Pianista

Genre: Music-Rhythm

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Pianista is a family-friendly Music-Rhythm game released on iOS in 2016, ported to Android devices in 2017, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018. This game has you playing abridged versions of solo piano themes from legendary classical artists like Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.

Before we get to the gameplay, let’s discuss the music, because this is not only going to be a focal point of the game, but also likely a point of contention for those considering whether or not to get this game. The Nintendo Switch version of the game has 77 songs, which sounds like a lot, but it’s worth noting that all of these songs are public domain, and the mobile versions of the game, while riddled with nasty monetization, nevertheless offered plenty more songs to choose from. I feel it’s particularly noteworthy here, because Pianista’s direct competition on Nintendo Switch is Deemo, which offers players an absolutely massive list of 200 piano themes to play, and in a wide variety of genres too.

To be fair to Pianista, all of the classical music contained within are time-tested classics, with good arrangements presented in an overall high quality, while many of the songs on offer in Deemo are songs composed for the game, or licensed from independent artists players likely won’t have heard of, while it’s hard to imagine that many players won’t have heard of the likes of Chopin or Bach. But it is still disappointing that Pianista’s creators could have filled the Nintendo Switch release with more classical themes from the mobile version of the game, but opted not to.

Beyond the sound, the rest of Pianista’s presentation aims to rise to the level of the music with a clean presentation that presents the game’s Guitar Hero-style music note lanes made of wood backed by a blurry music hall, though players can unlock other visualizations inspired by classic paintings as well. This all does an excellent job of making Pianista not only seem like “the classy Music-Rhythm game”, but also makes it far more visually-interesting than Deemo’s plain black and white look.

The gameplay here is pretty straightforward, following the same Guitar Hero-style gameplay that Deemo does – notes fall down the tracks, and you need to press the corresponding buttons when they reach the bottom. Players are offered not only three difficulty settings, but they can also select a four-button mode and a more challenging six-button mode, with the former using left and up on the D-pad and X and A on the face buttons, while the latter adds right on the D-pad and Y on the face buttons.

While multitasking six buttons may seem particularly difficult, Pianista is fairly forgiving – playing the wrong note doesn’t penalize the player, the game only cares whether you play the correct note, which means that if you hit a difficult stretch, you can often fake it for a little while simply by button-mashing, though this approach won’t work when the game has you holding down sustained notes.

Pianista lets players tackle these songs in a few different game modes. There’s Matinee mode, which has players selecting three songs to form a set, Concours mode, which presents players with curated sets of four songs to play, and Ensemble mode, which has two players each taking a Joy-Con and cooperating to play a song with each controlling half of the screen.

There’s also a Library mode that shows your completion progress for each musician, as well as a brief one-page summary of that artist’s career and life, though this element is woefully lacking – as an example, the page for Tchaikovsky refers to the sadness throughout his life, mentioning his separation from his mother and her subsequent death, but leaving out the death of his close friend Nikolai Rubinstein, his failed marriage, and his closeted homosexuality. In other words, this is a nice little bonus, but don’t expect anything even remotely comprehensive here.

There is one other omission here, and it’s another one that I feel really hurts this game. Despite Pianista being borne of mobile platforms, the Nintendo Switch version of the game doesn’t support the use of a touchscreen, something that would have been a wonderful inclusion, and a feature that was a highlight in Deemo. Perhaps in part because of this, Pianista never attains the same quality that Deemo has that makes players get a sense of the feeling of what it must be like to play its songs on a piano.

Look, it’s hard to review Pianista and not keep coming back to comparisons to Deemo. The two games are similar in many ways, and in those ways I have to say that Deemo is often the superior choice. While Pianista absolutely has the better presentation, and its list of songs is much better-known, Deemo has it beat when it comes to the absolutely massive number of songs, its wide variety, and its touchscreen gameplay.

However, for players who have already thoroughly exhausted Deemo and want more piano-focused Music-Rhythm gameplay, or who have a particular fondness for classical artists, Pianista is still a superb Music-Rhythm game that looks and sounds great, plays well, and is overall well worth picking up for any fan of the genre with a Nintendo Switch, even if what it lacks means I wouldn’t quite put it among the best Music-Rhythm games on the platform.

tl;dr – Pianista is a family-friendly Music-Rhythm game that has players playing solo piano themes based on the abridged works of legendary classical artists. This means the song list is much more recognizable than what was in the similar game Deemo, but that song list is also much shorter, and the Nintendo Switch version of Pianista unfortunately lacks Deemo’s great touchscreen gameplay. However, this is still absolutely worth picking up for Music-Rhythm fans on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: B+

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