After being abandoned by her family at a young age, Eliza just wanted to find something that would make everyone happy. That’s when she found music and it gave her the chance to help others through singing songs. This story is based on real events and explores what happens when one person gets too much power in an industry full of people who need protecting from themselves- how does society deal with someone like this?
The “a musical story switch” is a game that has been designed to be experienced as a musical. The player will play the role of a character in the game, which will help them experience the world through music and sound.
Rhythm games are a fickle, nasty set of games that I can’t seem to get enough of. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I stood in line at the head of the queue for Dance Dance Revolution, and I made the mistake of thinking that crushing arrows was the same as being able to dance. I attempted Pop N’ Music, Guitar Hero, and even a brief but embarrassing journey into Idol Masters, all to no avail: I have no rhythm. Maybe I’ve outgrown it, or maybe the style has evolved, but I’m terrible now, and I keep trying. Still, when a rhythm game also aims to convey a narrative – like Deemo, Lost in Harmony, or even Simply Shapes and Beats – it connects with me a little more, since I feel something more than just “perform well on this song.” The Ouendan games for the DS (together with Elite Beat Agents) were fantastic since they continued in the same style.
So, to put it bluntly, I admire what A Musical Story is attempting to do. A Musical Story is a trip through the life and recollections of Gabriel, a musician who is in horrible form someplace in a hospital and remembers how he arrived to his present position. It is an indie darling from Glee-Cheese Studio (and released by Digerati). It’s an odd, wordless journey through his life, from his poor beginnings at the bean mill with ambitions of something more to his efforts to break free and fulfill his destiny.
Gabriel and Glee-Cheese Studio want you to do more than just watch and listen throughout his journey: they want you to participate in the recollection by constructing chapters of sequences that are call and response musical numbers. You’ll be bombarded with anything from three to seven parts, which you must imitate using your controller. It’s not the most beautiful design, but considering that you’ll be replicating a variety of instruments and voices, it’s preferable than having a bunch of different peripherals that you’ll have to pick up and put down on the go.
This one is for all the flower kids in the crowd!
A Musical Story is a game that tries to wear two hats at once, and as a consequence, neither is entirely accurate. On the one hand, it’s attempting (and succeeding) to tell a story using a relatively new medium, one that might easily have been an animated short but instead becomes a game that allows the spectator to participate in the universe. It’s amazing to see Gabriel’s rise and fall through the eyes of a lens that provides him the most of the view yet doesn’t rely exclusively on him for narrative. Instead, we receive a sliver of the broader tale via a rotating perspective, with Gabriel contemplative at moments and merely watching from the sidelines at others. It provides for a more subjective point of view, adding depth to the plot.
This is college for me if that guitar is replaced with a Gamecube controller.
A Musical Story’s audio and visual elements are among the best I’ve seen in recent memory. The actual world’s creative design and Gabriel’s dreams/hallucinations mingle together to produce an environment steeped with the characters’ hopes, fears, and ultimate desires, as well as, from my understanding, the designers’ own.
The stark nature of the highs and lows that naturally come with life, but also the unnatural elements of Gabriel’s drug habits, is a visual feast to see a scene slowly emerge across a stage, one snapshot at a time until the full picture is revealed to show the band working through their melodies, crafting connections with their audience and each other, and the stark nature of the highs and lows that naturally come with life, but also the unnatural elements of Gabriel’s drug habits. The juxtaposition between the rustic but reassuring design of the “actual world” and the 1950s style animation of the hallucinations and demons brought on by the drugs is unsettling.
An frightening warning from Saturday TV Fun House is shown.
The musical parts are also pretty good, as one would expect from a game named A Musical Story. Players are treated to a rich soundscape of 70s influenced guitar and bass, some excellent drum rhythms, and some incredible licks that must be replicated with pinpoint accuracy, especially during the good times. We completely explore the electronic side of things when the game’s tone swings into something darker or more emotional, with haunting synthesizer reverb piercing into the center of your soul to give the message “something isn’t right.”
There’s a lovely contrast between how the game is presented aurally, with amazing harmonies and structurally sound music, and truly unpleasant times that are both melodious and discordant. A Musical Story’s musical feature, without a doubt, is constructed in a manner that distinguishes it from other musically-driven games I’ve experienced.
Because Freebird had only just been launched, audiences were not yet clamoring for it.
The gaming portion of A Musical Story, on the other hand, is what causes the vehicle’s wheels to break off. In principle, the premise is simple: utilize the left and right shoulder buttons to perform a call and answer with the game using a limited number of notes. Simple enough, and the first five chapters are so simple to complete that you don’t realize the system’s basic flaw. The idea, however, takes a left turn and travels straight for a ravine after the sixth chapter, when the tale truly starts.
My ordinary ears have a hard time copying music after just hearing it once, and this creates some difficulty in how the game treats you as a consequence. If you don’t get the notes correct the first time, you’ll have to start again, which, on the surface, looks like a smart strategy. After all, the music is just as vital as Gabriel: you wouldn’t skip forward in the plot without allowing Gabe to speak his bit. Similarly, music yearns to be heard and asks that you do so.
What is the current tempo? What is the beat? Screw you, it’s time to click!
However, A Musical Story’s methodology implies that gamers will quickly get disappointed. If you miss a single note, you’ll have to start again from the beginning, with no time to breathe or attempt to figure out what you’ve missed. It will essentially keep playing the same notes at you over and again until you master them, at which point you may go on to the next set. It’s like a moment from Whiplash, where you’re Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons is the game, forcing you to repeat the action without stopping for a breath or letting your hands rest. By the time you reach chapter 16, you’re trembling with fear, for a one misstep means the game’s over, and here is when the game goes from disappointing to downright distressing.
This map goes to the Lost City of D as well, but from the other direction.
A Musical Story has a secret chapter/ending that can only be accessed by achieving perfect scores on all 26 chapters. This entails playing through each session, some of which include as many as eight verses, without making a single mistake. You had a line to help you know where the notes were intended to be in respect to the beat of the song when you played a game like Rock Band or even Tap Tap Revenge. This line only appears if you turn it on or if you fail the verse several times, and turning on the assist line means automatically forfeiting the chance to obtain a perfect score.
So if you’re making a lot of mistakes, A Musical Story spits at your feet and tells you to get better, all while using the same note visualizations for drums, guitars, bass, vocals, and more, as well as the same circular track with no distinction between the tempos, styles, and dynamics of the tracks. If you don’t complete the game completely, you’ll never learn what happened to Gabriel and his band. You’ll receive vague platitudes and an open-ended conclusion that is supposed to make you ponder but makes me fume.
No, thank you very much.
A Musical Story has a lot of aesthetically and acoustically outstanding elements, and that cannot be denied. This is a game that benefits greatly from the world’s social media exposure, as players will be able to observe streamers who have put in a lot of time and effort to create the ideal gameplay for the delight of others. However, from the player’s viewpoint, it’s a tedious task to have to be exact and remembered, rather than harmonized, in order to succeed and convey the whole tale. Failure to follow the developer’s plans means being on the outside, alienating the misfit nature that Gabriel and his band aim to embrace.
What’s the end result? All those laurel wreaths of indie acclaim are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, since they’re based only on viewing the final product and playing a little piece of the game. Though the game takes less than three hours to complete, it might be completed in as little as 90 minutes if the execution was more empathetic and player-focused rather than posture-based. It’s a pity, and I’m disappointed that such a lovely notion was given in the most lowest note conceivable.
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Character designs that are purposefully crude, along with sharp, cartoonish nightmare sequences, make for an engrossing experience. |
Forced repetition and harsh demands for someone’s naked ears destroy a basic input notion. |
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The musical component cannot be disregarded, and each track has been created with love and care. |
I would have given up on the game sooner if I hadn’t been so enthralled with how it looked and sounded. |
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Final Score: 6.5 |
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A Musical Story is currently available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One X/S, PS4/5, and PC.
On the Xbox One X, the game was reviewed.
The publisher supplied me with a copy of A Musical Story.
As an example:
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Look at them!
The “best musicals of all time” is a list that has been compiled by various sources. The list includes many different genres, and it’s hard to say which musical is the best.
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