Vib-Ribbon (1999)

I really thought I'd enjoy this game. I like PaRappa, I like music games, I tend to grade games that are really iconoclastic on a curve, I own it on PS3 and I still have some music CDs lying around. This seemed right up my alley.

Alas, it was not. I had a bad time.

The visuals are so minimal that they oscillate between boring and inscrutable. The timing feels inconsistent, and it's challenging to recover when the level geometry shakes and vibrates with each mistake. The levels are basically the bar from the top of PaRappa's UI, except instead of button prompts, you have to remember which abstract element corresponds to which button on your controller, which feels like a step backward to me in terms of UX. The game includes six irritating and horrendously compressed songs, but you can use your own music… if you don't mind levels with poor layouts and bizarre tempo changes.

There are many "hidden gems" and "cult classics" that never reach the heights they deserve due to factors outside of the work itself. Vib-Ribbon was a late PlayStation release, only shipping in certain regions just as CD sales began to decline. If things had been different, maybe Vib-Ribbon could have been the next PaRappa!

But I seriously doubt it.

(This was retro game club game #4 on the Grouvee forum.)

I can't help but give extra imaginary points to any game that is bold, trying to do something new and different -- even if the end result is something of a miss. Vib-Ribbon is one of those games, in this case a rhythm title with a unique graphics style, strange music, and just an overall quirky charm and flavor that I couldn't help but find a little fascinating.

This is from the same team that made Parappa the Rapper, which I have yet to play. I was drawn to Vib-Ribbon though thanks to its unique gimmick -- you have the songs to play from the game itself, but you can choose an option to insert your own CD, and play through stages based off your own music tracks. So on one hand the game has a measly six songs to play through... but it also has an infinite number of songs, perhaps comparable to games like Audiosurf.

The problem is I don't think the levels generated for your own songs are as well put-together as the ones specifically made for the game. They're not terrible, but they didn't impress me either. I'm sure that for the time, the technology was very impressive-- and indeed I do think it is very cool that they were able to pull this off at all. At the end of the day Vib-Ribbon is a pleasant curiosity, something I think is well worth giving a shot at least.

I do want to give kudos to the devs for coming up with a control scheme that feels very intuitive. You time button prompts to the shape of the objects approaching your rabbit (a cute character named Vibri) -- and for harder difficulties you'll be pressing two buttons at a time for obstacles that are a combination of the two corresponding shapes. It's clever stuff. I just wish there were more hand-crafted levels, and perhaps some other bands to play some songs... I won't say the music is outright bad, but it is something of an acquired taste. This is a title that would be great to see make a comeback on a platform like Steam, where modders can have at it with their own specially-crafted levels and tunes.

Vib Ribbon is charming a quirky. The ideas are solid and even more innovative than some new rythm games: shapes in the track signal which of the four buttons you need to push, but the trick is that shapes can be combinen in different ways.

I do think that the weird presentation can get in the way of the game, though. The combination of the walking character and the shapes means that the precise timing of the button is not always clear. On top of that, if you fail to get over some obstacle the line starts shaking all over the place, which then makes it even harder to nail the next button prompt: a positive feedback loop of failure that is not fun at all.

There's only 6 songs included which I didn't like very much, so there wasn't a lot of replay value there. The trick is that you can use your own music. Unfortunately, with emulation the process of getting my music into the game is rather convoluted and the result is hit and miss. Generating meaningful patterns that also sync to the beat of a song is very hard as it is, doing it automatically is almost impossible.