Rhythm Hell

I love rhythm games, but there are times where I'll be darned if I can figure out why. You might surmise from reading this screed that I've just been driven to abject frustration of crashing and burning for the umpteenth time on a video game intended for the rhythmically-inclined, and you'd be correct. The game in question is Nintendo's generally stellar Rhythm Heaven Fever (unfortunately burdened with the moniker "Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise" over in the UK) and man do I hate it sometimes.

But most of the time I do not.

I think back to the rhythm games I've played in the past. I somehow managed to sidestep the colossal and ubiquitous trend of various Guitar Heroes and Rock Bands as I preferred to keep what little free space I have from filling up with plastic instruments, and similarly avoided the various absurdly popular DDRs, Pop'ns and Beatmanias once previously isolated to the Japanese Arcades where they could do no harm, but even so I've managed to play a considerable number of musically-driven games over the years: PaRappa the Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy, Frequency, Amplitude, Gitaroo Man, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy and all three of iNiS's nonpareil DS cheerleading games have held me in a similar cycle of frustration, madness and jubilant success.

I suspect the rhythm game is closely tied to our appreciation of music in general, and how strong the desire for a note-perfect beat is for the most arrhythmic. Were you to present a game in which I had to hop several platforms with perfect timing - a very frequent case within "runner" subgenre, with Bit.Trip Runner perhaps the most well-known example - that fervor to succeed wouldn't grab me nearly as strongly. At the risk of sounding too obvious, my obsessive need to nail the performance of a piece of music without error is really largely due to the appreciation of the music in question than my wanting to prove my own meager skills to no-one in particular.

Rhythm Heaven Fever scores itself very strictly. Its various stages individually have stringent criteria for when to hit a note, with very little leeway. The purpose of this, as the game itself elucidates, is to present a gameplay system that is simple to understand and thus allowing it to then manifest an onerous level of challenge elsewhere - rather than confuse players by giving them numerous options and resources, the control scheme is boiled down to a core of two buttons and the game simply asks that you hit them at the right moment. As such, Rhythm Heaven Fever is deceptively difficult, even more so if you're not one that can readily pick up on beats. Musicians, drummers especially, are incredible at this due to years of practice. They probably play Rhythm Heaven Fever and wonder what the big deal is. A certain musician acquaintance of mine reacts with incredulity on Twitter that I could find one of more timing-intensive stages - Monkey Watch - an issue. I certainly don't resent their ability - they trained longer and harder at it than I've ever done at anything save, perhaps, complaining about things on the internet. Often, though, I start to feel like I'm either too old or too unfocused to accomplish what the game asks of me and I just give up and put the game away for a spell.

And then a few hours later I resume playing it again.

Not even with platformers--the genre that has debatably created the most difficult games ever seen by our medium, such as Super Meat Boy and the cadre of masocore games that followed in its wake--do I feel this torturous push and pull relationship more keenly. I've been playing platformers for so damn long that I actually do profess to a modicum of talent with the genre - I recently beat Donkey Kong Country Returns and Rayman Origins both, with 100% completion no less. Even so, I've steeled myself and risen up to more challenges that initially seemed impossible in the rhythm genre than I have the platforming genre or any other. In the (hopefully distant) future, when paramedics find my lifeless crumpled form in front of a game that has risen my blood pressure to a terminal level, I have no doubt they'll be met with the tragically pertinent scene of an on-screen musician character denigrating my inability to keep the beat going.

So I don't feel like I can fairly review Rhythm Heaven Fever. It has caused me so much pain since I began playing it, yet in spite of this I've reached the seventh set of stages and excepting the aerial badminton shenanigans of Air Rally (and Monkey Watch, naturally) I've acquired mastery-signifying shiny gold medals for every single challenge the game has thrown at me. It's clearly not insurmountable, so why does it feel that way? Why does a lump form in my throat whenever a new stage presents its rules during its tutorial? Why do I instinctively avoid any opportunities the game provides to "perfect" a stage?

Despite its colorful characters and wonderful mellow tunes, I don't think a game has stressed me out to this extent in a real long time. I actually feel a kinship of sorts with the many fellow gamers suffering through The Last of Us's grim and oppressive set-pieces. I'm considering finally purchasing a copy of Dark Souls just so I can move onto something less emotionally intensive for a while.

But I won't. I won't be playing anything new; not while there's still Rhythms to Fever. Goddammit.