Kaikan Phrase - Datenshi Kourin (Playstation)

I've covered a lot of anime license games on here before, but this might be the game licensed from the most obscure anime so far. Released during the late nineties bishonen boom alongside the likes of Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no Matsuei, Kaikan Phrase is a show about a Visual Kei band made up of handsome young men. It's never had an official English release, and the only fansubs around as far as I can tell are rips of ancient VHS tapes!

 

Fitting with the theme of the show, the game is a rhythm game, in which you play the songs of the fictional band  Λucifer (which also became a real band, so singles and such could be released). There's only four stages in single player story mode, but each stage you pick one of two options. Though it's not a branching path, there are only two options for each stage no matter what, and the options only change the cutscenes that play before and after the stage. There's also only six songs in the game, and worst of all: they pad out the play time by making you grind to unlock them!

 

When you start a stage, you choose a song and a band member to play as. Since each member plays a different instrument, they each have different charts for each song, and naturally, different difficulty levels. To unlock more songs, you have to gain New Release points, which I think are scored 1:1 on the number of successful notes you play in a song. So picking a harder chart means more potential for points, but if you fail a stage, you get nothing. No matter what, though, when you start playing, you'll be hearing the first song at least three times before you unlock the second, and the gaps between unlocks only get longer and longer.

 

As for the game itself, it's incredibly simple: there's a bar on the lefthand side of the screen. Note markers appear on the bar, and a line travels down it. Although the markers appear in a number of different colours, you only ever have to press the X button when the line reaches them, and that's it! There's a meter next to the bar that fills up gradually as you hit notes, and if it's full at the end of the song, you pass the stage! As you progress through the four stages of a single player playthrough, that meter gets longer, but there's no other complications added.

 

Despite the grind problem, I still had a pretty good time playing this game. The songs are decent, and actually playing it is mindless and stress-free to the extent that it's a nice relaxing game to zone out to and play for 15 minutes or so. Obviously, it gets better as you unlock more songs, too.