Final Fantasy Theatrythm: Final Bar Line Demo

It has been a long time since I bothered playing a demo of a game. Longer still since I was willing to pay full price, at launch, to add a game to my collection. For years, I’ve been able to remain patient for a full version to be released a year or two later, and to still wait until a special rolls around to make the deal even more appealing. After all, the game will still be the same regardless of when it gets purchased.

Final Fantasy Theatrythm: Final Bar Line is an exception. I have always greatly enjoyed rhythm games, and the soundtrack to the Final Fantasy series has always been top-notch. Even games I don’t personally enjoy in the series, I can still find myself searching out the music on Spotify to fill the time, and appreciate the feelings it invokes.

I have no doubts that the full version of this most recent game in the series will be worth it. That being said, a Demo was released on the first of February, a little more than two weeks before the game gets released. Here is what I think of it so far.

First, a tiny bit of history. I have played just about every single Guitar Hero and Rock Band game except the most recent editions, and have bought entirely too much DLC for both series. I have loved the Final Fantasy series since I was in grade school (I am significantly older now), so there is a heavy dose of nostalgia hitting me every time I boot up Theatrythm. I also bought every piece of DLC for Curtain Call.

Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory was a Christmas Gift this year, and while I don’t have nearly as much nostalgia for the Kingdom Hearts series (only ever got as far as the Aladdin stage in the first game, though I own them all in some form or another), I found it to be an incredibly solid game. A full review of Melody of Memory is in the works.

Final Bar Line feels very much like a natural evolution of Curtain Call, while including some of the additions that Melody of Memory brought to the table. More characters, more games to pull the soundtrack from. The 3DS had the ability to use the touch screen, but since Final Bar Line will be on consoles that do not have a touch screen, this was replaced with hitting multiple notes at the same time!

I happen to enjoy this change. After the first few songs on Curtain Call, I ended up switching to button controls anyways. I was able to hit notes more accurately that way, and since I did a lot of my playtime on a bus traveling at the time, I didn’t want to lose a Stylus.

Another addition is the Rainbow Critical notes. Previously, you could get Good, Great, or Critical when hitting a note to varying scores. Now, the SSS Rank requirements seem to have been lowered a tad, but the margin for “perfect” note hits seems to have gotten a little bit tighter, at least on the Battle stages.

Curtain Call had three styles of song: Battle stages where your Party of four takes on a horde of enemies. Field stages where one character at a time travels on a map, moving faster if you time your button presses perfectly. Finally, there is the Event Music stage, where a cutscene from the game in question plays and your party is nowhere to be seen. The Demo has both Battle and Field stages, but no Event stages.

The Field stages got a bit of an upgrade as well from its predecessor. Now, instead of having just one character on screen at a time, your whole party travels along, and you get stopped periodically to fight monsters along the way. I feel like this is a good addition to the formula. For one, in Curtain Call, you may have two separate party setups: One strictly for fighting, and the other with high agility for traveling. Now, you don’t necessarily have to worry about switching out party members as battle skills would still come into play during a Field song.

Unlocking characters is different this time around as well. In Curtain Call, you would go through Quest Melody’s, randomly generated maps with a string of songs. Once you get to the boss of the map, you would unlock a certain amount of coloured shards. Get enough shards and you can unlock certain characters. In Final Bar Line, in the Demo anyways, you unlock the protagonists of whatever Final Fantasy you just unlocked the songs for. From there, you progress through a map of sorts of tracks from that entry in the series. It has been revealed that the villains are also going to be unlockable characters, I am assuming as a reward for beating their Boss track.

Kingdom Hearts Melody of Memory also added Missions, a set of tasks to perform while playing a song. In Final Bar Line, rather than the three tasks of Melody of Memory, each song only has one task to complete. At first glance, this may seem like a downgrade, but on the other hand, Kingdom Hearts only had about a hundred and fifty songs, not all of which were part of the story mode. At launch, Final Bar Line will have over three hundred and eighty tracks to play through! Having only one task per song will significantly reduce the grind, allowing players to head to a new song much faster.

These tasks range in difficulty and style. Sometimes you have to merely get above a certain score, sometimes you have to defeat a certain number of enemies or a certain amount of a specific enemy. It is a little addition to some, and while I would have liked to have seen more tasks added per song, the sheer number of songs available once the game releases will more than makeup for that in my opinion.

The Demo has thirty songs total selected from Six mainline Final Fantasy games: 2, 5, 7, 13, 14, and 15. There are also a total of thirty characters to level up to level 30. Replaying songs in the demo will allow you to collect more items to use in the main game. Summons, potions, items to increase stats, and scrolls to teach characters moves they wouldn’t normally learn on their own.

I appreciate the ability to try this game out for myself first, but there was never any doubt that I would want to add this to my collection. The songs themselves are a good mix of classic and more modern entries in the series, the change in unlocking characters is a welcome one, and while I won’t be grinding items to max out the characters currently available, the current setup gives one a nice taste of what the full game will offer.

If you have a strong interest in Final Fantasy, or merely a rhythm game enthusiast, I strongly recommend grabbing the Demo and giving it a shot yourself. The full game will be packed with content, and while a whole separate opinion piece can be written about DLC already being planned rather than being included in the game itself, I for one will be more than happy to increase the number of total tracks available to me when the time comes.

Final Fantasy Theatrythm: Final Bar Line releases on February 16th, 2023 on the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4. The above was written with the Switch version in mind, in Handheld mode.