If you’re anything like me, you miss the incredible amount of personality the rhythm game genre use to have. Colorful characters and original music were par for the course when games like Parappa the Rapper and Space Channel 5 released. But as time marched on, the genre became synonymous with licensed music and rigid note charts.

Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure brings the character-driven style back to rhythm games while, for better or worse, experimenting with some rudimentary adventure game ideas. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a game you won’t soon forget.

The cute and increasingly bizarre story of Rhythm Thief puts you in the shoes of Raphael, a young art thief trying to find out why his father abandoned him. Disguised as Phantom R, he makes his way through museums, libraries, and opera houses as he attempts to uncover the mysteries not only of his father’s departure, but of a man claiming to be the revived Napoleon Bonaparte.

Along the way, Raphael and his trusty dog, Fondue, avoid the constables, pal around with a violin virtuoso named Marie, and get wrapped up in a crazy plot you’ll have to see for yourself. Aside from the text-based dialogue, the story is told in a surprising number of fully animated cutscenes which, despite being hand drawn, are fully viewable in 3D (to great effect).

Rather than pulling you from rhythm stage to rhythm stage, Rhythm Thief adopts a structure not unlike a first person adventure game. By selecting different areas of Paris on the top screen, you’ll be presented with a single environment screen below where you can talk to whoever is around and interact with the environment in a limited capacity.

These sections unfortunately fail to reach their true potential. Recording sounds and using them in ventriloquist-like ways to solve puzzles is a great idea on paper. The problem is the game never trusts you to figure anything out. Instead, you’re either standing practically on top of the answer or led by the ear as the game points at it with red paths and exclamation points. Worse yet are the puzzle stages. These start with the complexity of a Simon game and somehow manage to get simpler. With the exception of one mildly enjoyable puzzle involving the reassembling of sheet music, the puzzles might as well not even exist.

Another downside of the adventure game inspiration comes in the form of pixel hunting. It’s never required for completing the game, but if you want to find money and optional items used to unlock bonus chapters, prepare to tap everything with the stylus. Phantom Notes in particular are aggravating in that you need to tap 5 of them in quick succession or they’ll fade away. The taps need to be so pixel perfect that trying to re-tap a Phantom Note I had previously tapped would often take far more tries than I’d care to admit. A little leniency here would have gone a long way and the obsessiveness it instills in you to leave nothing untapped damages the flow of the game.

“You can record sounds in the environment to solve puzzles.”

Ultimately though, this is a rhythm game. As you progress through the story, you’ll be tasked to play all kinds of unique rhythm stages with vastly different input methods. And it’s the contextualization of these rhythm stages that really makes them shine. When Phantom R needs to sneak past the cops, you’ll have to tap different poses to hide behind statues all to the beat of the music. When he needs to box a butler (who doesn’t?), you’ll have to use the gyro sensor to bob and weave before delivering your blows in a minigame that looks strikingly similar to Punch-Out!!.

Speaking of similarities, you’ll find several homages to classic SEGA rhythm games in some of Rhythm Thief‘s sidequests. You can shake things up in a couple stages based on Samba de Amigo and “chu” your way through some dance offs that mimick Space Channel 5. But not every rhythm stage is played from Phantom R’s perspective. Occasionally, you’ll be eating in synch with a poodle love interest as Fondue, playing what could be described as “Violin Hero” as Marie, and even rhythmically shooting baddies as Inspector Vergier.

“This stage is like Punch-Out!!, but with more butlers. Control hints can be disabled.”

The rhythm stages themselves are enjoyable for the most part. They never quite hit the same high as Rhythm Heaven Fever, but the great sense of variety will keep you from getting bored. Scoring is a bit odd, though. You’re rank is constantly rising (to a point) and lowering based on your actions, but this is independent of your score. One time I screwed up the whole beginning of a song and pulled it through in the end resulting in a higher rank than my previous attempt, but a lower score. The disconnect between the two is rather disorienting.

Whether you’re in or out of rhythm stages, the soundtrack is dynamite. It features Space Channel 5‘s Naofumi Hataya among others and while it’s far from a carbon copy, you’ll hear plenty of live brass sections in both. There’s also clever arrangements of classical pieces including a jazzy Blue Danube and a rocking rendition of “Little” Fugue.

Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure isn’t without problems, but it’s an incredibly charming new IP in a subgenre that barely exists anymore. What it lacks in puzzle design it makes up for in a huge variety of creative rhythm games that tell a delightful story consisting of equal parts endearing and bizarre. Afterall, it’s not always the perfect games that keep us smiling this much.

This review is based on a 3DS copy of Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure provided to the reviewer by SEGA.

Tags: 3DS, adventure games, rhythm games, Rhythm Thief, Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure, Sega

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.