Like most iOS games, there is something sad about Rhythm Thief. Born from a 3DS game about the aforementioned thief, this is a music game where you complete various mini-games in order to progress in a unimportant story comprised of three blocks of dialogue that almost have no impact on anything, something that probably was more akin to cutscenes in the original version. Why have story at all? To do so, you equip allies and fuse items and request friends like in other iOS games like Puzzle and Dragons, you collect premium currencies, hold auditions to spin the wheel on random gifts and other things of the sort that just distract you from the actual music games that are actually okay.
And that's my main complain about RT, everything distracts you from actually playing it. There are one or two actual games in each stage and padding that are interminable menu sequences, 'puzzle' games where you have to select a chest at random or tap on the right picture enough times, then you get allies and items, then you get to the actual gameplay. The allies are an unnecessary addition, they have skills like in Final Fantasy Theathrhythm and you can fuse them and rank them up like in P&D, but it's a rhythm game, if you can do the rhythm correctly, why would you need all these things? You also 'level-up' by getting experience from the stages you're playing, but that only allows you to have more allies and increase your HP. The HP increase is okay, I suppose.
The game begins by asking you to keep a strong online connection, then it loads/saves something, and you need to always be connected and watch these dumb spinners between almost every menu, this is terrible, it's stupid, I shouldn't need to be online to play my music game, I shouldn't have to wait for the game to check if I didn't hack some french guy as an ally while it wasn't looking. The loading adds to the distracting time between actual gameplay and lessens the experience greatly.
The mini-games range from swiping in the right direction with other dancers, tapping one of four buttons at the bottom of the screen at the right time, or tapping a button in a way that reminds me the onion hair pulling minigame from the first Rhythm Heaven. This is what the games in RT feel to me, Rhythm Heaven games, the downside is that they repeat quite often. Some of the tunes are good, some are less catchy, but that's to be expected. As the difficulty goes up, they mix it up a bit, making you tap three times in a quick succession or changing the speed you have to swipe from time to time, that's fine.
In any case, I wish this was just a list of mini-games in order and I could play them one after another and just enjoy the good parts. Maybe in that case I would notice that the game is too short or something of the like. So much padding can only mean that, right?
