It really is a sad thing when your own company overshadows you and pokemon is casting a mighty big shadow. It’s not really that Pokemon is bad because of it, but it unintentionally kills off any really neat ideas Gamefreak tends to have, Drill Dozer being one of them. And frankly if you haven’t heard of Drill Dozer I suggest you look in to it. The main reason why I mention all this is because HarmoKnight is a pretty awesome game, but because Gamefreak’s main success is Pokemon, projects like these tend to sell less and they end up not making sequels to such awesome games.
HarmoKnight acts much like any other rhythm game out there. Go with the beat of the music and you wont die. Course the way Game Freak changes up the rhymes are by having you play as a Harmoknight named Tempo in a platforming adventure where you’re trying to save a kingdom from the evil noise that crashed onto your planet. You pretty much go around each world trying to collect royal notes so you can advance to the next world in order to face the evil noise. Acquiring these royal notes is simple, just collect enough notes in an area by either being in the path of a note, hitting enemies at the right time, or hitting musical plants at the right moment. You can also jump to avoid obstacles such as pits or fire, and you have the ability to charge your weapon to get extra notes. However the lag on charging is often too great to really make it effective enough to use. The main goal is to get enough notes in each area to acquire the royal notes, although the bar for getting them is rather low compared to most rhythm games. Don’t let that fool you though, as the game steadily gets more challenging making the last few levels, mainly the second to last and final boss battle, fairly challenging to beat. Course if that isn’t much of a challenge for you, getting golden flowers will easily make up for that. In order to get a golden flower you pretty much have to get a perfect score in a level, then two things will unlock, some artwork for the game, and another level that is a faster version of the level you just gold flowered. So in order to complete this game fully you have to prefect both the level and a faster version of it.
The game also lets you play as two other characters that have a somewhat different playstyle compared to Tempo, but really aren’t present enough to really be apart of the game. Its a shame too because they do seem like solid characters to play as, but it just isn’t present enough to leave much of an impact. The game also has some levels based off of Pokemon music too, and I’m a bit ashamed to say I got this game because of that. Its not more so I’m ashamed of my love of Pokemon, but even GameFreak knows that consumers will buy anything with something Pokemon related. Honestly though HarmoKnight isn’t tainted with a huge soundtrack of pokemon and really only gets about six songs from the Pokemon Universe. Although this does bring up a question of why just Pokemon? Technically Gamefreak has access to the majority of Nintendo’s catch tunes and I really would have liked to play them. I suppose GameFreak wanted to try to separate themselves from Pokemon, music and all, but I really like the idea of HarmoKnight being Nintendo’s personal Guitar Hero or Rock Band. As well the game seems to be lacking in certain areas of the game, not in terms of quality, but the amount of levels that are there, well, simply put there could have been more. It seems that things were just kinda cut because they were pressed for time or simply didn’t want to add more to this game. This game does have a good amount of content, but it really could have been so much bigger. Heck, it could have even been a retail release! So the fact that its download only urks me because they could have just add a few more bells and whistles and sold it as a retail game instead. But I suppose with the price of admission, HarmoKnight provides enough entertainment, its a bit steep at 15$, but its worth it.
Final Thoughts:
I really wish HarmoKnight would have been a retail release, the characters and stories are there, but it certainly seems like it was cut a bit. Course what is there is essentially a wondrous adventure of rhyme and rhythm, I just wish there was more of it. At the very least, GameFreak made another good game, but hopefully this time it gets noticed…unlike Drill Dozer.