1. The presentation of this is amazingly charming w/ its hand drawn art style, beautiful music, Parisian setting and hilariously improbably
storyline. All of this is wasted and we'll deal w/ that
shortly.
2. The best thing about Rhythm Thief is its pun-y sense of humor. I cannot get enough of this stuff, folks.
3. Aside from 1 and 2, basically everything else about this game is straight-out bad.
4.
As you navigate Paris, you are encouraged to looks for secrets hidden
stashed away in various objects on screen. The reality of this though is
the secrets don't seem to actually be hidden anything, rather unlocked
by basically randomly tapping the stylus somewhere on the screen. This
means for each new location, you have to tap, tap, tap every last
millimeter of the screen to find everything. This is not fun.
5.
While randomly tapping everything, you will inevitably accidentally tap
on a character and be forced to re-skip through their dialog, so you can
get back to the task of tap, tap, tapping, which as per 4, is not even
fun to begin w/.
6. This is not even close to the worst thing
about this game. The worst thing about this game is the actual
mini-games, which are the core of gameplay. That is bad.
7. I am
actually somewhat impressed by the myriad of ways these games are bad
since they manage to do just about everything possible wrong at least
once though, mercifully, not always at the same time.
8. For
starters--and probably worst off all--sometimes the rhythm is just
subtly off and it is not even off in the same way every time. Sometimes
you have to be a little ahead of the beat, sometimes it's spot on,
sometimes it's late. Sometimes the rhythm of the music seems to have
nothing to do w/ the game. Sometimes it is easier to go by the visual
cues than the music. Sometimes the visual cues are distracting and will
make you fail.
9. On top of this, there are forced tilt controls
on some games that require you to tilt your 3DS at an unnatural angle. It seems like it's just
janky and busted--and it is--but it works if you hold your 3DS just so. At no point is this
ever clearly indicated in game.
10. Which brings us to another issue:
sometimes the mechanics of various games can be a bit obtuse and they
are never well explained. Most of the games are easy enough to figure
out but more than once did I find myself failing repeatedly because I
was playing a game incorrectly
11. Every time you fail a game, you are forced to re-watch its intro sequence. Over and over and over and over and over....
12.
There are many games that simply must be completed at a particular time
or you can't advance in the story. Often, you can't even back out of
the games and go do something else. You become stuck in a Sisyphean loop
of busted, janky tilt controls and rewatching intro sequences until you
want to gouge your eyeballs out.
13. Honestly, some of the
mini-games are pretty fun. As per 7-11 though, enough of these games are
busted enough to be downright infuriating and as per 12, you are forced
to complete even the games you hate. There is no real breaking point in
this game where I was like, "That's it, that's what stinks about this
and I'm done w/ it." But all its minor flaws stack up over time in a
really grating way. If you like this art-style, play Professor Layton. If you don't like this art-style, you are not exactly missing out on a stellar gameplay experience by avoiding Rhythm Thief.
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