3.5/5 ★ – Pencil_Nexus's review of Gitaroo Man.

I've been really anticipating this one. Listening to some of the songs off the OST made me really want to try it. Disclaimer; I'm by no means a rhythm game expert, so I'm basically new to the genre. This game has a lot to love about it. The lovely artstyle and character designs are super striking and distinctive. The cutscenes are super campy, coupled with the cheesy early anime dub voice acting that reminds me of Ballmastrz. The highest point of praise is the soundtrack. Every song, and by extension every level, has good to stellar songs. The Legendary Theme being a personal favorite of mine. The gameplay itself I have some points to make. The first few levels are basically tutorials, they are pretty easy for newcomers like myself. Stage 4 has a noticeable jump in difficulty, it took me a couple attempts to get it down as it's just straight up dodging. Now, the problem for me and I'm not sure if it's just me being bad or emulation delay, or both, but some patterns for battle and dodging were especially brutal. Stage 7 for example couples low health dodging with rapid micro strums to make the Latin acoustic guitar. Coupling that with rapid multi-button dodges and what feels like arbitrary stick placements for strums, it definitely led to some frustrations. Stages 4, 7, and the final stage being especially frustrating. With that said, the other stages are very fun. Stages 5, 6 and 9 were among my favorites. Overall, this game definitely has a lot of love put into it. The messages put in between the cutscenes really show a lot of themes and motivations that the creator what to get across, which is a cherry on top of the lovely cake. It isn't perfect, but I recommend trying it out. It's super short too, so it'll like like barely a day to beat it. Will I do the Master difficulty... probably not, lol