9. Hi-Fi Rush, dev. Tango Gameworks
I feel an unpleasant way about celebrating anything Xbox did last year... Letting a trillion dollar company defeat the best anti-trust swings by the federal government "for the gamers" sure worked out great, right? Right? But I have to admit they released one really great game last year. Hi-Fi Rush is the reason I do not need to put Final Fantasy XVI on this list, thank god. There was a much better spectacle action game that came out in 2023, one that was half as long and did not despise all its female characters.
I should mention this: I have no musical talent whatsoever. No sense of rhythm, about as much ability to stick to a beat as a dog has. Still, I like rhythm games because I like music. I love Crypt of the Necrodancer. But that love is limited to the base difficulties and no further. The modes where you take damage for a missed note are for me unplayable. Hi-Fi Rush mixes together Necrodancer with Devil May Cry, where your attacks have to follow the music. Thankfully it is not too cruel to those barely able to dance along. As long as you're grooving any way you can, you can enjoy this. I whiffed a shamefully high number of attacks. I could never get through any of the deep combos. Got low letter grades on every fight. Some people could probably play Hi-Fi Rush like Prince shredding the electric guitar solo in "Computer Blue", I have to play like a six-year-old slowly plodding through "Chopsticks" on the piano.
Still, I finished the game. That's the great thing about video games - you only have to get a little bit better at them to win. Real skills are hard and require hours of technique for mastery, games just need slight improvements and you can be done in about ten hours. Never do anything that's hard, that's why we have games.
Hi-Fi Rush is about a garishly colorful world of music, robots, and evil tech corporations. (Hm, you think Tango felt a certain way about being owned by Microsoft?) You play as Chai (Robbie Daymond), a clueless clucklefuck who accidentally gets his arm transformed into a super limb. Then using anime FLCL physics, he can summon Gibson Flying V guitars and bonk bad guys with them. Chai finds an oddball crew of friends, all named after foods for some reason, including hacker gal, Peppermint (Erica Lindbeck) and a robot cat, 808. The plot really is irrelevant, the game itself barely seems to care. There's bad guys, you bonk them, get to evil CEO guy, bonk him.
One of the best things about this game is the overall style. Hi-Fi Rush reminds me of the GameCube era's attempts to be cartoony. It feels like Viewtiful Joe or The Simpsons: Hit & Run, except even more colorful than you remember. It feels even more like that Simpsons game because the soundtrack is all mid-2000s heavy guitar buttrock. (Nothing wrong with buttrock!) Everything is all mild satire, not really biting capitalism but sort toothlessly gnawing on it, never breaking the skin, but maybe leaving a hickey. I do not think anybody at Microsoft was afraid of this game's depiction of Vandelay Industries.
Hi-Fi Rush feels small in a way major releases by platform holders never do anymore. It is not a video game meal, it's candy. We do not have mid-tier B-games like those early 2000s consoles had. Most AAA games never to justify all three of those 'A's, and attempt to be the biggest and most important game ever made. This is why Final Fantasy XVI did not really work, these kinds of spectacle action games should not be longer than 10-12 hours. They outstay their welcome once you've seen all the depth to their combos and mastered the counter moves. Hi-Fi Rush is about a Phillip J. Fry type, so unimpressive even his friends think he's an idiot, who luckily only has to save the world from a threat solved easily by bonking. Any more and Chai would be hopelessly lost. Anything more demanding and Hi-Fi Rush would completely collapse into unfortunate pomposity. Just let us fight a giant robot to a Black Keys song, it does not need to be bigger than that.
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