sweatpantromanc

Okay, look. I am a massive Rhythm Heaven fan. You are not likely to get that perspective from any other person in this section. Therefore, you must be warned; the information in this review will likely only be relevant to other major fans. Rhythm Heaven Groove is a subpar entry into the series that I am ultimately tempted to put near the bottom of my tierlist. Is it a bad game? Not especially. In fact, if your only exposure to Rhythm Heaven is Fever's Remix 10, I think you'll have an excellent time turning your brain off to play this. I need to highlight that most of my criticisms are stemming from the fact that I have spent years playing these games. Neither the visuals nor the music consistently meet the standards established by the very first entry in the series. Some games could easily be replicated on Google Slides with no visual disparity. With a handful of exceptions, the first 40 minigames have music that is forgettable at best and actively irritating at worst. There is a heavy overuse of the same synthesizer in these early levels. Another issue with the early levels is the amount of competency they assume the player has; that being virtually none. If you disliked Megamix's prequel levels, you will find the same discontent here. Not only that, there is a tutorial in front of every level, even sequel levels that add no new cues or responses. This is a waste of time. If you try to skip a tutorial without knowing what's in it, however, you may risk not learning very valuable information that will make-or-break if you pass or fail. This is due to the fact that, if there's a new cue or response added in a sequel level, sometimes that information will be placed *before* the review section... and sometimes it will be placed *after*. If you want to make absolutely sure you know everything before playing a sequel for the first time, you are forced to play through every new tutorial, *just to make sure*. This is a BRAND NEW PROBLEM that this series has, because no other game in the entire series thinks the player is stupid enough to not know how to play the sequel to a level they've already played. Groove *does*. If you are a blind or visually impaired person, you may have taken note of the fact that Groove offers a text-to-speech service within the game. This is a brilliant step forward! It also makes the complete failure to provide audio cues for some visual-only cues in levels even more embarrassing. Not to mention, enabling or disabling the TTS is the only audio setting in the game, and plenty of cues that have visual support are too quiet to make out if you're playing blind. You can't change the volume of the cues or the music. This is not accessibility- if you want to make a game with audio and visual cues accessible to a blind audience, you need to thoroughly ensure that your visual cues have audio equivalents. How is Five Nights At Freddy's 4 more up-to-scuff for blind people than this game? Did I mention there's 80 minigames? There's 80 minigames. A major chunk of these are sequel games, at a larger proportion to non-sequels than any previous entry in the RH series. Many of these minigames are "prequels" significantly lacking in quality, and a similar amount are sequels that are worse than the original minigame. The only reason there are 80 minigames in this game is because the previous entry clocked in at roughly 90 minigames; in turn, the only reason *that* number is so high is because 3/4 of them are ported from other games. There is no legitimate reason for this game to be as big as it is. There are actual reasons to buy this game, though. Beatspell is a fresh spin on the previous side-modes in other Rhythm Heaven games, and at times I actively prefer it to the main content of the game. Some minigames are standouts! Brolly Good Show 2 and Space Sentry are actively innovative; BGS2 is the first minigame in the series to be in a language other than English or Japanese, and Space Sentry's cue style seems to be entirely unique to the minigame. There's also a decent amount of fanservice- plenty of references to prior entries in the series are present in the game. (Whether or not that's actually a good thing, I'll leave to the reader). This game is playable. I personally believe it fails to reach the standards the rest of the series creates, but those standards are relatively high. And ultimately, it doesn't matter what I say to other Rhythm Heaven fans. You're going to buy it anyway.