Welcome back to Save State, where I’m sure we all know the rhythm and the rhyme. My wife’s absolute menace of a cat knocked some games off my shelf again earlier this week. When that happened, I chanced upon Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, a Final Fantasy rhythm game with a name I am still unsure how to pronounce. I’m a huge fan of RPGs (if you somehow couldn’t tell), including the Final Fantasy series which was among the first JRPGs to go mainstream back in the 1990s and early 2000s. These are games whose musical scores were so lovingly crafted that many of their soundtracks have a brilliantly timeless quality to them, so it makes complete sense that a title like Theatrhythm would be right up my alley.
There’s only one problem: I have never once in my life had the patience necessary to become good at rhythm games. I even bounced off the original Theatrhythm due to it having a relatively small song selection or something to that extent and never returned to it after Borderlands 2 released. Which, yes, sorry to remind you that Borderlands 2 released in 2012 as well, so if you were playing and enjoying it back then, remember to watch your posture, stretch regularly, and drink plenty of water.
In order for me to actually play a rhythm title, it seems that it needs to be something entirely novel and interesting, such as when the Nintendo DS presented me with a touchscreen handheld for the first time which made Elite Beat Agents incredibly alluring. It could also be that there needs to be some kind of connection to something I already love and care about, which is the case with Final Fantasy and Theatrhythm. On top of the aforementioned requirements, it needs to be easy enough to pick up and play while still giving me a reason to return, which the RPG elements of Theatrhythm do an excellent job in keeping me around for longer than other rhythm games have managed to do.
Thankfully, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line has almost all of the best tracks from Final Fantasy as a whole, as well as a ton of other songs from Square Enix series as DLC. It also helps that Theatrhythm is extremely easy to grasp how to play on Switch and PS4: You press the buttons and tilt the analog sticks on your controller when a trigger touches the circular receptors onscreen in line with the beat. The closer you press the button to when the trigger is overlapping the exact center of those marks, the higher the points you earn. There are tap triggers, directional triggers, hold triggers, and slide triggers that require players to move the analog stick in the indicated direction when it crosses the mark, as well as several others like hold-slide triggers, double triggers, and more. Apparently, the complexity and variety of how you play during tracks is higher in Final Bar Line than in the 3DS Theatrhythm games, with higher difficulty modes for those who aren’t complete scrubs, unlike myself.
The kinds of triggers you encounter in Final Bar Line depends on the kind of song being played. There are Battle Music Stages, Field Music Stages, and the occasional Event Music Stage. Battle Music Stages are where you’ll encounter multi-triggers across the four lanes, while Field Music Stages primarily use one land (so no multi-button inputs) but will require both analog stick and button inputs simultaneously on the hold-slide triggers exclusive to these stages. Event Music Stages are the least frequent, which show off some footage from the game represented by the song and plays in a more Guitar Hero-like presentation.
The visuals of Theatrhythm Final Bar Line are probably the cutest and weirdest part of it. Every single title in the history of Final Fantasy, from VII to Mystic Quest to Tactics, is represented here, as well as all of their characters and a good chunk of the enemies. So, you can have a funny chibi Cloud and Tifa in the same party as Lightning and Rinoa, all of them looking like silly little paper dolls. The art style is cute, and you’ll spend a lot of time beating the tar out of paper doll-looking Malboros and other classic Final Fantasy monsters. Obviously, the music is excellent because this is a rhythm game, but I will say that the jump from Theatrhythm on the 3DS to Final Bar Line in terms of audio fidelity is effectively night and day.
What’s great about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is that the game has multiple difficulty levels and has set progression to unlock more songs. When it is first booted, you’ll receive a single title key and can use that to unlock a Final Fantasy title of your choice. Many games from the Final Fantasy series are represented by 15 or so tracks you can play, and you’ll acquire a new title key after reaching the halfway point in many of these, allowing you to play songs from different titles if you’re not really feeling the one you unlocked. Each song you play will give you a rank, all the way up to SSS, and you can earn perfect chain bonuses for never missing a single note, helping you achieve your perfectionist goals.
On top of this, the Series Quest mode also has challenges players can complete in each level that can yield some fun bonuses, such as consumables that increase experience, give you new summons, or unlock collectibles like collectacards. These challenges all have difficulty levels assigned to them and some may outright not be possible for your first time through a particular title though that does give you a good reason to return to previously cleared ones to fully complete them. Some of these quests will require you do something simple like defeat a boss (which you do by playing the song normally with a strong enough party), while others may require you to get a perfect chain on the song by not missing a single note. As you clear songs, your main party will level up, gaining new abilities you can assign like strong passives or attacks and spells that can be used to help clear out enemies faster.
You can also freely change among the difficulty options even if it’s your first time playing a song, so those unfamiliar with rhythm games can play on Basic mode which gives you a lot more time to react to upcoming triggers in the song you’re playing. I play on Expert because I’m not horrible at these kinds of titles, but I am a massive scrub, so Ultimate and Supreme difficulty are way too much on my first playthroughs of each song. The bonuses for playing on higher difficulties is mostly for your own satisfaction; the rewards seem to be the same no matter the difficulty.
There are a few quests that require that you raise the difficulty to Expert or Ultimate, which make great stepping points into the more challenging difficulties by making them seem possible in the plethora of songs available in Theatrhythm. In fact, I felt confident enough to dip my toes into Ultimate difficulty after perfectly chaining most songs on Expert, and the fact that Theatrhythm lets you sort by song difficulty helped me find the Ultimate difficulty songs I wanted to try first. Of course, Supreme seems to be completely out of my reach, but only time will tell if I’ll have the patience to stick with it after leveling up my preferred teams of Final Fantasy heroes.
The most important thing about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is that you don’t have to level grind to clear any stage in the game, it just makes clearing quests in the Series Quest mode easier and makes farming for new unlockables significantly faster. The only thing you actually need to clear in any stage is to be able to hit the triggers as they come up in the song, but if you want to defeat enemies and bosses to earn treasure chests or clear quests that yield even greater rewards, you’ll need to level up and manage your party’s composition, which is actually a lot of fun. Every single time you unlock a new title, you’re given a whole host of characters from that game, usually a good portion of the cast (if not all of them in the more popular ones), and each of them will need leveled up or might have some great ability you would have never known about had you not used them. I used Bartz from Final Fantasy V because I’ve always thought it was funny his name is Butz in Japan, and he wound up becoming a real powerhouse for finishing some of the harder quests in Final Bar Line.
As you’re becoming a master in the ways of the rhythm and the rhyme, you’ll no doubt clear a great number of the titles in the game. Clearing a title typically unlocks that game’s villain for you to play as, like beating Final Fantasy VII will give you Sephiroth, which means there’s even more characters to enjoy playing as! You’ll also be leveling your party, increasing their stats, acquiring stat boosting consumables and collectacards, as well as building up your Rhythmia which unlocks even more bonuses or fan service for you across the entire Final Fantasy series. Beating the songs in the Series Quest mode unlocks them in the Music Stages mode, where you can freely play any and all songs you want.
If the whopping 385 songs included in Theatrhythm Final Bar Line aren’t enough for you, there are also a bunch of DLC tracks that bring the total number of tracks to over 500. These extra tracks include ones from Chrono Trigger, Nier Automata, The World Ends With You, and Octopath Traveler, so if you’ve ever wanted to play Xenogears music set to a rhythm game, this is absolutely your chance.
There is even online multiplayer where you can compete with other players for the highest score, though it seems to largely be dead, at least right now. Which, that makes sense given its age and the niche nature of it. Fortunately, I was still able to connect with some extremely good players through a fan Discord to experience being on the receiving end of a gold star beatdown by people who are way better at these kinds of titles than I am. The consolation prize, of course, is that players who play against one another can share their summon stones with great passive abilities with each other… so at least these guys left me cab fare.
What makes Theatrhythm Final Bar Line so great is its accessibility- if you want to play on Basic difficulty, you absolutely can. If you don’t like some of the triggers, you can change it to a single button mode that can make some tracks mix better with how you play. You can also switch to a Pair mode that lets you play locally with one other player, which in my instance was my spouse who was practically glowing the entire time we worked our way through Final Fantasy X’s songs (her favorite entry in the series, of course).
As someone who has played many rhythm games but dropped them due to various reasons from disappointment in my own skills to simple boredom, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line has done an excellent job of keeping me interested as I play in a way that titles like Amplitude, DJ Max, or Voez never have. Actually, thinking on it now, the only other rhythm games I’ve gotten hugely into have been things like Crypt of the NecroDancer or Cadence of Hyrule, both of which incorporated RPG and roguelite elements into the rhythm game formula, so maybe my issue is that I just need a little bit of RPG in my rhythm game to fully enjoy it.
The grinding for levels and maxing out your party’s stats component of Theatrhythm isn’t super necessary to enjoy all of its content at all, but getting a ton of treasure chests at the end of a stage tickles something in my primordial monkey brain and kept me engaged because that’s all it takes for a huge fan of JRPGs it seems. All in all, I just had a ton of fun and nostalgia playing Theatrhythm Final Bar Line and wanted to share that experience with all of you. With that, we’ll bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember, the only fantasy here is yours, and we shall be its final witness.