Maestro: Green Groove

Genre: Music-Rhythm / Auto-Runner

Players: 1

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Review:

Maestro: Green Groove, first released on mobile devices and the DSiWare service in 2009, and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released, is a family-friendly game the combines Music-Rhythm and Auto-Runner elements, with players using the touchscreen to pluck strings their bird protagonist is walking on to get him to jump, and tapping enemies to defeat them, all in time with the beat.

The presentation here uses hand-drawn and pixel art 2D visuals with a lot of color and a fair amount of personality to them. As for the music, this game has players playing through whimsical synthesized versions of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 Opus 9, as well as some “boss” stages with an original tune that’s much in the same style.

This is actually one of my first major complaints about the game, actually – with only three songs (plus the boss levels), repeated on different difficulty levels, this game is absolutely anemic when it comes to content. And while I understand that DSiWare games are limited in their space capacity, this game’s use of synthesized sounds for its versions of the included songs should have made it possible to have more than four songs. The game does try to compensate for this somewhat by unlocking additional gameplay modes as you progress, such as being able to sing in time with the music using the microphone, but this ends up being more gimmicky than a truly worthwhile gameplay element.

And while I really like the idea this game presents of a platformer that responds to your playing the screen like an instrument, in practice this creates problems, since causing your character to jump at the wrong time can mean scrolling up and away from other notes you need to play, causing you to miss those other notes as well. Also, the need to distinguish between strumming up and down at such a short notice makes this game much more difficult than it should be, to the point where I was on the fence about calling this game “family-friendly” due to the difficulty this adds in.

For the boss stages, these play completely different, being more of a call-repeat “Simon Says” style of game, and while it doesn’t have the issues of the gameplay that the rest of the game does, it’s also nowhere near as novel or interesting as the rest of the game, and whoever composed this slow, repetitive music that’s in these boss fights can’t compete with the composition of the likes of Beethoven, Dvorak and Chopin.

Despite its problems, Maestro: Green Groove is still an entertaining and original Music-Rhythm game, but it’s one that’s so starved for content and with frustrating difficulty spikes that it’s hard to recommend it over some of the other, better Music-Rhythm games on the Nintendo 3DS. If you’re a fan of the genre, this game may still be worth a look, but otherwise I’d advise you to save your system memory space for other DSiWare titles.

tl;dr – Maestro: Green Groove is a family-friendly game that combines Music-Rhythm and Auto-Runner elements, with players using the touchscreen to play in time with the music, causing their character to jump and interacting with enemies. It’s a clever concept, but it’s heavily marred by frustrating difficulty spikes and an extreme lack of content. Music-Rhythm fans may still find this interesting, but most are better off skipping it.

Grade: C

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