As if my fingers hadn’t been punished enough already. Princess Debut may have been a bit of a failure, but in general I really like rhythm and music games. Especially the ones that don’t require me to actually dance. You really don’t want to see me dance.
Plus I like Japanese music as well. I tend to prefer 70s music to the 80s stuff that makes up the bulk to The Kayou Generation
Not too informative, really, but it did show the three main features of the game: tapping the lyrics in time to the music, the occasional slider, the occasional annoying backup singer that pops up at the bottom of the screen and the occasional converging (broken) circle. It’s pretty easy to get into once you start playing. Sure it would help if you understood Japanese, and sure it would help if you knew those songs to begin with, but you can complete the game without all that.
It’s one of the easier music games out there as far as completion is concerned. Completing every song and unlocking all the bonus tracks shouldn’t take more than a few hours if you play diligently. That’s because the scoring system is very lenient. You start with four blue spots that you can think of as your HP. Each lyric you tap correctly gives you one extra HP, all the way up to 12. Each one you get wrong takes that down by one as well. What that means is that once you’ve built your life gauge all the way up, you can freely commit up to 12 errors without getting a Game Over. Unless you’re half asleep, that’s nearly impossible to do. It’s not like in Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents where one mistake on a hard song can send you into an instant death spiral.
Finishing the game is easy, so if that’s all you’re after then you’ll be seriously disappointed. If you want to finish it with a good ranking, however, you’re in for a bigger challenge. At the end of every song, you get a star rating depending on your position. 1st-10th, Gold star, 11th – 20th, Silver star, 21st-30th, Bronze Star, anything below that, White star. What’s the use of the stars? To be honest, it’s mainly a matter of pride. It feels good to have those shiny gold stars next to each song. I’ve made it up to 19 Gold stars with 10 Silver stars left to conquer and I’m feeling pretty proud of myself now.
The other reason to get Gold and Silver stars is that you can unlock outfits and hairstyles with them. Gold = hairstyles, Silver = outfits, Bronze = accessories. With those outfits, you can customize the character that dances at the top of the screen, changing their looks. You can also change their eyes, noses and mouths but they look ugly no matter what, so I usually leave that alone. If you have the time and effort, you can probably customize the singer for every song to look as much like the original singer as possible. I put the singer for Linda Yamamoto’s “Dou ni mo Tomaranai” in a replica of Linda’s iconic ‘hesodashi’ outift and she looked pretty spiffy, to be honest. I think I’ve unlocked all the outfits now though, so I’m just playing because I want to.
But seriously, getting Gold stars is a real pain. I don’t know how the star system is calculated, but I think combos have something to do with it. Also mistakes made at the end of the song seem to cost you more than mistakes made at the beginning, even if you’ve racked up a big combo. I don’t get that either. What I do get is that getting a “Great” score gives you more points than “Good”, and you can make a mistake or two, get mostly “Greats” and go on to get a Gold star. And you can play a perfect game without a single mistake and still get just a Silver star, probably because you didn’t get enough “Greats.” It’s fun, but all kinds of messed up.
Why is this game not better known, then? It seems the developers AQ Interactive and Artoon (also behind the craptastic Archaic Sealed Heat and the rather meh Away: Shuffle Dungeon) didn’t do that much promotion for it in the first place. One trailer and one Famitsu online article is hardly what I call publicity. More importantly, the game itself isn’t that good. The song selection is good and older Japanese fans might like that, but is the “Kayou Generation” the same as the generation that currently plays music games on the DS? If they grew up listening to late 70s and 80s music, then they’re in their 30s and 40s by now. Hmm, I’m not sure.
Maybe the game was made so easy because it was an effort to appeal to those people, but the result was that younger players (who are more likely to get it in the first place) found it too short and too easy. It doesn’t help that the sound quality is rather poor and the cover singers range from acceptable to Aaargh My Ears! terrible. Buyers would be better off spending the ¥5,040 yen cover price (now down to ¥1,740 on Amazon) getting the originals on iTunes instead. Plus the singer’s performance is linked to yours, so unless you hit each lyric just right, they’re going to hit those notes either earlier or later, making the song sound weird anyway. Oh, also the graphics are awful. They didn’t just use cheap cover singers, they used cheap graphic designers as well.
In spite of all that, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to The Kayou Generation. Getting the timing right especially for the slow songs is no mean feat, but I’ve come this far so I’m not ready to give up! And that stupid “Koi no Number 6700” song obviously has it in for me, I just know it! If I ever get all Gold stars (har har, not bloody likely) I’ll post again. Until then, it’s back to the DS for me.
Wa-Wait! So…why does the game has a mic test? Is this not a karaoke game?
It’s a regular rhythm game. The game description says you can record your own cheers of support, but there’s no option to do the singing yourself AFAIK.
[…] about that, I haven’t been up to much else lately. I gave up trying to get Gold Stars in The Kayou Generation, and I finished all the puzzles in Color Cross except one. I’m also a few hours into Saga 3, […]