Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

Is this really the end of Theatrhythm? If so, Final Bar Line goes out with a massive bang. Including DLC, the total tracklist numbers around half a thousand songs, drawn not only from the diverse assortment of games in the Final Fantasy series but also the larger Square Enix library in general. Even if you don’t touch the DLC, you’ve got a whopping 385 songs to enjoy here. The new tricks in the charts add a bit of excitement even to the old familiar songs, and the refreshed presentation looks great. If you like music games or Final Fantasy, you’ll want Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. If you like both, you probably already bought it.

Final Bar Line is bigger and better, and offers an incredible amount of unforgettable melodies for Final Fantasy fans.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is a labor of love that is worthy of loving back - it's game packed to the brim with iconic songs, unforgettable characters, and fun excuses to revisit and collect them all. Accessibility options, versatile difficulty levels, and simple yet addicting multiplayer help make a great package even greater. Any Final Fantasy fan owes it to themselves to dive into this game and take a musical trip down memory lane.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is the "tribute" game that FF's 35th anniversary needed, a title that brings together the best of its soundtrack with a fun and simple gameplay style that both casual and hardcore gamers will enjoy. Add hundreds of things to unlock and an adorable aesthetic, and you have a great game for the fans.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is the definitive game that brings us almost the entire anthology of music from the Final Fantasy games and others outside the franchise. They knew how to mix these two genres with style. However, on Switch it is way better to play it in portable mode.

A captivating rhythm game that, with tons of contents, will make your Final Fantasy's heart beat fast.

It‘s a fan-feast for the ears, then, with a good sense of rhythm and lots of tracks. It‘s just a shame that its looks are somewhat disappointing and that it‘s comparably stingy in terms of extras commemorating the series‘ 35th anniversary.

If you are a fan of FF music this is a must buy. There are lots of great tracks in there from almost every FF entry.

Of course, the soundtrack is amazing. If you like Final Fantasy games, you will definitely recognize a lot of the songs. It’s a very pleasant game, but in my opinion, it’s lacking in terms of gameplay. It’s just clicking buttons to the beat of the song, or sometimes a drumbeat is added on top of the music. I feel like a kid in kindergarten playing this game.Final Fantasy VII Rebirth had such an amazing melodic mini-game with songs on the piano! The developers could have made something like that or simply copied the Guitar Hero formula, but for one instrument. That would have been a much more fun and engaging experience. In this game, we’re not playing actual parts of the music—we’re just smashing buttons to the rhythm like children.I was very disappointed, especially after seeing and reading so many positive reviews

Quantity over quality. That's how I'd sum up this game. I don't hate it, in fact I really, REALLY wanted to like it, but man as a long time fan of this series, FF games, and rhythm games, this game completely watered down the series in a huge way. It feels like it was streamlined for a wider audience, adding just a whole bunch of "stuff" while taking away a lot of the elements that made the first 2 games so **** lack of ANY sort of Switch touch screen compatibility, let alone a mode similar to the old swipe screen, is honestly kind of baffling. That said, this review is limited to the Switch version. Before you say "bUt thE new ModE is So muCH beTTer", my point is more that the players have the OPTION of playing in different ways. Curtain Call had FOUR different modes to play. And I've already heard people retort by saying that styluses don't work on the Switch, to which I say that this is something that can be slightly modified to a finger tap/swipe instead. It currently just feels like every other rhythm game I've had to play using a controller. And the fact that you can't even use the touch screen in the menus is kind of infuriating. Anyway, next point.Some of the character/song choices. I get it. They're trying to cater to as many people as possible. But some of the choices are just... odd. Why are there SO MANY FFXIV tracks??? The story mode for this game was PAINFULLY long. [start rant] Not to mention 2 Yshtola's? MAYBE if #2 was unlocked AFTER beating it, but both being unlocked from the off. "Oh but Cloud and Yuna both have 2 versions!" you say? Yes, but both have the character from 2 different titles. And let's be real, did Yshtola of all characters really need a second version (this comment goes double for the sheer number of FFXIV songs). [end rant]Abilities. The CP system, one of the most interesting parts of the previous games, especially Curtain Call, has been completely cut, along with most of the strategy involved in making a team. IN ADDITION, they cut the total number of abilities from 4 to 3 across the board. Like... just why? I will say, I do love the new summon system and the slight gacha-style qualities associated with it. The old summon system was very arbitrary and just bleh, but the fact that you can choose summons more easily and they can now happen more than once a battle is a nice change.Next, and woo this is a big one, FMS mode is now just slightly different than BMS mode. Chocobos? Gone. Airships? (Kind of there but mostly...) Gone. And then there's the EMS stages, which have almost completely gone by the wayside, a practice that started with Curtain Call. All sense of uniqueness among tracks is completely gone. Not to mention that the BMS tracks, which used to have one line per character, is kind of just a jumbled mess now with no real meaning to even having 4 tracks anymore.I feel like they literally just tried to win over so many people with the sheer amount of tracks and characters, but here's the thing: it worked. All of the reviews I've seen are solely focusing on the nostalgia, and track and character selection That's cool, but man the mechanics have suffered so much and it feels like the devs just got lazy. Like, the formula was already there. You just stripped it away to a watered down mess. All that being said, am I still going to play it? Yes. Am I a hypocrite? Also, probably yes. I'm mostly just hoping that my mind will change and after about 15 hours of playing, it already *SLIGHTLY* has, but only time will tell. If I wanted to just listen to FF tracks, I'd load up Spotify or Youtube and let it run. But I wanted a good Theatrhythm game. The original, while it had its flaws, came out of nowhere and provided such a great experience. Curtain Call, while it did away with the original story mode which I personally really enjoyed, added so many good mechanics and touch-ups to the original. Final Bar Line just... stripped all the work away. I'm praying they put out some patches, though I'm not hopeful. Maybe I'll change my mind, but for now, I really can't give it higher than a 5.

While the game is nice, it lacks Freya Crescent and a few other favorite characters I like in the series. This overall dampens my experience.

The game is fine, as far as rhythm games go, but they've severely over-filled the starting games (which I'd suspect are those you can access in the demos), and ignored the rest. FFVII has 7 characters. FFX has 3. So for the first game, which you can unlock right away, there are nearly 2 full teams. For the second, you don't even have one team. Your options are play FFX levels without a full team or break your immersion having a random character from another game along for the ride. The tutorials also need a lot of work. They're fine for the basic levels, but there are none I could find for the higher difficulties, which have new combinations of actions which are required. That would be somewhat less of a problem if the requirements for completing some levels wasn't to do so on the higher difficulty levels. EDIT: I have discovered that not only to the DLCs only contain songs and no characters or scenes (semi-expected), but that the "news" option on the main page of the "Premium Digital Deluxe Edition" is just ads for more PAID DLC!