Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure

Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure is a game that offers musical minigames in a fantasy adventure about an art thief. Despite its interesting premise, however, the game suffers from a poor selection of minigames and a story with serious problems of structure and cohesion.

The story revolves around Raphael, a young thief who, accompanied by his dog Fondue, wears a disguise (codename Phantom R) to try to discover what happened to his father, an art forger who one day vanished without a trace. During his search, the boy meets a beautiful violinist named Marie who has in her violin the same symbol present in a coin left by Raphael’s father. The protagonist, then, soon finds himself having to stop Napoleon Bonaparte – recently resurrected – and his diabolical plan to dominate the world.

In Rhythm Thief, the player explores the streets of Paris, talking to the people and solving their problems – which usually translate into musical minigames. The environments are usually static and lifeless, with only some details, such as bees and airplanes, moving. On the 3DS, the player interacts with the environment by using the touch screen, touching everywhere to find hidden coins and other collectibles.

This brief summary is enough to make any true gentleman notice how similar Rhythm Thief is to another franchise. In fact, the game doesn’t try to hide the fact that it fully copies Professor Layton‘s formula, dividing the narrative into chapters and even starting each session with a summary titled “The story so far.”

Rhythm Thief, however, falters in so many ways that it ends up just showing how well designed a Layton game is in comparison. In the Layton games, for example, while exploring a certain environment, the player can only find hint coins – which regulate the game’s difficulty – and a few secret puzzles. These secrets are usually hidden in points of interest, such as on a street sign or at the top of a tower.  Exploration, therefore, is simple, brief, logical, and rewarding. In Rhythm Thief, on the other hand, you can find hundreds of similar coins, 80 specific sounds (when you touch a car, for example, you get the sound of a horn), 90 “Phantom Notes” (musical notes that appear in groups of five), and more than 40 CDs containing the game’s soundtrack. That is, the developers clutter the environments with dozens of items, making the player spend most of their time touching everywhere on the screen: there are so many collectibles that points of interest end up losing their importance.

To make matters worse, the collectibles that can be found in some environments change after certain chapters. This leads a completionist to complete madness, stimulating the paranoia to revisit the entire map of Paris after each chapter, touching everywhere again and again. The most time-consuming element in the game, therefore, is not the minigames, but the neurotic action of touching the screen after collectibles.

The minigames themselves are the only interesting part of the game, being designed around a competent soundtrack that excites the player with its dynamic and energetic jazz. The player slightly modifies the music with their actions, by performing the movements shown on the 3DS’s top screen in synch with the music to achieve a high score. Such minigames are contextualized in the story: in one, the player must press the “A” button the instant Napoleon’s thugs approach to attack – and it is worth noting the fact that they all come at you with small jumps, which gives a silly charm to the action that perfectly fits the overall spirit of the game. In another, you must move the Stylus from left to right to match the musical notes that Marie plays on her violin – notes that descend the screen in the usual Guitar Hero format.

However, even some of these musical minigames are problematic, as they fail to teach the player how they work. There is one called “Samba Carnival” as a reference to Samba de Amigo, another musical game by the same director, Shun Nakamura. On the 3DS, the player must press the d-pad and the “X”, “A” and “B” buttons so that they correspond spatially to the six circles on the top screen: pressing the d-pad triggers the three circles on the left, while the buttons, the three on the right. Thus, pressing “X” triggers the upper right circle, while pressing “down” on the d-pad triggers the lower left circle. In the minigame, then, blue balls move in the rhythm of the music towards the circles and the player must trigger the correct ones in synch. However, for obscure reasons, on the tutorial screen, besides the buttons not being positioned to match the circles in the space, the buttons and the circles are marked with colors that also don’t match: the “X”, for example, is painted green along with the two lower circles, leading the player to erroneously believe that they are the circles that correspond to the button.

Another negative aspect of the minigames is the scoring system. Instead of evaluating the player’s overall performance, it consists of a bar that grows a little with each correct input and retreads a lot with each mistake. The result is a frustrating system that delivers a “D” to a player who hit correctly all but the last three notes, and an “A” to those who missed several at the beginning but did everything right from the middle to the end.

Another area in which Professor Layton puts Rhythm Thief to shame is the story department. Layton’s stories are usually built around a MacGuffin (a mysterious object sought by the protagonist that moves the story forward), which keeps the player interested in its fantastic nature. In addition, the setting is always shrouded in an aura of mystery, stimulating exploration. In Rhythm Thief, Raphael’s quest for his father is tedious, rarely providing new revelations, and the setting, Paris, is represented in a simplistic way.

However, the main problem with the game’s story is that it simply doesn’t make sense. If Napoleon Bonaparte’s presence in the synopsis caused surprise, it is no less out of place in the game itself. In Rhythm Thief, Napoleon is as random a villain as he is one-dimensional. The character has no connection with the protagonist’s narrative arch and the threat that he represents is a generic one: he could very well have been Louis XIV, Genghis Khan, Jair Bolsonaro or Imhotep and the change wouldn’t have made any difference.  He’s just a random villain. He doesn’t even possess an ideology, desiring to conquer the world simply because that is what villains like to do. Besides his goal being absurdly cliché, his plan is also not explained sufficiently: the only information that the player has is that he intends to recover a special crown, called “The Dragon Crown”. But the reason for this is only revealed during the climax, when it’s already too late for us to care.

Besides that, the story’s last act is also completely absurd. Suddenly the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are floating next to the Eiffel Tower and there was no clue that such a bizarre thing could occur. Although, at this point in the game, the player has probably given up understanding the internal logic of the story and is just going with the flow. It’s also not the case of the absurd having a point, serving a narrative function. It’s not even a twist: The Hanging Gardens are there just because it looks cool. Raphael’s story intends to be dramatic (as evidenced by the sacrifice of a certain character at the end) and the characters take that universe seriously. However, they are also too generic and shallow to work: Raphael wants to find his father and… that’s basically the character. And the dialogues can be quite silly, but in a nonsensical way: “Napoleon, I’ll put water in your loo!”

With some poorly designed minigames and an absurd story, Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure leaves the player more frustrated and confused than engaged. It’s a game that fails in so many areas that there’s no musical minigame exciting enough to save it from mediocrity.

November 19, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 07, 2016.