For
a while now, it’s been rhythm games that have become my go-to for a challenge,
and Technika is what captivated me most, no doubt about it. As a
drummer, I tend to take very easily to these games and get slightly obsessive,
so have beaten many of the big challenges of the genre – getting through the
Dragonforce song on Expert in Guitar Hero, perfect-playing ‘The Singing Passion
of Hatsune Miku’ in Project Diva 2nd – as well as silly
things like monopolising the scoreboards of the Taiko drumming game at the
local arcade. But Technika is the one that really addicted me when I
started it in its first arcade cabinet iteration – the bright colours, the
catchy electronica songs, the adorable anime-style background videos, and most
particularly the gameplay. In Technika, a line moves along the screen in
two sweeps – one per bar – and you have to poke, slide or hold your fingers on
different notes along with the music. It starts very simple and gets extremely
hard, with all sorts of polyrhythms between hands, crossing wrists over and
under one another and very fast tempos to contend with.
I
got hooked, I sunk rather too much money into mastering the hardest version of ‘Son
of Son’, only for still harder tracks and still harder versions to come out
with monthly updates, all of which I happily devoured. I did all the challenges
and finished all the sets, at one point reaching the top ten on the
international region scoreboards (ie no Korea or Japan and perhaps a few other
places) – though that’s because by then many Americans had upgraded to Technika
2 and couldn’t get the last set’s worth of points. Still, I was very good
at it and top of the high score tables for my country’s one and only machine
for a very long time.
Then
the arcade closed down, the other one that got the machine didn’t put it online
– making play rather pointless – and in all honesty I breathed a sigh of relief
because the game pounded my wallet quite hard over the course of a few months. I
put far too many coins into it.
Then
came Technika Tune for the Vita, one of two games that transformed it
from virtual paperweight to my constant companion, with my poor 3DS left
low-priority (along with Project Diva f). I imported it as soon as I
possibly could, and though it vied with Project Diva and Kid Icarus for
my attention for a while, it soon became completely dominant and I’ve played
little else since. Now that the very easy platinum trophy is mine, a very easy
one mostly based on playing for a very long time, with the only ones I found
tricky ironically being the ones you get for playing badly. I perfect-played
all the Lite tracks, got into the top 75 in the other modes (could push that
higher if I get the urge) and generally played the thing to death.
My
only complaint is the lack of favourite songs. It has ‘Proposed, Flower, Wolf’,
but not its second part, and I prefer the original ‘Oblivion’. Why keep the
likes of ‘Fate’, ‘Access’ and ‘Y’ when you could have had ‘Sin’, ‘Blythe’ and
numerous awesome Clazziquai tracks? Probably so download packs can come later.
Of the new tracks (to me), I mostly liked the cute ones like ‘Shining My Boy’
and ‘Hello Pinkie’, and some cooler, faster tracks like ‘Bamboo on Bamboo’ and ‘Renovation’,
good complements to the likes of ‘Fermion’, ‘Thor’ and ‘Xeus’, while disliking
novelty ones like ‘Song of Sixpence’ (sung by children) and ‘Light House’
(mostly animal noises like those you get on children’s keyboards). I was
tearing my hair out at the odd rhythms of Irish jig ‘Emblem’ when perfect-playing.
But I definitely missed cute tracks like ‘Shining Shooting Star’ and ‘In My
Heart’ and less cheesy ones like ‘Color’, ‘Hexad’ and ‘Supersonic’ – and would
have liked ‘Heart of Witch’ from Black Square/Technika 2. Some of the
better new songs were based on classical pieces – Mozart, Tchaikovsky,
Rachmaninov – but there were also several horrible electronica pieces like ‘Dual
Strikers’ and ‘AD2222’, as well as more cringe-worthy hip-hop tracks that make ‘Ruti’n’
sound cool, including one hilariously awful one about Toronto called ‘In the
Tdot’. There were also a handful of tunes from Jpop band Kara, which were in
general pleasant enough and easy to play. Overall, a very mixed bag with a few
chores to play, but not at all bad and with some great tracks I’d not played
before and thoroughly enjoyed.
In
terms of presentation, the game is excellent, looking stunning on a little
screen. It’s somewhat fiddly at first, but I soon got used to it, and though I
had kinda hoped there would be held/repeating notes on the back AND front
carefully-designed to be possible, once I realised the way they had adapted it,
everything made sense and if anything it was easier (except times when a bit of
hand would brush the back touchpad and cause an off-time note), plus the note
and icon bonuses made it far, far easier to get perfect plays, along with fever
– though I must say the vast majority of my breaks came when trying to activate
fever and failing.
Definitely
one of my favourite portable games – though I have to say, a shaky bus and that
jerk when a train comes to a stop can ruin many an attempt at a high score.
Highly enjoyable all around.
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