Rhythm Minigame Insanity: A Super Crazy Rhythm Castle Review

By Al

Players: 1-4 Local & Online
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle is a game that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. It's a rhythm game, but it has a strong focus on multiplayer and that's evident as soon as you load in for the first time. It also is brought to us by way of Konami, a developer who hasn't seemed all too interested in developing new IPs lately. This aside, Konami has a long history in the rhythm game field, and they were once a king within the genre thanks to the long-running BeMani series of games, not to mention Dance Dance Revolution. Is Super Crazy Rhythm Castle a return to form for Konami? How does it hold up to other rhythm games that have released recently? And just how well do those wacky minigame elements gel with the core gameplay? Well, we're going to hopefully answer all these questions and more, so let's start our journey to this Crazy Castle!

Yeah, this is the intro alright.

He sure has a fun time blocking your progress.

There is something of a story in Super Crazy Rhythm Castle, but it's so bare bones that it doesn't feel like it's worth repeating here. I'll give it a go anyway I guess. Basically there's a Rhythm King in a Rhythm Castle who has defeated several previous kings to attain his status. You arrive, either solo or with your friends, to take on this King and rule the castle yourself. You're given no real reason why you're doing this, but I guess being King is reason enough. The current King isn't going to just let you face him in direct competition though, he immediately blocks your path and makes you do a lot of busy work before you can challenge him. As you traverse through his castle you'll take part in several stages that make up the core rhythm game experience. Giving you a simple rhythm challenge is no fun though, you're also given some party game-style mechanics to deal with. Every stage in the castle can be tackled solo, or in a group, though we'll talk more about multiplayer later on in the review. Speaking of your group though, each player can choose from four characters at the start of the game. These are quite the random assortment and do not have an ounce of character to them besides maybe looking cool. You'll never learn their backstories, they'll never have any sort of meaningful dialogue, and you can actually replace them at any time with a button press. You can also unlock other playable characters throughout gameplay too, and also adjust the game's difficulty within the same menu. The castle's various regions also house NPCs who stand in your way, but you can deal with them by completing stages or fulfilling a pre-determined mission that either gets them off your back or allows them to open up the path to the next area of the game. Pretty simple stuff, but things get messy fast as you keep playing the game.

Can YOU figure out what's going on here?

Those minim things end the game.

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the design of Super Crazy Rhythm Castle, and one of them is how you go about choosing the next level you're going to play. The titular castle acts as a sort of hub world, but stages are sectioned off into Metroidvania-esque areas that only open up as you progress in the story, or get an item you need. There is some slight sequence breaking you can do here and there, but you're pretty much moving along in a straight line. The problem with this is that it's usually very unclear as to where you're expected to go next. The castle isn't even that big, yet I found myself wandering around every path trying to find the next stage that would let me progress. More often than not it involved talking to an NPC I didn't even realize was waiting for me to complete a fetch quest. Since the NPCs mostly speak in nonsensical phrases, and sometimes outright gibberish, I mainly ignored them my first time through. Besides giving NPCs items, you can also sometimes unlock new areas by using skills you gather throughout the game. These are most annoying as they never seem to change the world permanently. Why do I need to keep using the weed killer if I want to replay the first area's boss fight? Why do I need to keep hypnotizing those dogs (at least I THINK they're dogs) when I want to clear a path? It's strange that some changes you make to the castle, like opening up shortcuts between areas, stay open while others close up. It makes for a very unsatisfying gameplay loop in general, but that's the least of the problems here.

This one took me a while to figure out.

This one wasn't that bad actually.

Now we all know what a rhythm game entails. You hit notes on the beat, and you get a score depending on how well you did. That only makes up a small part of the core gameplay here, with the focus being far heavier on the other gameplay elements within each stage. These other gameplay elements come in the form of odd, usually quirky, tasks that are reminiscent of things you'd find in games like Overcooked or Moving Out. Sometimes you'll have to destroy items in a big area, and only play the rhythm game portion to power up your tools of destruction. Other times you'll have to create recipes using items dropped from a chute whenever you hit a certain note streak. Yet other times you'll have switch between playing songs to defeat enemies that appear randomly in some stages, and can mean a game over if you let them overtake you. And sometimes you'll simply be playing a song when the stage starts rotating in a confusing loop. Usually whatever minigame you're playing gets harder the longer it goes on, and then you start having to dodge items that stun you for several seconds. This all is very frustrating in general, but more so when you realize that you're never once told how to play any of the game's stages. There's very few mechanics that carry over from one to another too, so you'll have to often figure out each stage by trial and error. This naturally means you're bound to fail each stage at least once before you're able to even get the lowest of passing scores. If you fail a stage you have to restart it. If it's a multi-level stage, you're sent back to the beginning, even if you failed in the last section. This can be annoying enough, but you also have to watch all the levels cutscenes again. You can fast forward them, but this barely seems to speed anything up, and makes one wish there was a simple skip button. I actually thought that this game was not meant to be played solo as I found it all but impossible to beat some stages even when I knew what I was doing, but then I found some friends to try out multiplayer...

What even are these items?

The very basic plain rhythm game room.

First off I must say that this game is clearly developed with multiplayer in mind. The character select screen gives this away, and there are always on-screen prompts for other players to join. Each and every stage can be tackled with up to three other players, but the question is whether you'll really want to do this. Before we talk about that though, let's cover how we gather together our team. Other players can join in locally, as well as online. Now this is the first problem with multiplayer as there is no cross-play (at least on the Switch), and you can only play online with friends via an invite system. I found it hard to find anyone I knew who had the game, but once I did I had to see if things were actually easier with another player. To cut to the chase, I quickly learned that it was not any easier, and it in fact added a new level of difficulty and frustration. I didn't realize that multiple players meant that everyone just played the same game, but with an added competitive edge as everyone was now hunting for a better score between the players. I expected more working together since nearly every levels multi-tasking seemed like it was meant to be handled by assigning tasks. Since this isn't actually how Story Mode multiplayer works, it actually means that everyone pretty much just gets in everyone else's way. I hated every second of multiplayer, and it gets even worse when different players are at different levels of understanding what you're supposed to do in each level. This extra layer of confusion ensures that you're going to have to restart again, and that's starting to become a theme here. Now there are some versus levels you can play as you progress throughout the game that are actually a lot of fun, but these aren't story progression levels and are distractions at best. I'm not sure why the focus seems to be on multiplayer even exists in Story Mode if this was the way they were going to handle it. As it stands, it's an experience that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

The empty multiplayer room.

Oh yeah, there are bosses here.

Now everything is sort of wrapped up within the core Story Mode, meaning that it's in the castle hub where you'll find all the game's other modes too. Besides the multiplayer versus area, you can also use telephone booths to teleport to a series of rooms where you can play a simple rhythm game version of all the game's music without any of the minigame distractions. This actually was the most fun part of the game for me, but I couldn't help but think that was odd since it's extremely bare bones. The room you play each song in is the most generic thing imaginable, and it almost feels like the game only gives you this mode as an afterthought. Now songs in this plain rhythm mode are unlocked by collecting tapes you get from completing each stage that has a new song in it. You can also collect tapes throughout the overworld, or by unlocking them by collecting enough medals on the basic song stages themselves. These tapes you find or earn aren't from Super Crazy Rhythm Castle though, they're tracks from other classic Konami games. These are even cooler songs as they usually are arranged versions, and feature their own on-screen graphics while playing them. Besides collecting tapes, you can also collect items to open up other areas, or revisit stages to max out your stars or coins. Your progress in everything is tracked within a section in the pause menu, and the percentage of completion you see there seems to be affected by how well you've done on each stage. That means if you want to 100% Super Crazy Rhythm Castle, you're going to have to do perfect on just about every single stage in the game. Something far easier said than done for a lot of reasons.

I'm not too bad sometimes.

Oh look, a perfect score.

I haven't really talked too much about the music in this game, and there's a few reasons for that. First off, many of the rhythm tracks are just... bad. There's no other word for it. Some are silly, some are bad examples of specific genres (like metal, pop punk, etc.), and others are just weak instrumentals. It's telling that the best songs in this game are the retro ones you find throughout the game that come from past Konami titles. I wasn't expecting to find the latest licensed hits here, or even a collection of covers of classic songs like in Taiko no Tasujin, but I was expecting music of a caliber far better than this. There were several tracks that had the silliest lyrics that I dreaded having to hear again whenever they popped up again. Oh yeah, there isn't a whole lot of original music here all things considered, and you'll find tracks from past levels popping up later on. This might not be all that bad, but when I get to my next point it'll become clear why the bad rhythm game music is such a huge negative here in particular.

One thing you'd expect from a game that is centered on music is for things to stay lively and at least have a soundtrack that extends into the non-level portions of the game. That sounds like a basic expectation right? Well, I have no idea how Konami dropped the ball here, but most of the game actually passes by in silence. Every now and then an atmospheric track will play, but most of the time it's just sound effects and the grunts that pass as "voice acting". It actually feels like something akin to a survival horror game where the music is meant to accentuate certain scenes, but going through the overworld sections, and the intros to stages, in complete silence is just crazy to me. It honestly feels like the game is just unfinished, as if the budget that was supposed to be used to put in the background music just fell through somehow. They could've been lazy and just put in some of the instrumentals, but they didn't even bother with that. I don't want to keep going on about this, but it was the most obvious thing they could've fixed to make the game a lot better but they didn't even bother. Oh, and I mentioned the grunts a few times already, but yeah, there is no voice acting here either so get used to the weird sounds this game uses to represent speaking. Animal Crossing this isn't, and it just adds to the shockingly bad sound design that comes from a company that used to be the king of rhythm games.

These NPCs are wild.

The retro Konami tracks are great.

Since this is half party game, we have to talk controls a bit. I hate everything about this game's control scheme. Movement feels a little clunky in general, but the mapping of all your skills just feels off. These skills unlock through gameplay, so their buttons are pre-determined, but their placement should've been chosen by the player Action RPG style or something. You'll often find yourself using skills you forgot about, and you'll inevitably be hitting a bunch of random buttons until you find the one you need. Also, having to hold a button to select and close many menus is rather annoying and I'm not sure why you're forced to do it. Oh, and things aren't any better in the Rhythm game sections. You control the notes using the L button, the right d-pad button, the Y button, and the R button. If that sounds random to you too, then join the club because I could never really grasp this crazy spread for a game that only uses four simple notes. There's an option in the menus that says "controls", but no matter what I did or pressed, I couldn't remap any of the buttons. I can't think of many games that use the shoulder buttons in rhythm gameplay, but it's so awkward that I immediately wanted to change it. It's shocking how bad the controls are, and presumably there is/will be a way to remap them, but this game shouldn't be such a chore to play by default.

I've been knocking this game left and right, but there's another issue I have with it, and that's its overall length and replayability. You can beat the entire game 100% in less than ten hours, probably only in 2-3 if it weren't for all the inevitable redos you're going to have to do because you'll never know what's expected of you the first time around. I guess you can go back to the in-game stages for better scores and stars, but I don't see myself ever bothering with that. You can go back and play the songs on their own, but the fact that you have to travel to this room from the overworld keeps it from being a standard pick-up-and-play thing. The same goes for the multiplayer levels. You can of course try out the Story Mode levels in multiplayer, but I already went over why this isn't a good idea. Playing the versus levels is even more of a chore as you have to go to a specific world location to even get to them. Why these aren't selectable from the title screen is beyond me. This alone will probably keep me from ever revisiting the game after I've played through all the parts I want to.

Keep an eye out for those tapes!

Sometimes things just spin.

At the time of this writing Super Crazy Rhythm Castle has an MSRP of $39.99, which is a decent price for the amount of content you get. Now I obviously still don't give this game a recommendation due to the general frustration and poor presentation, but I can appreciate that it is at least not priced as a full AAA release. With that said, there are a lot of high profile rhythm games, especially on the Nintendo Switch, that are far better than this one and fans of the genre are better off grabbing one of those. Perhaps if this one goes on a deep sale it might be worth checking out, but I honestly think this falls just below average that I think players should just skip it altogether. That's a shame though, as Konami finally returns to new IP releases only to give us something as mediocre as this. Hopefully this doesn't mark an end of Konami returning to the rhythm game genre, but next time I hope they address the issues here.

For More Information on Super Crazy Rhythm Castle:
https://www.konami.com/games/ca/en/topics/2239/

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Story: C
Gameplay: D
Graphics: C
Music/Sound: C
Value: C

Overall: C-

Pros:
+ A quirky story, wacky characters, and a strange but interesting world are all enticing enough to keep players in despite the frustration.
+ There's lots to unlock, including other characters and songs, that extend gameplay far past the main Story Mode.
+ Playing the songs in a standard rhythm game fashion is actually fairly enjoyable, and possible as the game progresses.
+ The versus mode multiplayer levels are great for party game setups.

+/- While this game isn't anywhere near perfect, seeing Konami return to the rhythm game genre is exciting.

Cons:
- Difficulty is all over the place and relies mainly on trial-and-error to get past most stages.
- Restarting stages features unskippable opening scenes, and being sent back to the beginning of multi-room stages.
- The overworld being nearly completely silent is really strange considering this is a music-centric game.
- Multiplayer in Story Mode stages doesn't help anything regarding difficulty, and it usually just results in everyone getting in everyone else's way.
- The standard rhythm game sections have extremely generic backgrounds.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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My thoughts exactly.

#SCRC