In the opening hours you’re still bombarded with unlocks, tutorial messages, and all manner of high pitched audio stings to tell you what is going on, and it’s still gloriously absurd, yet enjoyable.Īt the risk of repeating much of what I said in 2012, there are three types of song, backed with either an emotionally driven backing scene, a battle scene, or a adventuring theme, and the music plays out as you tap, slide, hold, and move the stylus on the touch screen. You still pick four playable characters to level up and equip items to, and they still level up a rate of knots. So, the core gameplay returns, and Curtain Call is still a music game that has bizarre, probably over-complicated mechanics attached in an attempt to retain the Final Fantasy elements. Curtain Call ratchets that love up to eleven by throwing an interesting new mode at us, as well as a ridiculous number of songs – a few of which appeared in the previous title. Theatrhythm was a very good game, and a love letter to fans of Final Fantasy’s music. At some point that joke worked, honestly, but the point I’m already labouring to make is that there’s really not much difference in the core gameplay between the original Theatrhythm game, and Curtain Call.Īnd that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I would recommend this game to FF and music fans alike, as well as those that enjoy casual, collectathon, or mechanically challenging games.When is a sequel not a sequel? Why, when it’s Final Fantasy, of course. The game is held back by attention to detail for player options, though this is still a solid title given that the 3DS rhythm library is relatively slim. Overall, the collectathon and completionist nature of the game is enticing and the quantity of music is outstanding. I was surprised that you could not create presets for your teams, meaning you had to manually change around characters and their abilities when you want the optimal set-up for a song. There will be songs where you struggle to hear the song over the sound effects, and vice versa. Also, there does not seem to be a happy-medium sound level for the player hits. For a music title, it is a shame that many of the unlockable replacement sounds are out-of-place and distracting. The options in the game are hit-and-miss. Still, it is exciting when you do nail every note to a melody, the combo allowing characters to use attacks and spell. You begin to think about the best way to handle a fast string of notes when it seems like a counter to the control scheme. You need to be very deliberate when using the circle pad versus using the stylus for directional strokes, and the game can be very picky on the timing of each note on certain stages. I have mixed feelings about the way the controls handle, even though t here are 3-4 different control schemes. The rhythm gameplay itself is satisfying and easy to pick up it is both addicting and challenging to 100% each given song. I've played for 20 hours and I have yet to scratch the surface of what's left to complete. You unlock characters from the games as you go along, quests to obtain said characters and rare items, and rigorous ingame achievements. There are soundtracks from at least 16 titles right off the bat, amassing 200+ songs total, with 3 different difficulty levels. I didn't know the complete-and-collectathon I was getting myself into. I had only played Final Fantasy IV growing up, but that soundtrack alone encouraged me to look into Theatrhythm.