“Rhythm action” might sound like one of the marketing bullet points for a fancy dildo but it is in fact a genre of video game, in which the player is obliged to perform some kind of combat mechanic in time with the backing music. A logical innovation, really, it doesn’t take a genius to compare the experiences of playing a drum kit and twatting lots of people with sticks. Lots of very short people in metal hats who complain very loudly. It’s not strictly a *new* genre, but certainly one that’s going through a bit of a heyday between BPM, Metal Hellsinger, and now this thing, Hi-Fi Rush. I’m sure eventually one of these days I’ll run into a rhythm action game I don’t get on with. It’s bound to happen if the genre keeps gaining popularity, when someone makes a game about catching falling turds in a bucket in time with Peter and the Wolf or something, but it’s not happened yet, ‘cos Hi-Fi Rush is great fun. Where BPM and Hellsinger were FPSes and Crypt of the Necrodancer was a roguelike dungeon crawler, Hi-Fi Rush brings rhythm action to the noble spectacle fighter, which goes to show that rhythm action can work in basically any style of combat. I’m sure there’s already a fucking gold rush brewing on Steam. Someone’s gonna do a version of Civilization where you get extra points for invading the Turks just as Ride of the Valkyries kicks in.
In Hi-Fi Rush we play a massive dork named Chai who volunteers to get a robot arm glued on by a powerful tech company and is too busy enjoying his rocking and rolling music to notice how blatantly evil the whole arrangement is. But things go awry when his tragically retro MP3 player – oh christ MP3 players can be tragically retro now, I’ve been doing this way too fucking long – gets merged with his body during the cyborg process, and he gains the ability to summon a magic guitar-shaped piece of metal that twats the absolute fuck and furthermore fucks the absolute twat out of things as long as it keeps in time to the beat. Declared a defect, Chai must join forces with a mysterious hacker named Peppermint and fight his way out of the evil tech campus by defeating her seven evil ex-boyfriends, I mean, middle managers, to end the machinations of the villainous CEO Kale. For some reason most of the characters are named after – bear with me on this – foodstuffs with slightly hipstery associations. Swiftly they also team up with Macaron, Quinoa, Almond Milk, and Organic Fairtrade Coffee Beans. I made up three of those.
Hi-Fi Rush was simultaneously announced and released on the day of the Xbox showcase, which is something you only do if you’re really fucking confident in your game’s instant appeal and high quality. And by all the locally sourced meatless lasagnas in Hell do I hate to admit they were probably right to be. It’s got a pleasingly fluffy, Saturday morning cartoon sort of vibe, but unlike most Saturday morning cartoons, didn’t cheap out on the animation. The entire world is very colourful and very vibrant, two words that also wouldn’t look out of place in the marketing blurb for a fancy dildo. Every single thing that animates does so to the beat, so if you lose your rhythm you can get back in sync just by glancing at some robot cats fucking on a nearby dumpster. Shinji Mikami is credited as executive producer on this, which in my experience could mean fucking anything from he spearheaded the entire project to he let them use his garage to do the mocap recording, but I must say, his stink is all over Hi-Fi Rush. In fact the story reminds me a lot of his old game, God Hand. Massive dork with scarf and replacement arm teams up with mysterious girl who secretly loves him despite most of her actions suggesting she is actively plotting his death.
Pretty funny game too, although it’s the physical comedy that lands the most for me, not so much the dialogue, when the whole “goofy overconfident manchild meets angry humourless bossyboots lady drier than a raisin on a dead lizard’s back” dynamic starts to remind me a little too much of my favourite early 2000s gaming webcomics. Oh yeah, I was gonna awkwardly segue to the combat at some point. I genuinely struggle to find fault in it. Rhythm action is a natural pairing with spectacle fighting, it’s stylish crossing over with stylish to create a singularity that wears sunglasses and read Game of Thrones before the TV show started but doesn’t feel the need to bang on about it. Quick attacks to the beat, heavy attacks to the second beat, dodging and parrying, it all clicks away together nicely like a lego metronome. But without a decent ranged attack, what if we need to close distance in a hurry? Why, just use the grappling hook, of course. Oh Hi-Fi Rush you cunning sod. My one weakness. I’d have defected to the Nazi party if they’d let me use a grappling hook to climb the concentration camp guard towers. Oh boy I should’ve kept that to myself.
If pressed, I suppose the equippable super attacks felt a bit vestigial. There were like nineteen in the upgrade shop I never felt the need to buy or try out because “give me a moment to pause mid-combat and sip on my latte while everything around me dies in flames” is about all I want from such things. Other than that, no notes. The combat never feels grindy because it’s a linear sequence of continually escalating fights regularly introducing new enemies, scattered across nicely crafted distinctly themed levels full of platforming challenges and timing puzzles and story moments, and each closed off with a spectacular unique boss fight. No fucking gear crafting, no bigger version of standard enemy that thinks it can pass for a boss fight ‘cos it’s health bar’s long enough to drag on the ground. And then, when you get to the end of all the levels and fight a final boss who’s actually hard and took me a few tries, Hi-Fi Rush introduces an extraordinarily innovative concept called an “En-ding.” Where all the plot threads reach a state of denouement and we are for some reason not obliged to continue grinding combat forever or hold out for DLC.
Well, there is some post-ending 100% completion stuff if you’re so inclined. In fact, post-ending is the only point when character customisation unlocks, and that felt a bit odd, only letting me wear a green T-shirt instead of a red one at exactly the point it no longer matters. All in all, strong recommend, but at the same time, it makes me angry. Big publishers like Bethesda have been trying to convince us for the last decade or so that no no no, you don’t want breezy innovative fun that wraps up nicely in an eight hour package, you want to swing a pickaxe in the grind mines for months on end to make numbers increment while overworked graphic artists juice the latest hardware directly into your eyes with a ballistic milking machine. But when they throw out something like this with zero hype, it yodels to me that they’ve known what we really wanted all along; they know damn well what a fucking good game looks like. How timely that they should remember just as a bunch of live services are getting lined up next to the conspicuously pungent trench and the whole live service concept is becoming about as radioactive to marketing pitches as coming with a free dead dog. Money talks, eh, Bethesda? Well, maybe yours can’t with your dick stuck in its mouth.
