When one thinks of the Final Fantasy franchise, the music is definitely one of its stronger points. So why not make a game incorporating the wonderful songs and melodies as a standalone title? That’s exactly what Square Enix has done with Theatrhythm Final Fantasy.
Theatrhythm’s gameplay largely amounts to tapping and sliding the stylus on the touch screen. Theatrhythm also has three different types of gameplay, each defined by the pacing of the songs. Battle Music Stages feature a faster beat, and has players defeating as many enemies as possible by correctly responding to the given rhythm “triggers” that scroll across the screen along four separate lines. Field Music Stages are a bit slower, and have the player moving the stylus up and down along a continuously flowing line. And lastly, Event Music Stages revolve around an important moment in each Final Fantasy game. Rather than the triggers scrolling from the left as they do in the other two stage types, they appear on the entire top screen.
In a recent interview with IGN, Theatrhythm producer Ichiro Hazama commented on why the gameplay was split into three modes:
When you look at the Battle Music Stages and Field Music Stages, you see a distinctive difference in the music. Battle music is uptempo, it has a really fast pace, and field music stages have slower music. And when you look at Final Fantasy games, both styles exist. When you look at rhythm games, most of them just have the simpler, faster music. But you can’t do that with a Final Fantasy game, to satisfy fans of the series. That’s why we separated those two.
In terms of event music stages, it just recalls people’s memories from the games. It’s a little bit different concept from the other stages. Battle music stages are very similar to a traditional rhythm game. The field stage is to make players feel more comfortable just enjoying the music. And event music stages are to make players feel like they’re the conductors of the actual music.
Theatrhythm is also very unique in that it incorporates RPG elements into its gameplay. What would a Final Fantasy game be without RPG elements? Here’s some of those elements. Before each Battle Music Stage, you get to choose a party of 4 notable FF characters. If you miss a trigger or execute one poorly, the team’s shared HP bar goes down. If that hits zero, it’s game over, meaning you’ll have to start that segment over from the beginning. You can equip your team with an item, like a potion or Phoenix Down, which will automatically be used once certain conditions are met. Each character also has customizable abilities, such as Weapon Break (which reduces enemy attack power) or HP Up (which increases your HP).
Why did the team behind Theatryhthm incorporate RPG elements? And how hard was it to do so? Hazama answers that as well.
Of course, it wasn’t easy. But when you look at Final Fantasy fans, they’re not necessarily big rhythm game fans. So to satisfy them and amuse them, you do have to have some RPG elements. They might be better at using abilities or items to clear the games easily. And then they might be able to enjoy a music game that much more. That was our idea.
And if you’re wondering why they decided to use a “chibi” art style for the game, Hazama says it was because of the vastly different art style of the FF games.
As you know, if you tried to use the original character art, you’d see such a variety of art styles, from simple pixel images to beautiful CG images. So it was difficult to put those all together in one game. But in Japan, when we were developing this game, there was another game, a mobile Kingdom Hearts game, which had something called the Avatar Kingdom. In that game, some Final Fantasy characters appeared as chibi characters. I thought it was really cute, so I proposed the idea of using it in Theatrhythm to Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura approved, and so that’s how we came to it.
That’s it for this preview, and look forward to Theatrhythm Final Fantasy this Tuesday, July 3rd on the Nintendo 3DS.