Nintendo’s Wackiest New Game Feels Like The Devs Getting Away With Something

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have known that Rhythm Heaven was a close cousin to WarioWare, but it never stood out to me as strongly as it did while playing Rhythm Heaven Groove. The sheer unapologetic weirdness of it intertwined with the strict timing-based minigames made this feel like WarioWare, but as a rhythm game. And I feel like a fool for just now discovering that these are two great tastes that go great together.

The influences from WarioWare will be obvious to anyone who has played that long-running gonzo microgame series, but unlike those, the individual games in Rhythm Heaven Groove last much longer than a few seconds. After a short practice round to learn the rhythm and button prompts, you go into the actual performance that mixes together commands to the rhythm of a song. Almost all of your commands are mapped to the A button, but more complicated arrangements add one of the D-pad buttons for a different command. In an early game where you're driving a stunt car for a commercial, for example, the A button accelerates while the D-pad Down hits the brakes, so you need to alternate between them on command to stay aligned with the other stunt cars.

The WarioWare spirit shines through in both the art style--an eclectic blend of crude simplicity, chunky cartoonism, and occasional hyper-realism--and also in the gonzo spirit of the games themselves. The stunt car example is one of the more normal ones, but many of the games are downright bizarre. Across the breadth of Rhythm Heaven, you'll have to jump and roll as a cat doll, bounce fruits off your muscles as a bodybuilder, sort delicious pudding from tainted living pudding cups as a factory robot, and jump over windshield wipers during a rainstorm. The game frequently surprises you with new creative applications that all feel different, even if they're mechanically very similar. That sense of surprise meant that even when I didn't like a game as much, I loved seeing the creativity.

In addition to adapting to each game's rhythm, you also often have to contend with distractions in the background. The kitty-hopping game--Hop, Stop, N Roll--transforms the background from a simple wood-paneled design to a kaleidoscopic beach scene, so part of the challenge is keeping your concentration and the beat going while the world changes around you. When you learn to "read" the games, you also start to notice little signs about your performance, like your fellow performer in the umbrella-folding game shooting you a dirty look if your timing was just slightly off. 

While the WarioWare influence is obvious, my time with Rhythm Heaven Groove also reminded me of another long-lost rhythm game: Elite Beat Agents. While no game has quite substituted for EBA's charm, mixing storytelling with pop songs and rhythmic touch screen taps, Rhythm Heaven Groove is similarly focused on nailing your percussive beats. The sound design has excellent feedback with a sharp, snappy snare that punctuates even harder when you nail a beat perfectly. Sometimes I would simply close my eyes to feel my way through the rhythm, and it worked just as well as watching on-screen. Everything has a sound cue, so this is one game you actually can play blindfolded. 

My absolute favorite aspect of Rhythm Heaven Groove, though, were the Remix stages. Each column consists of four stages, and they all feel varied as you're playing them and climbing the tower. When you reach the top, all four get remixed into one game, sometimes set to a real, credited J-pop song. At this point, all those games that seemed so different feel like different parts of the same whole, and you get to see them coming together. Sometimes a game will even fade into another mid-beat, showing you that you're actually keeping the same rhythm across both. It's a very cool magic trick. 

That said, the mapping of commands onto the D-pad would occasionally trip me up, because it wasn't always the same D-pad button across each game. Since the Remix stages start without any warm-up time, I would sometimes finish a set of stages and come back to do the Remix later, only to discover I had completely forgotten which D-pad button to use. Aside from trial and error, the only solution is to quit out and find the individual minigames, and then redo their practice modes as a reminder. It's not terribly intuitive, and there's not any particular reason the D-pad prompt couldn't just be consistent throughout all of the minigames. Yes it's a little more elegant that D-Pad Left triggers a crab claw and D-Pad Down hits the car brakes, but would it really matter if they were the same? On that one point, the game became less about rhythm and more about memorization, which undermined the fun. 

And as much fun as it was in handheld, I struggled with playing Rhythm Heaven Groove on my TV. To its credit, the game recognizes when you've hooked it up to your TV for the first time and conducts a quick calibration game in an effort to reduce the effects of lag. But even after going through that, I struggled to hit my marks across several games playing on my TV with a Pro Controller, even in games I had already mastered in handheld mode. The game does note that some TVs just behave differently than others, so your mileage may vary.  

Those same struggles with TV lag may have impacted my multiplayer experience, but not enough to detract from the fun. I dabbled in all the games with my two kids of varying ages, and after some early struggles, we found a handful of favorites that created the kind of raucous party atmosphere that Rhythm Heaven is obviously going for. There's a great mix of competitive and cooperative game types, and unlike the single-player columns that offer different games as you climb, these offer new twists on the games you've already mastered. We were only playing with two players at a time, but it fills in the extra spots with bots regardless of your player count for a total of four. As long as you have at least one buddy, you can play all of the multiplayer games.

So many of the multiplayer games are strong that it's hard to pick favorites, but a few stand out. A virus-busting game shoots a disease through tubes, so you have to pin them with precise timing as they come, and your position in the four quadrants of protection rotates each turn. A tennis game imitates an RPG as you lob balls to defeat approaching enemies and save a prince. Cake Wait revolves around waiting until exactly 3 o'clock to grab the single slice of cake on the table, testing your ability to count down on-tempo. An Arkanoid-like arrow-shooting game has you break bricks protecting a bomb as you race to be the first to hit and detonate it. There is even a card-flipping memory game, but instead of pictures, you're matching particular drum rhythms as displayed by toe-tapping chickens. All of these are delivered with the same goofball spirit as the rest of the game, which makes it disarmingly funny. 

Still, multiplayer lends itself to the big-screen experience of a TV, and we did occasionally find it hard to master the timing in some minigames. One of the first, in which you pluck hairs from an onion, consistently tripped us up, even after going back to it once we had performed much better on some of the other games. It's hard to say if this was due to TV lag or if that particular game is just surprisingly strict, but it was a noticeable change from the kooky fun of the others to consistently failing out of that one.

Nintendo is one of the biggest and oldest game publishers in the world, so it feels strange to say that something it made carries itself with indie sensibilities. But that's always been true of WarioWare, and by extension, it's true of Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's such a strange, low-fi game that it comes off as if the team is getting away with something while the boss isn't looking. But it's also a genuinely welcome addition to my Switch collection, because it's such an oddity. Whenever I feel the need to tap my toes while feeling the beat of a tadpole march, or invite my friends to compete in a foot race as lucha libre across giant bouncy balls, I'll return to Rhythm Heaven.