Kamitsubaki City Ensemble

Genre: Music-Rhythm

Players: 1

.

Review:

Kamitsubaki City Ensemble is a Music-Rhythm game released in 2024 on PC, mobile devices, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. This game has players guiding a group of AI girls who wake up in a post-apocalyptic city devoid of life, who must use their magical songs to restore what had previously been destroyed.

This game really does try to push this story, but it’s something you’ll soon be glossing over in favor of the Music-Rhythm gameplay. Thankfully, there’s plenty there to keep players engaged.

So here’s the real shocker – Kamitsubaki City Ensemble is polished, well-made, and has a surprisingly generous amount of content… all for only $4. I honestly kept finding myself searching for the catch here, and while this game isn’t perfect, I have to conclude there really isn’t one. This is exactly what it appears to be – a $20-$30 game stuffed into a $4 package.

This game’s 48 songs (!) must be gradually unlocked, which can be a pain. And they’re all songs within the niche “Vocaloid” subgenre of J-Pop, which won’t appeal to everyone. But they’re solid well-made songs with decent enough variety within that genre that unless you have a distaste for Vocaloid music, you’ll likely find something to like here. There are additional paid DLC songs available for purchase too, but what comes with the game is plenty.

The rest of the presentation is quite nice too, with clean-looking 2D visuals consisting of clean black lines on white backgrounds with cobalt blue highlights, joined by some really nice-looking anime-style character designs. During gameplay, you’ll mostly be looking at a Guitar Hero-style collection of lanes dropping notes down to the bottom of the screen where you need to hit them at the proper time.

During gameplay, you can either use gamepad controls or touchscreen controls. With the gamepad controls, each lane is assigned a button, though this can get really hectic as the lanes contract and expand and you can have as many as seven on-screen at a time (in order from left to right: L, left, up, right or Y, X, A, R). Not only is this a pretty large number of inputs to juggle, but you’ll frequently run into sections of songs where you’ll need to enter multiple inputs at once, and in more difficult songs even enter those inputs asynchronously.

Because of this, I find playing in handheld mode using the touchscreen much more intuitive, simply tapping notes when they hit their lane’s bar on the bottom of the screen. However, this is still a challenging Music-Rhythm game even with these controls, and I would argue that this won’t be the best game for novices to the genre.

I should also note that this game’s menus make the odd choice of making players tap ZR rather than B or A to select menu items, which you do get used to, but it’s still an inexplicable choice that causes some confusion.

In the end, Kamitsubaki City Ensemble definitely has its share of flaws, such as the awkward menus, throwaway story, a difficulty that makes this somewhat less accessible, and an all-Vocaloid song list that just won’t appeal to everyone. However, the core gameplay here is quite good, especially if you’re playing with the touchscreen. And getting 48 songs for $4 is an absolutely insane deal. If you enjoy Music-Rhythm games and don’t despise Vocaloid music, I think you need to consider this an absolute must-buy on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Kamitsubaki City Ensemble is a Music-Rhythm game that has some rough spots here and there and a soundtrack of exclusively Vocaloid music that won’t be for everyone, but it features solid lane-based gameplay (with superb optional touchscreen controls) and a whopping 48 songs for only $4. If you enjoy Music-Rhythm games and don’t hate Vocaloid music, this is an absolute no-brainer at that price given the massive value present here.

Grade: A-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}