THEATRHYTHM FINAL BAR LINE has kinda grown on me

published: 2023-03-01

A few disclaimers I feel are necessary:

I got a package the day before February's huge blizzard hit Minnesota. It was scheduled to arrive that Wednesday, but a friend in high places must have pulled a few strings. Or maybe the post office got scared of the "historic weather conditions" and decided to rush everything along before the roads came unusable. In any case, I got a new game in the mail right before the snow hit, and a cancelled VRS meeting the next day meant that I had a week with no reason not to hole up in my room and play a single game nonstop until I gave myself a mental breakdown.

THEATRHYTHM FINAL BAR LINE is a video game for the Nintendo Switch with the premise: "what if the FINAL FANTASY RPG series, but it was a rhythm game?" Instead of directly commanding your party of four characters to use attacks and items to battle monsters and explore a world, you (the player) get thrown into one song after another where you have to hit buttons or slide joysticks in time with the music to hit the triggers that come at you from the side of the screen. Good timing means your party does more damage to monsters, and bad timing (or even missing triggers altogether) means the monsters do damage to your party. If your HP bar (a single bar with all party characters' HP combined) reaches zero and you have no healing items or powers equipped, you fail the stage and have to start over. If you survive to the end of a song, you win, regardless of how many monsters you actually defeated. Unless you decide to go full-in with stat minmaxing and building parties specifically for dealing with certain monsters, it's a relatively simple game. You don't even have to like the FINAL FANTASY series to enjoy this game... which is good for me, because the only one I've ever managed to play to completion was FINAL FANTASY VII, and that was a complete snoozefest after I left Midgar somewhere on Disc 1. It probably doesn't help that I don't own a (modern) PlayStation. (VIII has a special place in my heart for no rational reason... maybe I should try that one again that after writing this article?)

I knew what I was getting into going in because I'd been playing the previous title in the series, THEATRHYTHM FINAL FANTASY CURTAIN CALL for the Nintendo 3DS, off and on since mid-2018. (All-star Carnival doesn't count because I never had a way to play it.) While the Switch version is, for the most part, an improvement over its predecessor, even if you opt out of buying the DLC, there were a few pain points throughout my week of being snowed-in that made me wish the 3DS hadn't been discontinued.

The core gameplay is the same between the two versions. As stated above, you hit triggers in time with the music, and these triggers come at you from the left side of the screen. There are three types of triggers: "tap", "hold", and "slide". On the 3DS, you can choose to either use button input to hit the triggers or, since the system has two screens and the bottom one is a touchscreen, you can use a stylus to tap, hold, and slide instead. However, despite the Switch also having a touchscreen, there is no touch input option in the Switch version. You can either use the original button layout or switch to Simple Mode, which replaces slide triggers with tap triggers, making it possible to play using only a single button. In either mode, the button that hits triggers can be any button that isn't one of the joysticks, Home, or Screenshot. If your left joystick has drift, as it inevitably will with enough time, you can also use the right joystick for slide triggers. But be careful: FINAL BAR LINE adds double slide triggers, meaning you'll have to use both joysticks at the same time to not have that trigger count as "bad" or "miss". If any of your joysticks have drift, you should stick with Simple Mode. Summoned party members, like Leviathan or Shiva, are no longer tied to your party's leader; in CURTAIN CALL, summons could only appear once a song at a specific part in the song, but now they can appear at any time and also multiple times a song whenever the summon gauge is filled.

There are three types of music stages you can play on, depending on the purpose the song had in its original game:

  1. "Battle", which features songs used in, er, battles or cutscenes where there's a lot of fighting going on. There are four horizontal lines across the screen that triggers travel on from the left side of the screen to the right. In CURTAIN CALL, each party member was stationary behind a line on the right-hand side of the screen, and they would attack whenever you successfully hit a trigger on their line. FINAL BAR LINE retains the four-line layout, but party members now wander around the bottom of the stage and seemingly attack at random. If playing in Simple Mode and there are two slide triggers, one that begins right where another ends, you can just keep holding down whatever button you're using and you'll automatically get a "Critical" (best) rating for that trigger. But because there are no slide triggers in Simple Mode, that doesn't leave the developers much to work with, meaning for a lot of songs they just phone it in...

Shoutout to S-Config, whose video embedding code I stole for this post.

Oh boy, I love repetitive stress injuries! (I may have sprained every finger on my right hand playing this game.)

  1. "Field", which features overworld themes and music on the calmer end of the spectrum. In both versions, there is a single line that triggers travel on. In CURTAIN CALL, the first member of your party walks along a road, and the better you do on the stage, the faster they run. If you lose enough HP from missing triggers, that party member will stumble and fall and be replaced with the next character in your party. In FINAL BAR LINE, all four members of your party walk at once, and they often stop and fight a monster or two before continuing their journey. Airship themes no longer have you travel on an airship; they're just the same as every other Field-type stage now. FINAL BAR LINE also introduces double tap triggers where you have to hit both L and R (or ZL and ZR) at the same time; if one of these appear, the line that triggers travel on will temporarily split into two, and both taps will be judged individually. The up-and-down motion for hold triggers can be difficult for some controllers to follow, as my brother had issues with keeping his cursor on the track when we played in co-op mode.
  2. "Event", which can have songs from either of the previous two categories. Event-type stages are similar to Battle-type stages, but instead of your party fighting a monster, a (muted) cutscene from the song's original game plays in the background. For the retro titles (FINAL FANTASY I-VI and Tactics) gameplay footage is used because of a lack of cutscenes, but strangely it's of the Japanese versions of those games, even though I made sure to specifically buy a USA-region cartridge. (Songs with lyrics are in English, though... And CURTAIN CALL had actual cutscenes for Tactics' Event-type stage. Why did they replace it with gameplay?) If you're photosensitive, do not play on Event-type stages: strobe effects, such as when characters cast spells or teleport on the overworld map, were not edited out and occur frequently. There are still four lines that triggers travel on, but they're rotated ninety degrees; the triggers start on the top and come down towards you, similar to Guitar Hero. This is much improved from CURTAIN CALL, where triggers just... appeared in a swirl? I could never get the timing right, but now I can.

Zack dying during the Event stage for FINAL FANTASY VII

Speaking of timing, FINAL BAR LINE adds a number of quality-of-life features:

  1. Game sequels with only a few songs are now grouped together so you don't have to scroll as much: for example, Advent Children, Crisis Core, and Final Order are now grouped together under "FINAL FANTASY VII Series" instead of getting their own game (movie?) entries.
  2. You can make up to five teams to make farming for Rhythmia in certain conditions, like "all-woman" or "all from this certain title", less painful. Characters also have a single line of description now so you can see if they're a woman or a man (I thought Faris was a man all this time... literal asterisk sigh asterisk) and what stat boosts they can trigger in battle.
  3. If you consistently hit triggers early or late, you can adjust the timing so that those triggers will be judged as "Critical" or "Great" instead of "Bad" or "Miss", or change the game speed to see more of the triggers ahead of time. (Although this can make for excruciatingly slow gameplay:)
  1. You can also change the color scheme that the triggers use if you're colorblind and disable special effects and animations for attacks if you're photosensitive or prone to motion sickness.
  2. When playing a song, if you pause and then resume, the game gives you a two-second timer to regain your focus before the triggers start moving again.
  1. By default, the game uses new sound effects for hitting triggers, although you can set them back to the defaults from CURTAIN CALL if you're like me and you're so used to the old ones that the new ones sound wonky. (CURTAIN CALL let you pick trigger sound effects from a whole library of sounds across the FINAL FANTASY series... but now you only get two options.)

  2. You can also now mute the moogle voice clips! If you play online, by default a grating voice that sounds like a modern-day "moe" anime girl on crack narrates everything that happens. Some of these are helpful, like "you're moving up" or "someone cast whatever effect on you"... except that the moogles (the little floating bear creatures) also say the nonsense word "kupo" after every line. "You acivated a burst, kupo!" GOD. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. In CURTAIN CALL, I had to tolerate their excruciating voices when playing online, but now I can silence them and hit my damn triggers in peace. Yeah, thanks, I know someone activated a "burst" (special effect). I can see the dancing birds covering up most of the trigger paths so I can't see what's coming up and the block of ice obscuring the score display. You sound like my damn brother, feeling the need to narrate reality to me.

Playing online can unlock songs quicker than playing through the singleplayer mode. In CURTAIN CALL, if you weren't the type of person to play online, there wasn't much to do: after the tutorial, the game dumps you at the main menu, where most of the songs are already unlocked and free for you to play at your whim. There is a quest menu, but the main purpose of that is to earn "shards" that you can use to unlock characters. FINAL BAR LINE reverses this: you have no songs unlocked to start, and one key with which you can choose one of the original titles to unlock. You then have to play through one song at a time in that title's quest until you come across another treasure chest with a key in it a few songs in, at which point you can unlock another title.

I hadn't unlocked FINAL FANTASY VIII at the time of taking this screenshot

But if you play in online mode, and you beat a song you haven't already unlocked, you will unlock that song even if you haven't used a key to unlock that song's original title yet. After you unlock a song, you can replay it at any time at any difficulty by going to the main menu and selecting "Music Stages". Speaking of difficulty, in addition to the existing "Basic", "Expert", and "Ultimate" levels, you can now also play select songs in "Supreme".

When you unlock a title, you get a few characters from that title to start, unless the title explicitly says there are no characters to unlock. Clearing a title's quest will (probably) unlock one or two additional characters, usually final bosses. As such, there are no shards to collect. Which is good, because FINAL BAR LINE adds a lot of new characters. Hell, you don't even need to grind ten gazillion hours to get eight black shards to unlock Sephiroth anymore: you just need to beat all fourteen of the FINAL FANTASY VII songs.

Speaking of Sephiroth... if you're like my youngest brother and your only attachment to this game is because Cloud is a playable character, then you may want to stick with CURTAIN CALL because FINAL BAR LINE's version of "One-Winged Angel" omits the whole first half of the song. Truncating songs isn't new for the THEATRHYTHM series: to give two examples, "We Have Come" is also cut in half in CURTAIN CALL, although the new beginning is during a quiet part of the song, and "The Extreme" skips the long piano intro. There is no reason for "One-Winged Angel" to be cut in half, and so poorly at that: it drops you directly into a dramatic part of the song. The Advent Children version of the song remains intact and whole, which makes the original version's truncation even more bizarre.

Speaking of taking creative liberties with the soundtrack, the names of a number of songs were changed as well, mostly to undo weird localizations from CURTAIN CALL. So don't feel bad if you have a hard time finding your favorite song before the timer runs out in online mode. Hey, at least people use online mode in FINAL BAR LINE. Nobody was online in CURTAIN CALL. My only point of reference for what the previous game's online mode would have looked like was a mockup mode, which pits you against computer players pretending to be other people online. FINAL BAR LINE doesn't have a mockup mode. It also doesn't have a cooldown for sending taunt messages in online lobbies, so you can just jam the arrow buttons on your controller to spam taunts and annoy the other players in your room. Or maybe they'll give up and join in. You never know!

If you're sensitive to repetitive noises, be careful when switching between online and singleplayer mode: when online, in order to keep the flow of play moving, the game will not give out unlocked rewards for reaching certain levels of earned Rhythmia points. If you go a long period only playing online, next time you play singleplayer you'll get spammed with all the rewards you missed.

In conclusion, during the blizzard and its aftermath, I played this game so much that I legitimately injured my right hand. (Thankfully I didn't need medical attention, because the blizzard sure hit my local roads hard...) I would highly recommend it to anyone who isn't emotionally attached to one of the songs that were truncated or locked behind DLC or who loves music and needs a cutesy game to play with others that isn't full of gore and violence. Those damn moogle voice clips in online mode make me wish there was violence, though...

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander