NoClueWii

A truly fantastic game! Surpassed my expectations by a long shot, tons of amazing minigames, fantastic remixes with a lot of creativity, incredible songs, charming and memorable audio cues, and the game is packed with content. I also want to highlight the Beatspell mode, it is AMAZING! I was really surprised at how fun it was! It is also the easiest game of the series making it good for new or more casual players, with no minigames that feel frustrating or unfair while still offering some challenge for experienced players in the later minigames and when going for perfects. While playing it I get the feeling this game is more of a Rhythm Tengoku 2 than a Rhythm Heaven 5, and that is a good thing. I definitely appreciate more variety and experimentation while keeping the game simple, but not doing something way too different like the unskippable story mode Megamix had. The sense of rhythm is more present than ever! It is ALMOST everything I wanted from a new Rhythm Heaven and more... if they hadn't COMPLETELY fumbled the art style. The minigames that use the default visual style for this game looks BAD. And it honestly feels pretty simple to fix or at least massively improve. The biggest problem by far, at least for me, is how the line art of the characters was drawn. There is absolutely no weight to any of the lines, they don't get thinner at the ends, making every corner and detail look unbelievably lazy and amateurish, almost no even slightly sharp edges anywhere, everything is round and samey, and it completely breaks the very simple yet incredibly stylish art style of the Rhythm Heaven series every single other game followed to some extent. It feels like such a hard thing to mess up, I'm genuinely baffled that they got it so wrong. When they first showed the game my expectations immediately lowered substantially once I saw how the art looked and the obvious problems with it. Not to say there aren't ANY minigames with the game's default art style that look good, they CAN look really great, but the artist missed the mark for way too many of the minigames, resulting in a lack of that important impactful visual feedback that made so many of the older minigames so memorable for the new ones using this default style. None of the minigames are really truly "ugly" though, just VERY disappointing for the series, and I hope that if we ever get a new game it goes back to the usual art style for the series, otherwise it would be beyond disappointing. Thankfully there is quite a bit of variety of art style in the game, with many minigames not even having line art at all and looking great as a result! I even actually LIKE the way some of them have these large empty spaces on the screen, it can feel otherworldly and I really like it. And even for the minigames that look less than ideal, once you get past how they look, they can still be a lot of fun! At the end of the day, Rhythm Heaven Groove is truly an incredible game, way better than I could have ever predicted the next Rhythm Heaven game would be, and even with all the problems I have with much of its presentation, I can't bring it lower than a 9.