I believe the record will show that Rhythm Tengoku is one of my very favorite titles. The GBA cart still occupies my DS, and I’ll still break out a few quick rounds when stuck on a bus, or plane, or if someone is boring me. So, when a trek through the E3 show floor led me to a booth where an awfully familiar-looking game, named Rhythm Heaven, was on display, I made a beeline for the DS, trampling the unfortunate journalists and vendors in my path. My suspicions were joyfully confirmed: Rhythm Heaven is a new version of Rhythm Tengoku (the previously announced Rhythm Tengoku Gold), designed for the DS by Nintendo R&D1, and translated for release in North America. There’s a pun to be made here about being in Rhythm Heaven or some such, but I’m in too good of a mood for that.
The demo version of Rhythm Heaven had only three games available to try, but they were enough to give me a feel for how the game compared to its predecessor. The game has you hold the DS in Hotel Dusk’s “book” layout, which I honestly prefer for stylus-heavy gameplay. And, stylus-heavy it is, combining the touch screen mechanics in a variety of ways with all of the creativity and strangeness of its WarioWare cousins.
Rhythm Heaven is nowhere near the experience that one might expect from many current music games, such as Guitar Hero: On Tour. Instead, it matches the music-meets-reflex gameplay one might get from Elite Beat Agents with the unimaginably bizarre mini-games of WarioWare. In one game, there is a factory which produces cog-and-sprocket assemblies, and your job is simply to shove the last fastener into place, with a stylus flick, when a piano scale (synced to the stage’s background music) plays the “so” note. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-flick. In another, you play an overenthusiastic chorus member, who needs to sing only at the proper moments. The mechanic here is that pressing the stylus down will keep your mouth shut rather than open — the game becomes an exercise in releasing your voice at the proper time.
The Nintendo representative on hand told me the game’s release date is still TBA, but that it would “hopefully” be out for the holidays.
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