Before you rush off thinking you've landed a steal (ho ho ho), you should note this isn't a straight-up port of the 3DS game by any means. The final stage paywall is a dirty trick.Sega's iOS adaptation of Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure is out now, and it's priced at $10. Some genuinely memorable music and characters.Ĭons: The story and exploration elements have been side-lined in favour of endless repetition and level-grinding. Pros: Beautifully presented, amusingly written, and very inventive in terms of scenarios and action. In Short: The original 3DS game is sacrificed on the altar of microtransactions and grubby monetisation, almost erasing any sense of fun in the process.
We’re not sure what exactly that middle ground is but until Sega, and Nintendo, can find it they’re going to continue to have trouble on both portable consoles and smart devices. But surely there must be a happier middle ground than just gutting the game of its original context and filling it with inappropriate monetisation schemes.
On the other hand the original, which is hard to find in physical form nowadays, is £39.99 for an eShop download – which we’ll admit is too much. Trying to turn the whole experience into some sort of never-ending musical equivalent to Cookie Clicker is just madness, especially as the accomplice-borrowing social element means the game requires a permanent Internet connection (and you can guess how much trouble that is).Īdd in the price of unlocking the final chapter and The Paris Caper costs a substantial £12.48, and that’s without any extra microtransactions. The original Rhythm Thief was a silly but charming rhythm action game with a daft plot that you were interested in seeing the end of but once you had you would probably never return to it. You’re also forced to borrow a helper from another online player, again just like Puzzle & Dragons, but the whole thing just don’t make any sense in context. You can take up to three at a time and at a basic level they increase the length of your health bar, but by fusing them with treasures you collect along the way you can get them to perform more specific tricks like ignoring a missed beat or earning you extra coins. Part of this is to earn money to unlock new outfits and another is to gain new companions to take into a mini-game with you. The problem isn’t really with microtransactions (although the final chapter requires you to pay almost the price of the initial download to unlock), but that the whole structure of the game has changed from telling a story to mindless level grinding. The game is sensible enough to vary the difficulty and add in score modifiers and the like but because the musical sections were originally designed to tell little story vignettes (even if it’s just cooking a crêpe) the game is unable to hide the fact that it’s just repeating itself for the sake of it. Rhythm Thief though was never supposed to work in anything like a similar manner, and so constantly repeating the same levels becomes a terrible chore. Rhythm Thief & The Paris Caper (iOS) – somehow Paris doesn’t seem so fun anymore Re-releasing it on iOS might seem the best way to recoup the losses but unfortunately that’s not quite what’s happened here. This was only shortly after the 3DS’s late 2011 renaissance but the most obvious reason it failed is a lack of marketing push on Sega’s part.
Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure was originally released on 3DS in April 2012, but although it received positive reviews it wasn’t a success. A transition that has still left them struggling to make successes of even their best games. We wonder though what Sega would tell them about such advice, considering the problems they’ve endured in making the transition from console manufacturer to third party publisher.
Rhythm Thief & The Paris Caper (iOS) – rinse and repeatĪfter failing to find success on the 3DS, Sega bring their charismatic music game to iOS – along with the inevitable microtransactions…Īs far as many analysts (both professional and Internet amateurs) are concerned the solution to Nintendo’s problems are simple: stop making hardware and release your games on other formats, particularly smartphones.