FGC #670 Hi-Fi Rush

Do you ever get the feeling you’re playing a particular videogame ’cause you’re supposed to?

Hi-Fi Rush will get a pass

Hi-Fi Rush was released on January 25, 2023. It was a “stealth release”, which means that it had all the advertising and “hype” you would ever expect from a videogame launch, but had no previews or publicity before it was available. Neat! And that was probably a good idea for Hi-Fi Rush, as both the gameplay and the comedic plot would not necessarily come through properly in a two minute trailer. Those of you in the audience old enough to remember the original release of Psychonauts may recognize the issue of “wow, that looks kind of fun… but what the heck is it?” long before we attempted to define Tim Schafer’s action-adventure-comedy-collectathon-coming-of-age story. “Funny cartoon music fighting action game” is similarly a hard sell on an attention span deprived public (I lost interest halfway through typing that description), so a stealth release coupled with good word of mouth was the best advertising a rockin’ cyborg could ever imagine.

But Microsoft did take the bold stance of making me feel like an idiot for actually buying the game.

Tango Gameworks had some genuine hits with The Evil Within, but Hi-Fi Rush following such would be like the next Final Fantasy game ignoring a neon-haired protagonist for a swearing American pontificating on the joys of Frank Sinatra. The target audience would never forgive them! So why not give it away? Generate some good word of mouth by letting everyone have it. If they don’t like it, nothing was wasted. And if they do like it? You’ve got the next Among Us on your hands. Right?

Let’s talk about Game Pass. Game Pass was launched by Microsoft in 2017, and has always been sold as “the Netflix of gaming”. You subscribe to Game Pass, and you have access to literally hundreds of games at the click of an A button. While the concept of “hundreds of games” inevitably means there will be a lot of cruft on that list, it is hard to say there could be any gamers out there that would not be able to find some gold at the end of this rainbow. Gungrave, Goat Simulator, and Guilty Gear are all in the G section alone! Like a streaming service, the implication here is obvious: you can play these hundreds of games just so long as you pay the provider money in perpetuity. You miss that monthly invoice, and your access to all this glorious content goes away. Subscribe to games, kiddies, and you’ll always have something to play!

I have never subscribed to Game Pass. This is due to one very particular reason: I know how I play videogames. I am feast and famine with my interest in any given game. I might ignore the latest Kirby release for months, but then when I get into it, I do nothing but play it for 60 consecutive hours. This is antithetical to the subscription model. I genuinely feel bad if I know something is available, it is being dropped from the subscription service at some point in the future, and now I must play the game. It’s a waste otherwise, right? What am I paying for if I cannot play the game I actually want to play? Am I damned to simply play PAW Patrol: Grand Prix until another game comes along? No! Come to think of it, I have a backlog of approximately 467,026,810 games stretching back to the Atari era (somebody remind me I need to write that Pitfall article sometime). So why would I ever subscribe to an active, mutating to-do list? If I want to pay money monthly to do chores, I’ll get a gym membership.

What does this all mean? It means I am the odd man out that must buy Hi-Fi Rush if I want to give it a go. Not like the concept of renting a videogame exists anymore. And if I shell out for Hi-Fi Rush, I damn well know that I could be spending that same $30 on three months of Game Pass. Sure, it would mentally weigh on me that I am wasting money on a subscription, but wouldn’t that be the better deal? Shouldn’t I be a smarter consumer?

Bah!

Hi-Fi Rush was released in a manner that could get it some extra attention. But for this Xbox player? I have a sour taste in my mouth before I even hit start (or that little button that looks like a sideways triangle).

But then when I started playing the game…

Hi-Fi Rush will let the beat drop

Let’s take a solid thirty seconds to talk about the actual game of Hi-Fi Rush, and not everything else surrounding it. The elevator pitch is that you are a freshly mechanized cyborg man, and the evil conglomerate that created you is anxious to send you to the scrap heap, so you must fight your way out of their techno island. Easy peasy! It’s Sonic the Hedgehog meets Jak and Daxter with some kind of human wearing funny t-shirts tossed in there. Oh, that’s right! The tone is humorous and irreverent, too. And it has a rad “comic book” art style, so there are onscreen onomatopoeias and various Looney Tunes actions that will tickle your funny bone. Mix in likable and distinctive heroes and villains, and there is an awful lot to like here.

The gimmick du jour is that Chai the Hero has been keyed into the beat of the world (or the world is now moving to his beat, same diff), and you are encouraged to perform every action according to this beat. Sock mook robots while tapping the attack button rhythmically, jump across platforms that disappear on the downbeat, and then finish off a big boss by keying in on that final bass drop. It is a concept both complicated (you mean I can’t just flail about like an overcaffeinated gorilla?) and simple (who among us has never tapped menu commands to the in-game music?). Repeat for a solid 12 tracks, and we have a good lil’ mixtape going.

Unfortunately, in adopting conventions of the rhythm genre, we now have an action game that has many of its cousin genre’s flaws. First and foremost, rhythm games of all colors require 100% familiarity with your controller du jour. When you are told you must quickly press the X button to the beat, you damn well better know which X button you are aiming for. Some rhythm games have accounted for this with “reminder” GUIs: Gitaroo-Man’s button-based sections had the prompts appear from four cardinal directions, so your brain naturally realized the button coming from the “down” direction was the button at the bottom of your Dualshock. And PaRappa the Rapper, released right there with the first Playstation controllers, went the extra mile and came with a little controller diagram so you could have a “cheat sheet” on hand to remind you where to find a triangle when a moose started barking at you. Regrettably, no such allowances are made in Hi-Fi Rush. On occasions when the game suddenly ducks into full rhythm mode, you better know that controller layout by heart, or the beat will not go on.

And speaking of learning fast, it is difficult to ascertain what kind of an audience Hi-Fi Rush ever had in mind. The whole “rhythm-based action game” thing is new and novel, so it makes sense that the first stage is given over to many tutorials and “guided missions” where you cannot make progress unless you pull off what the game wants you to do at least once. You don’t need to earn an S-rank on every last battle, but you do need to prove that you could find the beat. But from there, literally every new feature in Hi-Fi Rush is explained three separate times. The basic rhythm (ha!) of these lessons is that you are presented with a challenge (weird door, laser-shooting robot, etc), you have a “support” character in-universe explain what you are supposed to do, then you have an immersion-breaking on-screen explanation provided in plain text, and then, after completing the challenge, you will encounter a helpful refrigerator-bot that will tell you the exact same thing again, but with slightly different inflections. This happens for literally every new feature introduced, and most of these “features” are basically “use the green guy’s power on the green door”. In fact, the last “assist character” available is introduced something like six hours in, but there is still an entire level that is given over to repeated explanations of how/why you might want to use her. I’ve been playing the game for a period longer than the whole original Star Wars Trilogy (yes, I know those movies technically total up to 6:29, nerds, I am trying to make a point), it is reasonable to assume I can understand that red woman beats red door. I’ve been looking for the solution to that “puzzle” since the first level! Adrian Fahrenheit Țepeș would eat these developers alive!

But the minute you are in a boss fight that requires perfect parry timing? Or even just some dumbass samurai robots that use a similar style? Your enemy will telegraph their attack rhythms perfectly, but give variable indications as to when they will actually start their assault. And that’s rough! If you cannot start the pattern “together”, you’ll be off the beat the whole time, and scrambling to match exactly what is on screen. And, while the damage for missing these beats is not significant, you can see a few game overs if you do not ever get on that proper starting line. And that is the kind of thing that could use three tutorials! Or at least some further practice! But, nope, how to avoid getting hit in the face you must discover on the fly. And do not get me started on the weird way this game distributes health refills during a battle…

So Hi-Fi Rush has a few hiccups. There are a few more I’ll get to in the notes section (because I am a pedantic jerk). But this can be forgiven, as this is a unique experience. Of course there will be issues! They are practically inventing a genre! Maybe this will just be a Mega Man – Mega Man 2 situation where waiting for the sequel is the best course of action…

Hi-Fi Rush will never happen again

Hi-Fi Rush was developed by Tango Gameworks, a Japanese game developer founded by Shinji Mikami, previously of Capcom (Resident Evil, God Hand, Goof Troop). Tango Gameworks was part of ZeniMax Media, which was acquired by Microsoft in early 2021. Hi-Fi Rush was released in January of 2023. In February of 2023, Mikami left Tango to found Kamuy. A little over a year later, Microsoft Gaming announced they were closing Tango Gameworks entirely. It closed in June. In August, South Korean publisher Krafton acquired Tango Gameworks. So Hi-Fi Rush… uh… might see a sequel?

But let’s look at the reality of that one. For one thing, Mikami is gone, and unlikely to come back. For another, Krafton distinctly noted that it was able to retain “around 50” of the 105 staff members that comprised Tango when it was shuttered two months earlier. And what games has Krafton actually published? Well, who can forget Bluehole Studio’s Mini Golf King? Or Rising Wings’ Defense Derby? Or New State Mobile, formerly PlayUnknown’s Battlegrounds: New State? Yeah, not exactly setting the world on fire there. And now a proposed Hi-Fi Rush 2 is on that same “games developed as Krafton” list as Defense Derby…

I’m not here to pick a fight with Krafton fans (who, I am told, are referred to as The Krafaithful), but can we agree that Krafton does not have the same budget as the wealthiest company on the planet? And that losing an experienced executive producer and half the responsible staff is going to lead to a different product? I am not suggesting that “Hi-Fi Rush 2” is going to be a mobile game where you feed gears to 808 the robot cat, and maybe you can gacha your way to winning a 5-Star Peppermint Swimsuit JPG. That would be a fate worse than death by laser grid. But the odds of Hi-Fi Rush 2 somehow being a complete upgrade over the original are low, as “a different direction” is all but guaranteed here. It is marvelous that Hi-Fi Rush (and less than half of its staff!) have a second chance after Microsoft unceremoniously dumped them. But expecting a universal upgrade here is on the same level as Chai’s belief that Vandelay Technologies is going to make him an instant rockstar.

But even if Hi-Fi Rush 2 is not as exemplary as Hi-Fi Rush, that doesn’t mean I have to play Hi-Fi Rush right now. That’s why I don’t subscribe to Xbox Game Pass. I got into some amazing games well after they were current. I barely ever played a Dragon Quest/Warrior back in the NES days! It was cool to come around on those decades later. Just like the retro titles of lore, Hi-Fi Rush will always be there waiting for me…

Hi-Fi Rush will never be the same

Hi-Fi Rush was released digitally. In February of 2024, Limited Run Games was named as a collaborator for releasing a physical version, though, as of this article’s writing, it is still not available on their site as so much as a preorder. So we are stuck relying on the publishing interest of Bethesda/Microsoft, a company that has already terminated the creators of the game. And, thanks to how music rights work in America, Microsoft does not wholly own Hi-Fi Rush as a product, because it includes the bane of many a streamer: licensed music.

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm game at its core, and, ever since Guitar Hero, there have been many people that expect a licensed game to be nothing but music they know. Hi-Fi Rush did not manage to fill 10 hours of gameplay with a playlist of radio hits, but there are a few big boys in here for major events. Trent Reznor got two songs in there, Prodigy is on the list, and even Fiona Apple is getting a musical credit at the end. And that’s pretty rad! When a big boss robot rears its ugly head, and Nine Inch Nails kicks in, well, it makes for a memorable skirmish. This proud clod might be a reject from Wily’s Numbers, but hearing that sweet guitar backing your battle makes an indelible impression.

But memories don’t come cheap! Even the largest of companies must license music from its creators, and that means Hi-Fi Rush with Special Guest Joy Formidable can never be wholly owned by Microsoft. And that means that, depending on the terms of the licensing (with multiple artists!) there will come a day when it will either cost the publisher money to renew said license, or that music must be removed. And, while Hi-Fi Rush does have an available “streamer mode” that replaces all licensed music with general soundalikes, it is debatable what MS could choose to do in the future. Will they permanently enable streamer mode like Grand Theft Auto 4 and its loss of licensed music? Or will they drop the game in its original incarnation all together? We live in a post-Mega Man: The Wily Wars universe, so it is likely some version of Hi-Fi Rush will always be available, but will we always have access to the complete Hi-Fi Rush? No one can say for sure. But we do know for sure that the entire final sequence of the game is hung on two different licensed pieces of music, and playing the game without that is not what was developer-intended.

Hi-Fi Rush initially gives the impression of a likeable, but flawed action-rhythm game. It is unique… but that was not enough to hold my attention on opening attempts. However, I played through it (relatively) quickly and dedicatedly, as I did not want to miss the real Hi-Fi Rush experience. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna pay thirty bucks for a game, and it isn’t even the whole package by the time I get to play it! Who cares if I am not enjoying myself!? At least I am playing the game.

Because I have to…

FGC #670 Hi-Fi Rush

• System: Originally an Xbox X|S exclusive, we also saw this baby on Playstation 5 and PC. I technically own this for both Xbox and Playstation, as I determined it was faster for me to buy a whole different version than force my brain to understand Xbox button layouts (it’s backwards!).
• Number of players: Chai has multiple buddies, but he is technically stuck on a solitary adventure.
• Favorite Character: Macaron is the sensitive strong guy who built giant, wall-busting arms and his own therapy robot. He knows what is important.
• Is it a beat ‘em up? Yes, you do fight a series of battles on a descending elevator. Welcome to the club, Hi-Fi Rush.
• Favorite Boss Fight: Roquefort with the wolf-bot in the money pit. More games should include money pits and/or ironic punishments for malevolent accountants that live in money pits.
• Favorite Thing that happened: Yes, there is an extended parody of Xenogears in here.
  

  That is glorious, though anyone that would care already knows about that by now. There is also a giant laser robot on wheels that CNMN distinctly notes must have been “difficult to construct” and it is “a shame you don’t get to fight it”. Super elaborate mech design that never actually gets used in gameplay? That is the true spirit of Xenogears.

• Evolving Art Style: Anybody remember the 1993 cartoon The Bots Master? Starring Ziv “ZZ” Zulander and his crew of whacky robots? The Hi-Fi Rush ‘bots are very reminiscent of those designs. I’m not saying there is an overt connection here, just a thing that happened. Now please forgive me, because I am going to use the next few bullet points to complain about the game I felt like I had to play.
• How about a laugh: Hi-Fi Rush is a comedic game, but far too much of its humor relies on a sort of “get it?” level of writing that may as well be the modern answer to a laugh track. As an easy example, we have this…
  

  Look, player, a robot is eternally getting punched in the face “for research”. And that’s funny! But it is less funny when the game outright states “watching this thing fly is hilarious. And any visitors to the lab seem to love it”. Is the assumption that the audience will not understand that this joke is supposed to be amusing? Does every punchline require a knowing “well that just happened,” so the listeners are cued to guffaw? And the way everything is a barely disguised criticism of capitalism and the videogame industry in general…

  

  That is not exactly subtle, and it makes me sad for how everyone designing this game was next on the chopping block. In the fullness of time, Hi-Fi Rush is practically a ten-hour long one of those recordings in Bioshock where part 12/12 is found next to a corpse.

• Level Design: Hi-Fi Rush is a collectathon. There are a million little bits and baubles to find in (almost) every stage. And that impulse is understandable from a design perspective, as Hi-Fi Rush has a gorgeous, distinctive art style that should be investigated via the time-honored tradition of looking for more coins. But goddammit do I loathe how often this is relayed with random forks in the road, and one fork arbitrarily leads to a heart piece, and the other advances the stage to the point you cannot backtrack without repeating the level. It was malarky in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and it is bogus twenty years later. Either make your secrets more secret, or make the mandatory path forward a little more obvious. Chai can jump in either direction! It isn’t hard!
• New Game Plus: You do not have a full compliment of abilities until about the 60% point in this game’s plot, so, even before you add “mystery doors” into the equation, you were always going to have to repeat individual levels to find hidden secrets. The first level has two obvious points that require later-game tools. But apparently replaying a level still includes all the plot and cutscenes as when you first played the stage. And that is cute once or twice, but you really do not need to literally replay everything in the game just to unlock a single mystery door at the midpoint of a level. All the on-screen tutorials even repeat! I beat the game! I know how to do a combo, dammit! And, yes, a big factor here is how much the music is tied in, and removing cutscenes would dramatically impact that. But figure it out, designers! I don’t have all day, here!
• Are you done now? I don’t care for the main character’s general vibe. Okay. That’s it. Now I can move on.
• Did you know? Ignoring paid DLC, during the “main campaign”, you have only minor options to change Chai’s clothes, and you cannot change the outfits of the rest of your team. After completing the game, many outfits and cosmetics are available, and you can dress the head of security in a zoot suit for all anybody cares. One must assume the costumes are not available until after the end to preserve the story legitimacy of a tale where you frequently encounter a hard-boiled robot in a fedora that waxes poetically about being the automaton in charge of human resources.
• Would I play again: I barely wanted to play this the first time! It feels great when you are “on”, but there is an awful lot of cruft between you and that musical nirvana (not the band). And if I just want to air-combo mindless drones without rhythm, I’ll play Kingdom Hearts. I do not regret playing Hi-Fi Rush, but if I want some rhythm action-fun, there are other options available.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Contra: Operation Galuga! We’ve got more action next week, but this time with so, so many more guns! Please look forward to it!