HARDEST THEATRHYTHM CURTAIN CALL SONG SERIESExcellent though it is, Curtain Call is chained to the series it repurposes enjoyment of the game may well correlate directly to your knowledge of its referents.Ĭurtain Call, moreso than Theatrhythm, guzzles your nostalgia like gasoline, and the game’s increased depth and breadth only serves, in some ways, to dilute its own efficacy. On the off-chance you’ve wandered this far into this review without having spent much time with Final Fantasy, you are probably completely, hopelessly lost in the preceding four paragraphs. It’s a deft bit of design, this haptic representation, and it does great work to knit the physical, reflexive process of rhythm-matching to the emotional and mystical Final Fantasy universe. Over time you’ll gain experience, augmenting your party’s abilities, and increasing your chances to conquer harder stages and tougher foes.įield Mode, alternately, invokes the grandiose scope of the games, the journey through hundreds of locations terraformed into cartridge RAM, by bidding your party members run against the tide of rhythm triggers, racing towards-what else?- treasure, accessible only to the nimble-fingered. Button triggers rush down lanes at your party members, and successfully matching them causes that character to attack. Battle Mode, for example, is designed like a Nintendo-era Final Fantasy battle sequence, with your party lined up to one side, and a parade of terrifying monsters to the other. There are several ways to engage with the game’s core rhythm-system, each designed to invoke a specific Final Fantasy principle. Well, of course, is the immediate feeling- this IS a Final Fantasy game, isn’t it? Before you’re able to even browse the song selection, for example, the game takes you through a minutes-long narrative prologue, and then bids you assemble up a four-person party of adventurers. Raised as one, really, because it demands to be configured like an RPG planned through like one. Here’s the most thrilling thing, though, and what brings us to the game we came here to discuss, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call-a tremendous number of these experiments are excellent.Ĭurtain Call, like its predecessor, 2011’s Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, is a taut and mechanically-demanding rhythm game disguised as a hundred-hour RPG. Scores of one-off Final Fantasy titles have been released in the past decade, representing experiments with new genres and paeans to traditional JRPG action alike. In the absence of a core series title to drive the franchise forward, Square-Enix has expanded outward. These days, I think the answer is, “we talk about all of it,” in a way that wasn’t true when a flagship Final Fantasy title would be just around the corner, promising some enticing twist-but only a twist!-to the menu-driven RPG gameplay upon which the series was founded. Perhaps we talk about the two concurrently-running Final Fantasy MMOs- XI, first published before Enix’s incorporation into Squaresoft, and XIV, whose initial reviews were so poor that Square-Enix scripted an in-game extinction-level event, shut off the servers, and completely remade the game for re-release 18 months later?ĭo we… do we talk about those awful iOS games? What do we talk about when we talk about Final Fantasy?ĭo we talk about the core numbered series, whose impossible, decades-long streak of quality work has been in limbo for eight long years, while Final Fantasy XV undergoes a very careful, deliberate birth? Is there anything to talk about, save reminiscence of the series’ past glories, and speculation as to whether we’ll ever see more?ĭo we talk about the multiple subseries dedicated to exploring mythoi introduced in those core titles? The FFXIII-heavy Fabula Nova Crystallis series, perhaps? The retconned-into-being Ivalice Alliance? Or maybe the action-RPG-heavy Compilation of Final Fantasy VII?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |