#41
Change YoY: NEW! My Rating: 9.1 / 10
I'm not even going to pretend to be even remotely objective when it comes to judging the quality of this game, as it basically feels tailor-made specifically to my personal tastes. I've always enjoyed a good music rhythm game, Guitar Hero and Rock Band took up a sizable chunk my friend group's multiplayer gaming time back in the late 2000's and early 2010's, and though the genre fell of severely due to factors such as oversaturation I always felt like there was always a place for good rhythm games on the market. I've played other games from the genre on occasion over the last ten years, but the first one that truly struck a chord with me was Theatrhythm Final Bar Line just earlier this year.
Much of the reason behind that is the thing that any great game like this needs, the music, and As far as I'm concerned, the Final Fantasy series has the best music in all of video games, so a game largely built around it was always going to appeal to me. Every single main installment and numerous of the series spin-offs are featured here, amounting to hundreds of songs from the series' entire history, and through DLC you can expand that to include numerous other franchises with excellent music. What it then just needed was enjoyable gameplay to anchor the music, and luckily Final Bar Line has that as well. It's not the most complex or difficult of rhythm games, but playing is still thoroughly satisfying, and what it might lack is more than made up by the music. Obviously, you can always argue about song choices, and there were certainly some tracks I missed and others I found underwhelming or over-represented (if you include the DLC, there are seven different version of 'Battle at the Big Bridge' in the game, which is just pointless in my opinion), but when 95% of the songs are great I can't complain all that much.
I spent nearly 150 hours playing this game in the month or so following my daughter's birth, and it provided me with exactly the kind of relaxing experience I needed at the time. How much value anyone gets out of a game like this depends entirely on your personal affinity towards the music of Final Fantasy, and for me it couldn't really have a much better set of songs to play.
