It struck me a little while ago that I had never finished EBA on my
DS. I never liked it very much, despite the hilarious presentation – it always
felt fiddly and I didn’t like how often the real problem was seeing the next
place to touch because it was hidden by your hand, resulting in me finally
playing with a silly grip on the stylus, holding it right at its end so my
vision was rarely obscured.
I was surprised upon finishing the tricky last level that there was
a whole new difficulty setting beyond what I thought was the last one, called
Hard Rock. Apparently you play the same thing as in the previous difficulty,
only the hit markers are flipped from their former patterns, plus come up
faster and need to be hit in a tighter window. Your life bar also depletes
absurdly fast.
This became the main thing that I disliked about EBA. It’s the only
rhythm game I’ve played where I can have a 100+ combo and still die, just
because I’m hitting the beats slightly off and getting 50s and 100s instead of
300s (the equivalents of the usual ‘safe’, ‘great’, ‘perfect’ or similar).
Because the bar depletes on its own, you can also be doing badly, but passably,
only for a long silent passage (excluding the ones for little scenes, where
your life bar freezes) to take your bar down to the bottom. It makes for an
annoying, frustrating experience at higher levels, and necessitates too much
memorisation. I probably only put the same amount of time into passing the last
stages as I do most rhythm games’ hardest parts, but I lost far more often and
for far more irritating reasons.
You can’t dislike a game that has such silly mini-stories and such
fun, especially one with something like the Christmas song that totally subverts
all your expectations about such a light and sweet-natured story. But I can’t
say I want more.
