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I very much wanted to like this game. And I may go back eventually to try it out (I did – and added my thoughts at the end), but the aggressive tutorialization and cutscenes every ten seconds really got to me in my first half hour – to the point that I’m writing this instead of playing the game, which is never a good sign.
It has taken me more than 30 minutes to get out of the tutorial. The main character is the most bland and insufferable “idiot protagonist” you can imagine – he doesn’t even get the standard chuunibyou excuse, as they establish he’s twenty-five in the opening cutscene. The combat is probably okay, but you only get about ten seconds of combat at a time before you are either interrupted by a cutscene or you are forced to wait for the next wave of enemies.
That being said, the tutorial itself is hilarious. You get an unobtrusive on-screen prompt saying left click is light attack and right click is heavy attack (though for me this was weirdly reversed in my first battle). You fight. AND THEN you’re teleported to a weird delusion of grandeur section where you are taught that…left click is light attack and right click is heavy attack. You must sit and watch the rhythm play out in front of you, then wait until the game says you can move or click before displaying that you understood. Then this happens two more times with other mechanics, in between the cutscenes which definitely, absolutely should have been running during gameplay. I am led to wonder if someone planned out the first level, then had execs come by and tell them that they need a better tutorial and to make the plot more obvious – because what’s a tutorial if it isn’t taking up half the screen with text and having the game tell you out loud what to do?
I decided to compare this intro to BPM: Bullets Per Minute – a game which is incredibly similar and which I am truly awful at: instead of the 25+ minutes of tutorial, you are immediately playing the game (and can easily die from something in the first room which isn’t just a misjudged platform hop). That’s usually a good sign. Not only that, BPM uses its music incredibly effectively. Instead of taking the “safe” Top 20 pop rock hits of 2010, it has a custom soundtrack which creates the perfect mood for battling through hell as a Valkyrie. In other words: Chai merely adopted the beat – Göll was born in it … molded by it.
Maybe I just like BPM’s first-person style better. Maybe Hi-Fi Rush will find its legs and show more interesting combat (and less unlikeable protagonist) as you play through. But all I do know that I’m about to go play BPM instead. Tier Three.
ETA: After cleansing my palate with some BPM, I returned to Hi-Fi Rush, determined to at least beat the first boss. It turned out I quit pretty much just before the game started letting you actually fight things. I can now confirm the combat is…acceptable. I beat the first mini-boss (major enemy?) before the tutorial had finished teaching me, and had to wait around for the exit to open up. The “boss” fight started with a fairly lengthy cutscene, before making me realize that you don’t get to fight the actually interesting enemy and end up just fighting another robot which slowly attacks and exposes its weak spots – not exactly the thing I was looking for in a fast-paced rhythm brawler. Outside and after that uninspired boss battle, Hi-Fi Rush seemed to want to be a platformer in addition to a third-person brawler – but I’m not sure that part works either, since the platforming sections don’t keep up the pace of the rest of the game: the Sonic problem, basically. Not to mention the constant interruption of the camera and control to point something out in the environment or to have a stylistic finisher. Which is also not something you want in a fast-paced rhythm brawler.
While this last bit is personal taste, I’m reminded of the many poorly-dubbed anime of the early 2000s. There’s just something about Japanese comedy and pacing that doesn’t translate well into English for me, and this game seems to lean in to that style. So, I suppose, if you enjoyed early 2000s anime dubs (and mid-2000s Dreamworks movies), you’ll find the plot a lot more engaging than I did. Sadly, I found it to be a little too shounen for my taste.
At the very least, I can now say I gave Hi-Fi rush a fair shot. But play Crypt of the Necrodancer or BPM instead. Tiering unchanged at Three.