Akihabara – Feel the Rhythm Remixed

Genre: Match-4 Falling Block Puzzle / Music-Rhythm

Players: 1

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Review:

Akihabara – Feel the Rhythm (from here on I’ll just be calling it Akihabara) is a Match-4 Falling Block Puzzle game originally released on PC in 2017, with a “Remixed” version of the game coming to the PC and Nintendo Switch a year later. This game seems to have been heavily inspired by the Lumines series of Falling Block Puzzle games, and players familiar with that series will find this to be a similar experience, albeit with a few noteworthy differences. And I’ll just let you know right now – yeah, I’m going to be comparing this game to Lumines a lot in this review, as the similarities are hard to ignore.

In terms of presentation, what’s here is pretty good. As in Lumines, the game cycles through multiple styles of visuals as you progress through it, and each of them has an appealing visual aesthetic and unique background music. While neither are quite on the level of Lumines, they are nevertheless pleasing, with some of the game’s music having a nice mellow quality to it.

In terms of the gameplay, like with Lumines players are moving falling puzzle pieces onto a game board as a bar moves over it, clearing matched pieces. However, it’s in the details that this game sets itself apart. Firstly, the blocks are much bigger here, and in part because of this the relative size of the board they’re placed in is smaller. There are also a wider variety of colors for the blocks (Lumines only used two), and in this game they’re cleared Puyo Puyo-style, by simply connecting four or more in any direction (or five in more challenging game modes), even snaking around other pieces. However, the biggest difference here is how players actually clear those blocks.

Unlike Lumines, in Akihabara, blocks don’t automatically clear when the timing bar moves over it. Rather, players must actively tap a button as the bar passes over blocks that are ready to be cleared. In addition, players are rewarded for tapping the button at the right time, with the default being the moment the bar reaches the blocks to be cleared. In theory, this brings the game a bit deeper into the Music-Rhythm genre, while also making for a greater difficulty as players must multitask the Puzzle and Music-Rhythm elements. In practice though, neither of these things turns out to be very true.

The problem with the Music-Rhythm element is that if we were to consider this game to be a Music-Rhythm game, it’s one that commits a cardinal sin for the genre – its gameplay doesn’t always match up with the music. Sometimes the timing of button-presses matches up with the beat of the music, sometimes it matches up with the off-beat, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to sync up at all. Where in a good music-rhythm game players should be able to tap the buttons based primarily on the audio, in Akihabara they’re much better off watching the bar and pressing the button when it hits the blocks to be removed, at times even making it a point to ignore the music since it can be misleading.

You might think that this would make the game’s multitasking elements more difficult, since watching the bar means taking your eyes off of the blocks you’re controlling, but this is hardly an issue as Akihabara is largely lacking challenge altogether. On the default difficulty, the pieces fall at a glacial pace, and this speed doesn’t seem to pick up as you keep playing. Players can of course increase the difficulty, but even there it hardly feels like much of a challenge. Don’t expect to challenge yourself against an opponent, either – this game has no multiplayer mode, something that feels like a huge oversight.

There’s another issue with this game though, and that is that it never quite feels like it reaches that compelling feeling you look for in a Falling Block Puzzle game that drives you to keep playing. This is partly the fault of the Music-Rhythm elements, which keep pulling players out of the Puzzle gameplay to work on cleanup.

Don’t get me wrong, Akihabara – Feel the Rhythm Remixed isn’t a terrible game – it’s built on the same basic gameplay as Lumines, which is a fantastic Puzzle game. However, the tweaks it makes to that gameplay end up working against it more often than they work for it, with a more prominent Music-Rhythm component that falls flat because it fails the basic requirements of a Music-Rhythm game, and in turn makes for a multitasking element to the game that fails to bring much-needed challenge to the game but complicates it enough to make the Puzzle elements less compelling. Despite all of this, you can still find some enjoyment here, but there seems little reason to bother when you can find much better games like this on the Nintendo Switch, including Chime Sharp and Lumines Remastered.

tl;dr – Akihabara – Feel the Rhythm Remixed is a Match-4 Falling Block Puzzle game that seems directly inspired by Lumines, albeit with more prominent Music-Rhythm elements. Unfortunately, those Music-Rhythm elements are poorly implemented, and the multitasking it requires of players makes the Puzzle gameplay less compelling while failing to bring the game the challenge it sorely lacks. This is still a decent Puzzle game, but it’s hard to see why you’d bother with it when you can just play Lumines Remastered instead.

Grade: C+

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