There's just more of it to love.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/38614/theatrhythm-final-fantasy-curtain-call-review
Despite having virtually no experience with Square-Enix’s esteemed Final Fantasy series aside from some cursory attempts at FFVII, FFVIII, and that GBA tactics game, I still knew that the franchise was touted for its soundtracks. I also like rhythm games, so I decided early on to pick up the bizarre Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy in 2012. I didn’t really expect to love it as much as I did, pouring dozens of hours into the game. But I wanted more, because the track list in the first game isn’t very expansive, but I wasn’t willing to pay for DLC. Well, it’s taken two years, but a solution has emerged: Curtain Call, the sequel that’s better in just about every aspect.
To be clear, the core gameplay remains the same: you tap, swipe, and hold the stylus on the touch screen as notes stream from left to right along with the beat of a Final Fantasy song. But that’s really all that’s stayed the same.
First and foremost, the track list has ballooned considerably. It now includes more than 200 songs—this includes all of the songs from the first game including its DLC, new songs from those same games, and tracks from spin-off games like Type-O, the XIII sequels, Crystal Chronicles, Dissidia, Final Fantasy Adventure, and even Advent-freakin’-Children! No love for Spirits Within, though.
In the first game, the main solo “campaign” consisted of playing through the soundtracks in chronological order, which didn’t take very long considering the scope of the soundtrack, and playing through challenging “Dark Notes” to slowly unlock more characters. In Curtain Call, you can actually access the available track list at any time and play through any available song on the fly. The main campaign, however, is “Quest Medley,” which takes you through a random assortment of songs along a series of paths (you choose which ones to take). These are always background music tracks or battle tracks—which is good, because I really hate event (cinematic) tracks.
There are short, medium, and long quests. Even the medium quests are entirely too long, but long quests are just plain tedious, and it doesn’t help that you’ll often be forced to play the same track more than once or twice during a single quest. On the other hand, if you power through, you get tons of items, Collect-a-Cards, and Crystals for medium and long quests. Some of the game’s new items, like Tents and Airship Tickets, help make the longer quests more palatable. I was appreciative of the fact that every quest felt worthwhile. I’m constantly unlocking characters, for example (there are a ton of them this time).
Multiplayer has also opened up quite a bit—it takes the form of a versus mode that resembles the “boss fights” in later Guitar Hero games: by doing well in a song, you build up an attack meter that, once full, deploys a random attack on your opponent. They can do the same to you. There are a number of attacks that do various things, like briefly speed up your track, make the enemies more powerful, force you to make critical taps, or hide the note type until the last second. You can also play locally or online with friends or strangers, although it’s tough to find a match.
Character customization has not changed that much, but it seems like characters level up faster. The big new feature here, though, is that Collect-a-Cards can be equipped by individual characters as buffs, and equipping the right combination of cards (I’m hazy on how this is determined) results in a better buff. The catch is that cards are now a finite resource that you must grind to collect copies of. I didn’t really bother with card buffing, although I imagine it will be more important as I continue to trek through longer, more difficult quests.
The game also has a lot of polish: “repeat” songs are now longer, arranged a little differently, or just plain sound better than they used to. You no longer have to sit and watch your Rhythmia score get totaled after every match—it just happens all at once. New monsters look great and old monsters look better. I still really can’t stand the character designs of the heroes. They look like brain-dead Peanuts characters, but I was happy to see that there are MANY more of them, even multiple versions of the same character (both FFVII Tifa and Advent Children Tifa are represented, for example).
If you liked the original Theathrhythm, this is more of the same with plenty of bonus content. It sucks me in every time I turn it on, to the point where my wife is actually pulling the headphones out of my ears to get my attention. It’s a wonderful game. You should totally play it.
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