And now a reenactment of me learning about Hi-Fi RUSH:
“There’s a new action game that was surprise released the other day.”
“Oh cool.”
“It’s like cel shaded Devil May Cry.”
“Oh cool.”
“And the combat is rhythm based in time with the game’s music!”
“Oh no…”
Hi-Fi RUSH is set in a cheerful, light-cyberpunk universe where almost everyone is named after a kind of food because everything needs a theme. Our main character, Chai, comes to an event hosted by the biggest robotics company on Earth, Vandelay Technologies, that promises to give anyone who volunteers cybernetic limbs for a better life. Chai’s surgery doesn’t quite go as expected though, and after a freak accident he wakes up with a magnetic robot arm and his iPod embedded in his chest, which somehow has made the entire world move in sync to the tempo of the songs his iPod plays. This unexpected technological event has branded him a “defect” in the eyes of Vandelay and instead of offering to fix their mistake they just decide to kill him, which leads to Chai discovering his musical powers and ability to turn a metal stick into a guitar made of scrap metal. Along the way he meets a robot cat named 808 owned by a hacker named Peppermint that’s trying to reveal Vandelay’s sinister intentions behind their free robot limbs, thus beginning our adventure through a colorful cast of allies and bosses.
Like all action games the plot really isn’t what you’re here for, and any sort of twists or revelations are ones you can see coming a mile away. That being said if you like Saturday Morning Cartoons then Chai’s overconfident stupidity and Peppermint’s eye rolling might keep you entertained over the twelve or so hours it takes to beat the main story. There’s enough fun designs and cute back and forth between the characters you meet that I don’t think anyone will actively hate the story (unless you actively cannot stand Chai, which I won’t blame you for) however we’re here for gameplay and in that vein Hi-Fi RUSH certainly delivers…to a point.
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: I am garbage at rhythm and tempo in video games. In music too, frankly, since to me the metronome was just background noise that someone turned on and pretended it helped me play better while I was just playing the song at the same speed that I’d heard someone else play it. However since rhythm is such a key part of Hi-Fi RUSH it’s entirely possible that much of the actual game mechanics that I experienced while playing may come through as better or worse for you depending on how you can handle a beat. The basic design philosophy is that enemy and player actions can only happen in time to the beat of the game’s soundtrack (every song has the same tempo) so enemy attacks and your own will only trigger on beat, though your mileage may vary if an enemy is attacking multiple times or if you do a heavy attack that takes two beats to complete. You can block, dodge, and jump whenever you want but if you’re doing these actions out of rhythm they’re either less effective (you can only chain dodges together if you dodge with the beat) or in the case of the block ability don’t work at all.
This may sound really daunting but the game does try its best to be as accessible to as many people as possible by presenting the game’s beat in multiple ways. Many parts of the environment pulse to the beat, the game throws up musical notes whenever you do things correctly, and there’s an optional metronome that you can put on the bottom of the screen that shows a continuous pulse, but if none of that works the game also tells you that every attack you do will always land on tempo so if you just press an attack button after every attack lands you’ll stay in rhythm. Obviously that’s the one I stuck with since I am rhythm-deaf, as we established earlier, but even with that pro-tip for the musically challenged I was still getting garbage scores in the “Just Timing” part of the game’s post-combat rating system, so I’m sure I was just doing horribly at jumping and dodging in time to the beat, even if my attacks were mostly accurate. Alongside high scores at the end of levels you also get the added bonus of extra damage at the end of most combos if you stay in rhythm, which against some enemies can mean the difference between killing them in one or one and a half combos, so while the damage bonus isn’t necessary to complete the game it’s still a good idea to at the very least have one combo or two that you can pull off consistently.
You may have noticed I mentioned “score” in the last paragraph, which is one of the many ways that people have been comparing this game to the Devil May Cry series. Outside of just being shorthand for everyone referring to the action game genre (since many people still can’t decide between “action games” vs “hack-and-slash” vs “character action games” vs “spectacle fighters” etc) there are certainly a number of similarities between Hi-Fi RUSH and DMC4 or 5, and it’s not just the main character having a weird arm. While the combat isn’t the same, since it’s based more around combo chains than player-devised combos and there are NO alternate weapons, there’s still a pull ability like Nero, a real emphasis on launchers for air combos, no real “block” button outside of perfect parries like DMC‘s Royal Guard, and a post-game timed wave mode quite like DMC‘s Bloody Palace. There’s also horribly awkward platforming akin to DMC, which probably wasn’t an intended homage but my god does the physics engine love throwing you around if Chai so much as grazes the edge of the platform he’s trying to reach.
Something that isn’t like DMC is the game’s super attack meter, which is similar to Bayonetta‘s magic meter in her earlier games where you can charge up high damage cinematic attacks if you do well enough in combat, but in one of the game’s many baffling design decisions you lose all your built up meter when combat ends. If you’re anything like me you probably thought this was to avoid cheesing in combat, since the super abilities are powerful options to stagger stronger enemies, but the game sprinkles enough battery pick-ups between fights that you’re basically fully charged to at least a first tier super move by the time you’re in combat again. While it does encourage you to utilize your super abilities in an upfront “use it or lose it” gameplay style that makes combat very flashy, it’s just something that doesn’t feel like it needed to be in the game at all. However, it’s one of the least egregious things that Hi-Fi RUSH throws at you by the end of the game so we’ll move past the super moves and start REALLY complaining about things.
Before I get into the biggest problem with Hi-Fi RUSH I want to talk about quick time events. Remember those? I don’t play as many Triple A games these days but it really feels like the only one still doing them is Platinum Games, and even then the last time they did it in any egregious amount was Vanquish in 2010, but Hi-Fi RUSH is trying to bring them back. As I mentioned before, the end of most combos leads to a QTE where if you land the timing correctly you’ll deal extra damage, but I’m mostly hung up on the six plus button QTE sequences the game locks you in during boss fights or against some of the stronger regular enemies in the game. The regular enemies are slightly less annoying since these sequences can be avoided (if you think invisible AOE attacks are something fun to dodge) and they’ll generally only do them twice if you fail them both, but in boss fights after the halfway point of the game you’re just trapped in this multi-button QTE sequence that damages you for every button you fail to press in time and you can’t progress until you do it flawlessly. And it’s not even like God of War‘s old QTEs where the multiple button prompts appear on screen, instead Hi-Fi RUSH briefly shows you the sequence and the rhythm of the button presses and then hides them, turning it into both a memory and rhythm game when you need to press more than one button at a time. At least in other infamous QTE games like the God of Wars or Resident Evil 4 you just had to do one button prompt at a time or, god forbid, they actually showed you what buttons you were supposed to be pressing at what time. Hi-Fi RUSH‘s QTEs are more like Ghostrunner‘s sword fights (which everyone will remember were the second worst part of Ghostrunner) but with random dodges thrown in as well, and at least Ghostrunner was designed around the idea of endlessly failing.
With all that being said, the absolutely worst part of the gameplay is the buddies that you can summon in to support Chai in combat, as they are completely antithetical to what makes an action game fun. It starts innocently enough with being able to bring Peppermint into the fight to disable enemy shields and shoot buttons in platforming challenges, which is irritating but as a gimmick it was relatively inoffensive and acted somewhat like the guns in DMC. But then they introduce armored enemies in addition to the shielded ones along with a new ally that breaks armor, and on paper doesn’t sound that awful either… until you start encountering fights that are nothing but shielded and armored enemies. While you can freely switch between allies during combat the armor breaking attack only has a percent chance of shattering an enemy’s defenses in one attack and some shielded enemies need two attacks from Peppermint to break through (assuming she shoots at the right target to begin with) so while you’re waiting for your allies summoning cooldowns to go away you’re just stuck not fighting in an action game, since you can’t hurt enemies with shields or armor.
The reliance on your allies special abilities slowing the game down comes to a head in the final boss where, without spoiling exactly how it plays out, you need to use your teammates exclusively to damage the boss while you run around and wait for the armor to break or the shields to go down so you can actually get back to playing the game. It gets even worse when the armor breaking doesn’t even work the way it has until this point and you need to get the boss to do very particular animations for the allied attacks to actually help you progress, all while you run in circles doing combos at thin air to keep your score up (assuming you care about that sort of thing). This is the final culmination of an action game, the sort of battle that needs to measure up to the Armstrongs and the Vergils of the genre to cement your game as one worth remembering, and instead you’re just waiting for cooldowns to refresh and animations to play out just the right way all for the sake of having AI controlled partners do the fighting for you. The game forcing you to use these abilities to simply progress in fights and also trapping you in quick time events really feels like it conflicts with its own emphasis on tempo and beat, since the only thing I can think of that’s more tempo/enthusiasm killing than being trapped in six-button QTE that you just can’t quite master is having to run in circles not fighting IN AN ACTION GAME while your allies attack things you can’t damage without them.
Presentation wise the regular enemies could use some work. The bosses are all colorfully designed and have cool little “comic splash page” moments when they reach phase two of their fights but the regular enemies are mostly just the same kind of robots that are either bigger or have different colors. The final stretch of enemies in the last few areas are essentially the same enemies you’ve fought before but now some are ON FIRE, which again isn’t the innovation I’m looking for in stake-raising enemy design, especially since this is another instance of ruining the game’s emphasis on rhythm because when you’re hit by fire you need to wiggle your stick to put yourself out. I suppose the intimidating robot designs that I’m looking for wouldn’t really work in Hi-Fi RUSH‘s cel shaded, Saturday Morning Cartoon, “funny robots saying silly things” aesthetic. Additionally it’s truly strange is how little the music stands out during gameplay. Generally in these sorts of games (primarily Metal Gear Rising, Devil May Cry 5, and Bayonetta) the music is as much a part of the combat as the enemies themselves, particularly during boss fights, to the point where it will sometimes drown out everything else. Hi-Fi RUSH‘s music rarely does that and while it’s obviously something that could be changed in the game’s settings I find it interesting that the music wasn’t a bigger part of a game that’s all about it by default.
In the end Hi-Fi RUSH is an enjoyable (and affordable at only $30 at time of writing) action game that I’m hoping will act as a gateway drug for people that are interested in the genre but are too intimidated by its reputation for difficulty. Not that Hi-Fi RUSH isn’t challenging at times with its imprisoning QTEs and healing items that heal the lowest amount I think I’ve ever seen in a video game, but the colorful graphics and a simplistic framework that hides some depth seems like a great place for people to get started, especially if they head towards Devil May Cry 4 afterwards given Chai’s similarity to Nero. For the rest of us, those who keep thinking that surely Ninja Gaiden 4 will be announced any day now and are daring to dream when we hear rumors of Metal Gear Rising 2, Hi-Fi RUSH will keep your interest and scratch that itch at least through the first playthrough. Anything beyond that will depend how good you are at matching the game’s rhythm, as I can’t see myself going for high ranks when I’m as tempo-deaf as I am, but the game is a surprising treat and if you have any interest in the genre (and you don’t mind the main character’s personality) I recommend picking it up. You can do a lot worse for $30 these days.
