Nintendo 3DS Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] HarmoKnight (Nintendo, Nintendo 3DS, 2013)

Runs, jumps, and occasionally stumbles.

Game Freak is known for making kinda sorta the same game over and over but worse, so I suppose I should credit them for the occasional experiment. HarmoKnight is a rhythm-runner-platformer, which might bring eerie visions of Vib-Ribbon to the front of some of your minds, and that's not a terrible point of reference. You play Tempo, a boy with a staff tasked with jumping, dodging, and attacking through brief stages set to music. Enemies will spawn on-beat. You'll navigate obstacles on beat. Each stage is graded on how many musical notes you can collect, and friends will swap with Tempo occasionally to do, well, mostly those same things.

Getting the gripes out of the way, HarmoKnight is more indebted to the music than most rhythm games. Unlike Vib, there's few visual cues, and when the timing can be unforgiving and the game adds more buttons into the mix and you really need to hit at just the right time to be rewarded with a note or to not get hit, you don't feel like HarmoKnight is helping you out much. The bosses require literal perfection to get gold on their stages, and I just don't have the patience for that. Also, whoever made the A button attack and the B button jump is an actual gimp. Literal decades of muscle memory have established that one as "jump" and that one as "attack", and when you need to have impulse-level timing, yes, it can get very irritating!

On the better end of things, HarmoKnight is cute, the 3D effect well-executed, and controls aside, thoughtfully put together. I really like the background instrument flowers you can smack for extra notes and how they act as ghost notes to keep you on beat. Stages are short and breezy if you're not aiming for perfection, and it saves after each one, so it's really easy to pick up for twenty minutes when you're bored. There is a story about saving the world from "Noizoids", but it's not very unique, nor are any of the characters all that noteworthy (ha). I wouldn't call the music super memorable either, but it's upbeat and easy enough to follow for gameplay purposes. It's not perfect, but if you're not aiming for perfection, give it a good spin.