I've had a rabbit jumping off whales to reach the moon, a trampolining pair that turn into foxes, shooting ghosts with a bow and arrow, plucking facial hair from onions, a flying witch watering magical flowers, and it just goes on from there. Imagination, caution to the wind, madness throughout, just outstanding.
Click this page for more thoughts, videos and pics.
http://www.opensenses.com/features/rhythm-tengoku-videos-and-first-impressions
I've had a rabbit jumping off whales to reach the moon, a trampolining pair that turn into foxes, shooting ghosts with a bow and arrow, plucking facial hair from onions, a flying witch watering magical flowers, and it just goes on from there. Imagination, caution to the wind, madness throughout, just outstanding.
Each mini-game has its own tapped logic. Sometimes the visuals put you off as you do better, sometimes the sounds put you off, sometimes its anticipation, most of the time its keeping rhythm. Some games have you concentrating on two sets of timings at once following the song, others you have to learn certain cues and remember timing related to them - like the mini game where you smash a mallet down to throw a balloon in the air at the right time for a duck to catch as it jumps into a lake. On that there are three types of duck, three different timings, and three different duck jumping sounds.
Special mention to the sound quality - amazing from a gba cart. I don't know whether Nintendo have found a better way of sequencing samples, smoothing playback, or a new compression method, but whatever it is this is the best sounding gba game bar none. I'd say the quality even outdoes Ouendan, but thats not really a fair comparison as that uses fully sampled songs. gba player + hifi for the win. The music is consistantly good, in a bouncy happy dancey way.
See more discussion here:
http://www.opensenses.com/discussion/rhythm-tengoku
Videos! and *massive spoilage* of course:
10.6MB - Mix stage 1
9.2MB - Mix stage 2
7.2MB - Mix stage 3
8.6MB - Mix stage 4
7.0MB - Baseball salsa
6.7MB - Jumping playyan-kun
4.8MB - Scientist rescuing bug so he can listen to music - wtf