Sometimes, you’re in the mood to play something that’s easy to get into. Something whose play sessions are short, yet addictive that offers a lot of variety. A week ago, I laid my eyes on my game collection, looked at a game that I obsessively played a few years ago and thought, “yeah, I can go for that again.”

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call is a Final Fantasy-themed rhythm game released in 2014, developed by Square-Enix and indieszero. Curtain Call is a sequel to the first Theatrhythm, and there’s honestly no reason to pick up the first game because this has everything in the original game with way more added in.

Curtain Call contains more than 200 songs, not counting the DLC songs, which draw from other Square-Enix works. Many Final Fantasy games are represented in the game including, bizarrely, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Each game has a general selection of most (if not all) of the game’s battle music, the game’s main theme, a world map theme, an airship theme (if the game has it), along with any other noteworthy song from said game; like Aerith’s theme, for example. If you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy franchise, it’s very likely that most of your favorite songs will be in this game.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of things, the songs are divided into three types: Battle, Field and Event. Battle stages uses all the battle themes, Field stages use songs that are mostly for area exploration, while the Event stages are FMVs.

In Battle stages, the music tracks are split into four for each character in your party. Hitting notes leads to the character on that track striking an enemy, while missed notes damage the party. It soon becomes apparent that the team building stuff isn’t just cute, “oh, make a party with your favorite FF characters.” method. If you want to get a lot of items, you’ll need a strong, sturdy team to rip through enemies. In fact, even if you do perfectly, a weak team will probably only defeat a few enemies during the duration of a song.

Characters have different stat spreads and skill sets to consider when building a team. You can try going all-in on crafting a battle ready team, with skills that activate after a team member hits a required number of note types. However, on harder difficulties, you may want to consider putting in party members with high health and defense to keep misses from being less debilitating, or have cure spells ready to pick up the slack.

Now, there is a limit to the number of skills you can equip due to skill cost, but you can raise a character’s skill cost cap if you fully level them and reset their level. Making an optimal team is a huge time investment. However, given that rhythm games have a lot of replayability, along with the sheer amount of songs in this game, chances are that you’ll be investing the time anyway. Field songs are different in that instead of four tracks, you control a cursor on one changing track that curves and provides notes in time to the song.

Party members take turns running across a field, tagging in when one character screws up enough times. The goal here is to travel as far as possible during the duration of a song. The best course of action in this case, is leveling characters with a high stat growth in agility or learning skills that increases travel distance. While there are less music tracks to pay attention to, you’ll have to move the cursor as the music track bends according to the song’s rhythm, which I find to be harder than the Battle songs. However, they present a fair and engaging challenge.

The Event songs, though, are probably my least favorite. Event songs have an FMV playing on in the background while you play notes on a cursor that moves around the screen in a way that feels somewhat arbitrary. Except for losing health from missed notes, the Event songs lack the added game feel that the other types of songs have, due to the lack of an overarching goal. It doesn’t feel as engaging as the rest.

It doesn’t help that that the Event songs take up a small percentage of the total number of tracks in the game. In fact, they aren’t even included in the Quest Medleys (more on that later), which make it feel like they’re just tacked on? Additionally, if you’re trying to go through the game’s achievement lists, clearing the ones for Event songs will get annoying since there’s so few of them.

There is a Basic, Expert and Master difficulty level to play songs on, with the speed of music tracks and music notes to hit on drastically increasing. Basic is, well, super basic. I know that it’s the “easy” difficulty, but it is insultingly easy to the point that the only actual challenge it presents is getting a perfect max score. Expert is a pretty ordinary speed and Master (of course) kicks it up a notch.

However, my problem with Master difficulty is that some enemies only appear on Master difficulty. On top of that, they introduce spinning arrow notes, whose actual orientation to swipe on isn’t known until the split second that you have to do it. It’s a curveball thrown into what is already a reasonably hard gameplay challenge and it just feels like an annoying addition to generate artificial difficulty. Because of that, I feel most comfortable with playing songs on Expert.

You get Rhythmia after completing a song, alongside experience for used party members. When you meet a threshold of Rhythmia, you unlock a new song and… to be honest, you don’t get a lot of new songs this way. In fact, a lot of the new songs are from Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, which are themselves remixes of already existing songs, so you don’t get a lot of actual new songs. After a point, earning Rhythmia just unlocks cosmetics like, ooh, I can make the lines on the music tracks look different. When it comes to rewards, there really isn’t a lot in the game.

This even carries on into Quest Medleys. So, Quest Medleys are essentially small adventures where you’re stuck with one party for the whole duration, going through a dungeon of music stages like a glorified playlist. Clearing a Quest Medley earns shards of a different color, which will go toward unlocking a character from that color group. The problem is, once you unlock all the characters… you still get color shards as rewards, which don’t do anything. The rewards you get from Quest Medleys don’t change, so you end up having no incentive to play them except for leveling characters, since characters gain more EXP the farther down the Quest Medley you go.

I really think that after that point, the game should change its rewards to cards. There are collectible cards in the game of most creatures across the Final Fantasy franchise, that you can spend for character stat boosts on top of just collecting them. The “completionist into arcade experiences” in me wants to collect as much as possible, however, you only get cards as enemy drops and from some versus matches. Quest Medleys should offer the rarer cards as a reward to expedite this, as well as to, you know, make the Quest Medleys matter.

There is a versus mode of sorts, letting you fight AI and human opponents. Players go head-to-head to get as many points as possible, with deaths deducting a bunch of points. The versus mode has a unique mechanic where players can inflict opponents with random status effects to make things harder for them. Probably the most dreaded one is the one that not only makes timing notes more strict, but makes anything less than a “Perfect” count as a miss. This mechanic only comes into play if you’re playing on Novice and Expert playing songs on Ultimate does not enforce this.

Back when I initially played Curtain Call, I really hated this. I didn’t want to deal with the status effects but I didn’t want to play songs on Ultimate difficulty either, because my reflexes are honestly awful. However, as I got back into the game, it kinda clicked for me. If both players are reasonably skilled at the game, a versus match could easily become a stalemate. The status effect stuff is a necessary evil to throw wrenches into the game to prevent possible stalemates from happening. Ultimate, however, doesn’t need that restriction because it’s hard enough that it becomes an actual test of skill. Like, I still hate it, but I get it.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call is, for the most part, an excellent little spin-off, and I wish that there was another installment. Unfortunately, the last released game in the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy series is All-Star Carnival, which is an arcade title, so good luck actually getting to play it. I desperately hope that Square-Enix and indieszero make another installment to the series, especially given the five to six years worth of Final Fantasy music that can be introduced.

In fact, why stop at Final Fantasy? Curtain Call‘s got a bunch of DLC songs that are from other Square-Enix games, like The World Ends with You, Bravely Default, Chrono Trigger, etc. Given that Square-Enix has also put out a Theatrhythm for Dragon Quest, they can stand to make different games under the Theatrhythm brand. Heck, the company can really think more broadly and make a big crossover rhythm game. For now though, Curtain Call is an excellent game to go back to, even if I have gripes with the reward system and some of the difficulty decisions.

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Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call

$17.97

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Great variety of songs across the Final Fantasy series
• Battle and Field songs adds depth for added playability

Cons

• Too easy to get through unlocks
• Some questionable design decisions