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HOLD MY CURTAIN CALLS, THERE'S A NEW THEATRHYTHM: Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line
- Thread starter Kazin
- Start date
There's gonna be a demo available on Wednesday with 30 songs and 30 characters, and your save data can be carried over.
That should tide us over for another couple weeks!
That should tide us over for another couple weeks!
Demo track list
My Ultima Premium Deluxe pre-order has been placed. I don't think the demo will tide me over for more than a couple days, but that's okay.
The demo doesn't have "A Long Fall" so all it will do is to increase my impatience for the final release.
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If anyone is trying to download the demo right now on Switch, I had to initiate it from the Nintendo website. It wasn't showing a demo in the eShop. https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/theatrhythm-final-bar-line-switch/
It was available for me in the Final bar page - below the preorder button there was the Trial Version button. (of course I'm in EU so YMMV)
Yeah it's on the game's page itself, under pre-order (note you have to be on the standard game page for it, not any of the bundles).
Maxed out everyone's levels and cleared all songs on Ultimate. Game's good, and I was really only looking for reassurance that it would remain so outside of the 3DS platform.
Everything's fine and satisfying to hit, but the biggest braintwisters are undoubtedly whenever there are parallel lines where you're doing different inputs simultaneously, such as holding a note while managing the rhythm of its companion passage--to say nothing of the bits where you're asked to rapidly transition between ending one such input and shifting to another without pause. I ended up having the most trouble with "Opening - Bombing Mission" and "Saber's Edge" because of those patterns and the overall note density--maybe the only tracks out of the 30 present where I really wanted healing abilities in the party.
Everything's fine and satisfying to hit, but the biggest braintwisters are undoubtedly whenever there are parallel lines where you're doing different inputs simultaneously, such as holding a note while managing the rhythm of its companion passage--to say nothing of the bits where you're asked to rapidly transition between ending one such input and shifting to another without pause. I ended up having the most trouble with "Opening - Bombing Mission" and "Saber's Edge" because of those patterns and the overall note density--maybe the only tracks out of the 30 present where I really wanted healing abilities in the party.
The most mystifying thing about the entire game as presented in the demo is that the FFII tracks use the ancient mono recordings of the soundtrack, leaving the audio off-center mostly to the left--I imagine FFI tracks will be the same. Stereo audio really should've been prioritized in development as few willingly seek out the music in this format if they can help it.
I haven't completed all the songs yet, and I'm sticking to Expert for now, which was where I was most comfortable on 3DS (I dipped my toes into Ultimate in Curtain Call, and some songs felt great, others felt impossible to me. IIRC, "Blinded By Light" on Ultimate routinely destroyed me on 3DS, which sucks because it's XIII's best song and I wanted to master it lol). I haven't even encountered doing different inputs at once while holding a note on another line yet, it'll be interesting if I can get used to it.
I do like that there's another level of "Critical" to rate your timing in this game - my skill level was somewhere between Expert and Ultimate on 3DS because I could pretty consistently get All Criticals on Expert mode but nowhere near that on Ultimate, if I could even complete the song at all. This will let me better see where my skill level is, as I'm Perfect Clearing all the songs so far, but not All Criticaling them. The tweaks they made seem pretty good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing how they changed the party and stat building mechanics, as I really got addicted to maxing out character stats, including setting their level back to 1 to get more AP or whatever (which doesn't seem to be present here? We get 3 abilities max, apparently)...
Oof, I hadn't noticed that, as I haven't used headphones yet. I wonder if there's some compression going on for the demo that won't be present on the full release? Though I can't imagine compressing those tracks would save that much space, so yeah, I guess it's just mystifying.
I do like that there's another level of "Critical" to rate your timing in this game - my skill level was somewhere between Expert and Ultimate on 3DS because I could pretty consistently get All Criticals on Expert mode but nowhere near that on Ultimate, if I could even complete the song at all. This will let me better see where my skill level is, as I'm Perfect Clearing all the songs so far, but not All Criticaling them. The tweaks they made seem pretty good so far. I'm looking forward to seeing how they changed the party and stat building mechanics, as I really got addicted to maxing out character stats, including setting their level back to 1 to get more AP or whatever (which doesn't seem to be present here? We get 3 abilities max, apparently)...
Oof, I hadn't noticed that, as I haven't used headphones yet. I wonder if there's some compression going on for the demo that won't be present on the full release? Though I can't imagine compressing those tracks would save that much space, so yeah, I guess it's just mystifying.
It's just the mastering present in the original soundtrack releases of the first two games--since they've been around the longest and are official, they turn up as uploads on YouTube or wherever often enough and it's always startling wondering if your headphones broke. It shouldn't be an issue as I believe official remasterings that properly center the audio are available, to speak nothing of fan rips that are either centered in stereo or don't have misaligned mono playback--I guess Indieszero sourced the old albums and overlooked their sound somehow.
I wonder if that's the type of thing they'll patch in or fix for the official release, because yeah, I'll mostly be playing this with headphones when I'm not also having to keep an eye and ear out at work (lol).
Quick poll now that there's more attention on this series because of the new game - am I weird for turning off the noises the game plays when you hit each note? I find them distracting and also make the music sound weird. Does anyone else turn them off? You can mute the sounds in Final Bar Line, which is lovely, but I was wondering if the noises bother anyone else.
Quick poll now that there's more attention on this series because of the new game - am I weird for turning off the noises the game plays when you hit each note? I find them distracting and also make the music sound weird. Does anyone else turn them off? You can mute the sounds in Final Bar Line, which is lovely, but I was wondering if the noises bother anyone else.
This was definitely me as well, and I'm hoping to develop my skills a little further with FBL. Being unable to hang with Ultimate felt acceptable back when it was the highest difficulty level, but now that they've introduced Supreme I think I've gotta step up my game.
One touch that I thought was really cute was that the first leg of the FFXIV Series Quest is a choice between the field music for the three starting regions in 2.0. It's like picking your starting region in character creation!
Sprite
(He/Him/His)
I will forever be sad that, instead of Cid and Cait Sith, they have Cloud #2 and Tifa #2.
I’m also sad that the new mechanics means no touch controls.
I also hope there’s some sort of random quest mode like the maps in Curtain Call. Grinding characters and party building is my favorite part of these games and it’s a lot more satisfying with roguelike-ish window dressing, even if it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.
I’m also sad that the new mechanics means no touch controls.
I also hope there’s some sort of random quest mode like the maps in Curtain Call. Grinding characters and party building is my favorite part of these games and it’s a lot more satisfying with roguelike-ish window dressing, even if it’s mostly smoke and mirrors.
Pajaro Pete
(He/Himbo)
this would easily be my game of the year if not for all the other great games releasing this year (Suikoden 1+2 HD, Untitled SaGa Project)
I did eventually do that on 3DS but I didn't turn them down immediately in the demo.
So I'm having a weird relationship with the physical aspect of playing this game. I played Curtain Call for a hundred hours or whatever, sure, but some years ago I discovered a couple places in my city that had the All-Star Carnival release exclusive to Japan, and I ended up playing that cabinet quite a bit too. The arcade cabinet has such better control input compared to the consoles it's not even funny. Even when I played Curtain Call I preferred the touch screen-hybrid control scheme, which is not present now of course. The biggest change I made while playing the demo was to use the shoulder buttons for triggers instead of trying to use both sides of face buttons, because trying to hit face button triggers while also hitting all the slide triggers with analog sticks was pretty much impossible. I bring up All-Star Carnival because its controller uses 4 buttons for slide and button triggees, but the slide buttons are within thumb distance of the main buttons, meaning you don't have to contort your hands around much at all to play it.
This is also why I brought up All-Star Carnival. I believe Supreme difficulty never existed until that arcade release, and with the inherent advantage its control scheme offers compared to conventional controllers, I am wondering how feasible that difficulty even is with this console release now that those note charts are extracted from their original play context. I really can't emphasis enough how much easier it was to play Theatrhythm on that arcade cabinet.
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I haven't even looked up which characters are in the game yet, but that's a shame. I'm with you on the grinding characters part, @Sprite - there does seem to be hints of some sort of roguelikey bits because we can apparently trade summons with people, which must mean we could unlock different summons. So hopefully that sort of thing extends to character building, though the apparent lack of AP makes me worry they simplified things...
Yeah, @YangusKhan, experimenting with the controls is going to be my first task with figuring out how I want to play the game - I suppose I will have to use the shoulder buttons, because it is difficult to swap my thumb back and forth between the face buttons and the analog stick. Which sucks, because I hate shoulder buttons, but oh well. I haven't checked, but hopefully I can use ZR instead of just R.
Yeah, @YangusKhan, experimenting with the controls is going to be my first task with figuring out how I want to play the game - I suppose I will have to use the shoulder buttons, because it is difficult to swap my thumb back and forth between the face buttons and the analog stick. Which sucks, because I hate shoulder buttons, but oh well. I haven't checked, but hopefully I can use ZR instead of just R.
I'm using 8BitDo's Ultimate Controller that I replaced my death-by-drift Switch Pro Controller with, and there's really no system to what buttons I press, just what feels fluid and kinetically relevant in the heat of the moment. Double notes are the most fun for me to hit with synchronized shoulder presses, which is about the only constant. Whenever it gets to any even slightly messy section, the finger gymnastics get equally messy, but having one input readied at the shoulder and one on the face buttons does help with the mental mapping.