While I would not call myself an OG player of the Rhythm Paradise (or Rhythm Heaven in North America) series, having only started playing it with the first of the modern releases on the Nintendo Wii, I have a particular fondness for its formula – bite-sized experiences à la Warioware (albeit longer) complemented by great musical backing. Is it a game I will particularly hope is announced every time Nintendo does an announcement livestream? Perhaps not. But it is one of those trusty once-in-a-console generation (often end-generation) experiences that is always welcome when it comes around. With the Nintendo Switch in its last hurrah as the Nintendo Switch 2 forges ahead with its plans for the coming years, Nintendo have chosen now to release Rhythm Paradise Groove (or Rhythm Heaven Groove) on the former platform. Was it worth the wait since its last outing? Read on to find out.
As with every entry that has come before it, no continuous story holds Rhythm Paradise Groove together, and that is less a criticism than a statement of intent. What narrative there is stays confined to the very short, forgettable beats which power each minigame – some more notable than others. They are small, self-contained scenes to be enjoyed as they come, and there is a quiet charm in how the game trusts you to notice the connections rather than spelling them out for you. The one mode here with anything resembling a proper story is Beatspell, which we will come to a little later.
Visually, Rhythm Paradise Groove is an absolute treat, and it is easily the most immediately likeable thing about the whole package. Like past instalments, albeit with the benefit of being on more powerful hardware than any instalment preceding it, the biggest boon comes from how nice and crisp everything looks on the screen. Characters are simple, boldly drawn creations with heavy black borders, closer to something snipped out of coloured card than anything modelled, set against whatever backdrop the game warrants. Everything matches the eccentricness and quirkiness I’d expect from a Rhythm Paradise game, the main limitation being that where past games made you feel you were building towards something visually as much as rhythmically, here those visual climaxes are far thinner on the ground.
On paper, the audio side of Rhythm Paradise Groove should be untouchable. Tsunku returns as series composer, and this time he is joined on guest vocals by the likes of Ado, along with Fruits Zipper’s Yui Sakurai. Pleasingly for anyone who has grumbled about past localisations, a good chunk of the Japanese vocal work has also been left intact on this occasion. The spread of genres and tempos is broad enough that the campaign never settles into one groove for too long, and there are absolutely tracks here that do the job. Yet if I am being honest, far fewer of them followed me out of the room than I had expected. Most were perfectly pleasant while I was playing and then evaporated afterwards, which is not something I could say about the Wii or 3DS entries.
Structurally, things are as clean as ever: a sizable range of challenges, with each set of four headlined by a Remix stage to close it out, and a solo tally landing somewhere north of eighty once the tougher reworkings that turn up later are added to the pile. But how do they actually play? Much as it always has, which is to say deceptively simply. You are tapping A, holding a button for a specific length, occasionally reaching for the D-pad, and every so often asking both hands to fire at once, and that is genuinely the extent of it. The reason this series has endured for two decades is that nothing ever scrolls down the screen to mark the moment for you, so your ears lead, and your eyes follow, and you end up building a feel for the beat rather than simply reacting to a prompt. For the most part, Rhythm Paradise Groove doesn’t fumble this, and is willing to play with this approach in different ways – sometimes mid-beat. The minigames themselves are fun and well constructed, too, and there was a real pull in clearing one challenge to see what the next would throw at me. However, there is some degree of inconsistency in the quality of the individual stages. The hit rate sits a shade below previous titles. They are fine, but there was a lack of exemplar experiences.
This is particularly profound when it comes to the aforementioned Remix stages, the payoff each set of four minigames builds towards, and usually the part of any Rhythm Paradise game I look forward to most. There are good ones in Rhythm Paradise Groove, and the eighth stage in particular has some great beats. However, the good ones prove the exception rather than the rule from my perspective. Transitions between component games regularly land a fraction off, enough to break your flow at precisely the moment the mode should be rewarding you for having internalised it, and the sequencing feels less inventive than what came before, leaning on straight recreations of segments you have already cleared rather than reimagining them. In my opinion, the final few remixes are the biggest offenders, feeling like more of the same rather than a proper examination of whether you have understood every challenge leading up to them, which is exactly what a closing remix ought to be. Progression around all of this is forgiving to a fault, too. With a greater diversity of success ratings, it also felt possible to stumble your way onward without having actually learned much of anything. In fact, the only time I got a lower score that prevented me from progressing was by doing a workaround in a level which, moments ago, the tutorial had passed me on doing.
Then there is Beatspell, Rhythm Paradise Groove’s newest addition, which fuses rhythm gameplay with very, very light RPG systems – casting spells on the beat to see off a procession of monsters. The concept is a good one, and it does improve considerably once your spell list opens up and the timings start landing off the beat as often as on it. Still, the road there is a grind of samey encounters, and boss fights I had well and truly finished with before they had finished with me. I think there is something here, and the developers should really look at rolling out some post-launch updates to make it meatier, but otherwise it is kinda meh.
Far more successful is the multiplayer suite, which has a stronger offering than past Rhythm Paradise instalments: ten games with three difficulty variants apiece, support for up to four players, and a sensible split between the co-operative and the competitive. Beyond that, players can dive into the Toy Box, Score Attack, a jukebox, Drum Lessons and the Café, which collectively offer plenty in quantity but not a great deal in substance. That is probably a good way of looking at Rhythm Paradise Groove in general – I enjoyed nearly all of it while it was happening. But almost none of it pulled me back afterwards. The levels did not hook me as challenges the way the older entries did, and the music did not hook me as music, so the medal-chasing loop that normally kept me returning to this series never quite resulted in anything.
Finally I am brought to accessibility, an area where Rhythm Paradise Groove deserves genuine credit, not only in contrast to its previous instalments but also most games in general. My first instinct on meeting Li’l Miss Reeds was to go hunting through the settings and turn her off, which I suspect will be a common reaction. But having a text-to-speech companion is nifty for a particular group, those who are blind or have low vision – as you are left not actually needing to read the menus altogether. This is a series where your ears do the work while your eyes are just along for the journey, and combined with TTS menu guidance, puts Rhythm Heaven Groove in that small group of games that can be played with the screen off entirely. Elsewhere, Beatspell will shift its inputs onto whichever buttons you can comfortably reach, the tutorials will demonstrate a pattern as many times as you like before asking you to attempt it, and failing a stage over and over costs you nothing but time. Where I would push for more is everything else, as there is nothing on offer in the way of difficulty options or adjustable timing windows.
So, was it worth the wait since Rhythm Paradise Megamix, now over a decade behind us? Rhythm Paradise Groove is a charming, well-made and frequently very funny collection of musical minigames that does exactly what the series has always done – and there is a lot to be said for it simply existing again and doing so with this much care behind it. However, the experience felt more like a reach to its former heights rather than a step forward – with remixes lacking their predecessors’ invention and a soundtrack that, for me at least, faded rather than lingered. If you have never played a Rhythm Paradise game, this is a perfectly good place to start. But at the same time…. I would love to see Nintendo bring earlier instalments across to the Nintendo Switch 2 – as there are so many past gems that deserve a look-in.
Final Score for Rhythm Paradise Groove
Rhythm Paradise Groove (aka. Rhythm Heaven Groove) is now available to purchase via the Nintendo eShop
