised of Terra (from FF VI), Bartz (From FF V), Spiritus (From Dissidia Final Fantasy), and Ramza (from Final Fantasy Tactics). Without going into too many details, all of these characters work together in deep and complicated ways. For instance, Spiritus has the ability to make magic attacks of the party leader more powerful, so I put Terra as the leader, since she has the strongest magic. There are a lot of moving pieces to these systems to put out the right amount of damage, but of course, the rhythm game aspect is the main focus of the game.

The Rhythm is critical!

    I'm not the best person at rhythm games, since I have a really hard time playing this game at the highest levels, but I've gotten pretty good on Expert mode (which is confusingly what their name for the "normal" or "standard" difficulty). In true rhythm game fashion, you want to get as high of a combo as you can, awarding you a "perfect chain," if you're able to get at least a good on every note hit. It can be very difficult to get a perfect chain for many reasons, whether you just get into your own head, or if you have something going on in the background distracting you, or if the chart is just really challenging (and honestly it could be all three). It's still a really fun time, and as I stated already, the soundtrack is killer! It says something about me that I've never really gotten heavily invested in the Final Fantasy series, but this game makes me want to play through more of them. Like every other rhythm game, you have to hit the button in the right timing, but there are three different types of stages. "Battle Stages" pit you against waves of tough enemies while the notes come at you in four columns, symbolizing the 4 characters in your party. The "Field Stages" are slightly different because the held notes go up and down sometimes, so you have to move the analog stick up or down along with the direction of the line. The last type of stage goes along with certain cutscenes from the games, but they pretty much operate the exact same as the battle stages, just represented in a different way.

    My brother and I have played a lot of this game together because of one pretty awesome feature that I'm so glad they added: Pair Mode. This mode turns any song in the game into co-op mode, which is similar to the Co-op mode that they added for Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, but they didn't have it for all songs in the game. This mode does a great job of splitting up the charts between two people, and it's just a lot of fun to play that way if you have a sibling or a friend that comes over and wants to check it out, it's a perfect rhythm party experience. My brother and I have played through almost all of the Series Quests now, and I've loved learning new music and talking with him about the different tracks and how complicated some are and how some are pretty simple, but still really pretty. Final Fantasy VII obviously is the music that I was most familiar with, but XIV is pretty phenomenal as well. Not only music from the numbered entries is here either, Dissidia Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Tactics, Mystic Quest, Chocobo's Dungeon, etc. The list really goes on and on, including the VII Remake and VII series tracks, which include Crisis Core and Advent Children, among a few others. This is actually one game that I am tempted to buy a lot of the DLC for, since there's some killer music added here as well. Tracks from other Square Enix games such as Live-A-Live, Chrono Trigger, and The World Ends With You can be purchased in different DLC packs, and they all look like a lot of fun. Nier and Nier: Automata even got packs in there,  which is exciting since the music from those games are pretty phenomenal!

    All put together, this game has given me a lot to play, and as I said earlier, this game is such a joyous celebration of the characters and music from all these games that I would love to actually try the games out sometime soon! This was a big surprise when they announced it either at the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I'm so glad that the series lives on in this generation of consoles. I was worried how much the series would be changed because of the difference in the controllers, especially compared with the 3DS that I've gotten used to playing it on, but I worried for no reason. The controllers work fine for this style of game, though I did have to adjust my position a bit. The game suggests you use the shoulder buttons (R1 and L1, for example) while keeping your thumbs close to the analog sticks. It works well, though the fast notes can be hard to hit while alternating between the left and right hands. It's something to get used to though, and I think all in all, this is a fantastic game and celebration of Final Fantasy's 35 years of existence.

    Thanks so much for reading this little post about a fun rhythm game that I've been enjoying, friends! I didn't discuss everything, but I really haven't played much of the online multiplayer battle mode of this game, just because I prefer to do co-op, but I'm sure it works well like the one in the aforementioned Melody of Memory. There are also a lot of characters that you unlock as you continue through the Series Quests, but I'll allow you all to discover whatever secrets may lie there for yourselves. I hope you're all doing well and that you'll have a great week! This is Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed Rhythm Warrior, and I'll talk to you again next week!