Technic Beat Hands-On Impressions

Though the rhythm genre has enjoyed a slight bit of cult success here and in Europe, there is no market that produces and consumes rhythm games with such wanton abandon as the Japanese market. For every version of Dance Dance Revolution that fights its way to the American market, there are a dozen oddball rhythm games that never see the light of day on these shores. Mastiff, a publisher that has recently endeared itself to the cult of tactical strategy RPG fans in the US by bringing La Pucelle: Tactics stateside, looks poised to likewise rope in the small contingency of rhythm game fans with the US release of Technic Beat. And before you ask, no, it has nothing to do with the turntable manufacturer.

Developed by Arika, a Japanese studio best known for its work on the Street Fighter EX series, Technic Beat has existed in Japan as an arcade game and a PlayStation 2 game for years now, but it is just now making its way to the US. Sure, it's a little old, but for American audiences, the gameplay will seem shockingly fresh. Like most rhythm games, the core conceit is that you must perform actions on your controller in time with the beat. The interface in Technic Beat puts you as an acid-and-saccharine-soaked character on a rectangular stage. As the music begins, circles start to appear on the surface of the stage, and inside those circles, smaller circles start appearing and expanding concentrically. It's up to you to move your character inside the original circle and hit the square button as soon as the original and the expanding circle match size, which will then clear those circles.

If this sounds a little archaic, rest assured that the actual execution is a bit more intuitive. Like any rhythm game worth its salt, Technic Beat starts off incredibly simple but seems to have the capacity to become deviously complex and challenging. The gameplay feels unique, even in comparison to other rhythm games. In most rhythm games, the gameplay has a mechanical feel, but with Technic Beat, we felt almost like we were playing some kind of peculiar platformer.

The game looks like what you might expect if a bunch of Hello Kitty characters threw a rave. Everything is absolutely vibrant, and though the scale of the visuals that we saw was pretty limited, the screen was almost constantly teeming with motion. We were treated to a blossom of particle effects whenever we cleared a circle, though the most striking effect was the waterlike ripples that were caused on the translucent stage surface. The game is two years old in Japan, but looking at it in 2004, it seems to have aged fairly well.

Though Namco won't be involved in the game's publishing in the US, Technic Beat will still be absolutely rife with dance remixes of music from many games in its catalog. We noticed a lot of music from fairly obscure Japan-only Namco games, but there was plenty of music from bona fide classics like Dig Dug, Xevious, Splatterhouse, and Ridge Racer. The version we saw also contained a slew of original music, which varied a bit in theme, but all of it was informed by some subgenre of electronic dance music.

Technic Beat strikes us as a game that probably won't be a million-plus seller, but the game has a certain charm that will likely endear it to those who appreciate the slightly unhinged, uncontrollably cute Japanese aesthetic that seems to permeate most rhythm games. Though Mastiff will be tuning up the English translation a bit before publishing Technic Beat in the US, the rest of the game is to remain untouched. Stay tuned for more in-depth coverage of this unique rhythm game.