RHYTHM HEAVEN FEVER
Nintendo SPD
2012
Wii

I love rhythm games, and I think it’s fascinating the way they create challenging gameplay. For most listeners, music is not inherently interesting because it’s hard to perform. Yngwie Malmsteen is not a more popular guitarist than Jack White – Art Tatum isn’t inherently more beloved than Dave Brubeck. Games based on pop music run into this problem pretty fast, with the highest difficulties basically always being occupied by blast beat metal or hardcore techno. The ceiling is a combination of speed and variable notes that make for a pretty niche listening experience. At some point, it represents difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Guitar rhythm games require being able to powerslide and fingerpick through borderline illegible solos – dance rhythm games have so many notes flying at the screen their order has to be memorized in slow motion.

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise is pretty notoriously difficult despite stripping out a lot of that complexity. In Rhythm Heaven Fever, the franchise’s best game before the pivot to “greatest hits” collections from the first three games, there are only two commands. You either press the A button, or you press the A and B button at the same time. The speed also never gets especially high, either, largely set around 130 BPM. Where Rhythm Heaven Fever derives its difficulty is precision – the game requires on-beat hits without the sloppiness of some more forgiving rhythm games, and its pass/fail criteria can create brick walls if you’re really struggling to get the rhythm down.

The music itself is just delightful, veering wildly in genre from city pop to bossa nova to hard rock. Because the difficulty is only tied to the rhythm itself, the game’s later stages are able to vary far more in terms of genre, with the game’s later levels including hip-hop, 80s power pop, video game chiptunes, hard rock – it’s much more feasible to play with an interesting rhythmic challenge in a typical genre than to introduce difficult notation.

The game pairs every minigame with a unique, fantastical cartoon that the music is soundtracking. The mascot monkeys that appear here and there throughout the game might be playing golf or operating a watch – Karate Joe needs to land his punches on beat to keep in shape – a cat and dog are keeping a badminton volley going while piloting biplanes. The visuals are absurd, full of jokes and color, and are themselves such an aesthetic treat for playing well. Sometimes they can be so engaging that it’s actually better to just close your eyes and feel the music, but learning the visual cues can also help mark your place in the song itself.

At a time when the odd side of Nintendo’s magic has somewhat waned in favor of iterative sequels and huge, complex games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a game as simple as Rhythm Heaven Fever seems especially far away. Nintendo has chosen to grow alongside its players, creating experiences that are deeply appealing to people who either already intimately know how deep video games can be or who have a child’s time to learn. Even getting into a game of Mario Kart 8 requires building a vehicle, one that has stats, and engaging with that system without attention can result in creating a kart that’s no fun to play. I admire Rhythm Heaven Fever because it takes only two or three sentences to explain the controls you’ll use throughout, and each individual rhythm game contains tutorials to ensure the player knows how to interact before beginning. And yet, without any fear, Rhythm Heaven Fever also throws those players directly into the deep end, demanding that internal metronome be more precise than a lot of the rock legends of the 60s and 70s. It’s a wonderful dynamic that creates a sense of humor in play, matched by the cartooning you see on screen. It’s Nintendo embracing absurdity, and I hope it’s not the last we see of those funky monkeys.