Fond of weirdly obscure titles since childhood, Ivanir has been captivated by many Japanese games over the years. Some of his most passionate topics are the Dept. Heaven series, Summon Night Swordcraft Story, the Infinity series, Time Hollow. He's currently enjoying a ton of Switch and PC games.

Rhythm Heaven Groove is the latest installment in Nintendo’s rhythm series. Developed in a partnership between the company and TNX, the game is a great example of the franchise’s unique experience, with it now available on the Nintendo Switch.

A Kaleidoscope of Rhythm Minigames

Rhythm Heaven is a series of wacky minigames that explore the player’s sense of rhythm. Getting the hang of how it works is simple, with few inputs necessary, but each challenge is carefully crafted to truly test if the player can coordinate their movement according to the beat, hitting the buttons at the right timing.

Most of the time, it’s just a matter of pressing A or some directional button following cues in both visuals and sound. The game plays tricks on perception, however, to make sure players get things in a more instinctive sense. Obscuring the player's vision and even changing the sound cues in some advanced stages are just some of the ways it tests proper rhythm skills.

Each stage has to be completed with at least a Good/Ok score to unlock the next one, gradually progressing towards some more complicated games. For each four challenges, a Remix that puts them all together appears as a test of sorts before the player can move on to a new one. After beating the first forty challenges, a “Flipside” area with significantly harder challenges appears, often (but not always) building on those previously seen.

Besides just unlocking the next minigames, the player can also make an effort to obtain a medal by achieving an Amazing/Superb evaluation. By not making too many mistakes and handling the tricky portions of each challenge well, it’s not too hard to reach this goal for many of them. With enough medals, it’s possible to unlock the playful, virtually unlimited experiences of the Rhythm Toy Box as well as the Score Attack challenges of the Flipside. Compared to the main challenges, these experiences are all meant to be simpler and more of a pastime.

They’re not the only extras, however, with other notable inclusions including an RPG-like rhythm battle called Beatspell and the evolving Drum Lessons. In Beatspell, players have to fight monsters as a magician who casts her spells to the rhythm of the battle. Starting with Fire, each spell has a specific button command to press and doing so with the best possible timing will lead to critical hits. The magic options increase along with the stages, and the player is evaluated on their performance at the end.

Meanwhile, Drum Lessons evaluates the player's performance to coordinate button presses to the rhythm of the teacher’s playing. Each lesson is unlocked with more medals, and it can get tough to press the right buttons with an acceptable timing enough consecutive times for the lesson to compute. One error and it’s back to square one.

Like in other games of the series, from time to time, players may also see a challenge to do a specific stage perfectly within three chances to play it right. Doing this run with no errors on your input will grant you a special emblem. This makes the challenge much harder than just getting a perfect score whenever, since doing it outside the perfect campaign is completely ignored, a frustrating side effect of this design choice.

The Wonder of Whimsy

Beyond the wide variety of options, which also include fantastic multiplayer options in a separate menu, it’s also important to keep in mind that, like its predecessors, Rhythm Heaven Groove has a wacky atmosphere that’s important to the series’ identity. The concepts of the minigames feel like peculiar microcosmos that can go from the mundane to the absurdly over-the-top with its eccentricity.

From being a small bottle jumping rope to talking to aliens who can only communicate well if the conversation is done using the right rhythm, there’s no way to not feel the game’s creators have a unique approach to what they decide to depict. Ko Takeuchi’s the art director for the series as well as the WarioWare games, and his colorful, cartoon-ish designs stand out for being deceptively simple but charismatic and characteristic.

As a rhythm game, sound is also at the forefront of this ambience and this goes much beyond the background music. There’s no Rhythm Heaven without wacky sound effects to guide the player around and make this world feel way more immersive and compelling. The gameplay ends up as a synergy of everything put together, a symphony of weirdness that just keeps getting more fascinating as the player digs deeper.

The game even includes a text-to-speech system to read aloud menus and even describe other aspects of the interface. Thanks to this, Rhythm Heaven Groove may be Nintendo’s most accessible experience for people who have some sort of vision impairment to date. While playing it on TV instead of Switch’s handheld mode may lead to some delay, there’s also a setting to minimize its effects, which can be helpful.

Closing Comments:

Rhythm Heaven Groove is an impressive rhythm game that manages to offer a lot of variety in its minigames. With a whimsical style to its visual and audio choices, the game is vibrant in a way that sets it apart from many titles of its genre. It lives up to the legacy of the franchise and is an experience worth getting to know for anyone curious about the sort of variety that can be explored in rhythm games.