Tango Gameworks' Hi-Fi Rush released on January 25, 2023 to reasonable critical acclaim, but seems to have since (understandably) lost most of its mindshare in the greater gaming community due one of the most ludicrously stacked release calendars for post-pandemic video games.
Yet ever since it came out, it has remained rent-free in my mind. It was so disarmingly charming from the very first minutes, it drove me to consume it in almost one continuous sitting - something I hadn't done for an Xbox game since Ori and the Will of the Wisps back in 2020. I'd like to wax lyrical for a while about the ways that it so effortlessly captivated me, and also wax cynical a little (but not too seriously!) about the aspects I think deserves accolades but will probably be overshadowed by other titles released this year that have likely taken up most of the oxygen for video games discourse.
(Spoilers abound!)
The Platonic Ideal Of A Videogame (and The Most Pretentious Subheaders I Could Think Of)
Video games today are different things to many people, but to me Hi-Fi Rush embodies a kind of platonic ideal of a videogame conceived from the 2000s. It leans on the strengths of the developers’ previous expertise to deliver an extraordinarily simple premise with a (nearly) flawless execution, dressed in a bright and breezy ten hour story that walks the tightrope between not taking itself too seriously and sneaking in emotional sincerity and incisive wit where it matters.
Xbox has a puff piece on the game's development that makes a big deal about how most of Tango Gameworks had never made this kind of thing before, and this is technically correct (the best kind of correct). But digging a little deeper into the credits, the body of past experience in the team suggests they were still pretty well poised to find a recipe for success than their marketing might admit.
While there are plenty of staff in the credits whose experience mostly consists of just The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tango's lineage also draws deeper from companies like Clover, Platinum and Konami, even discounting the mentorship from Shinji Mikami himself. Some of the more obvious DNA comes from Maasaki Yamada's prior design work on titles like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and Viewtiful Joe, Shuichi Kobori's legendary compositions for Bemani and Dance Dance Revolution, or Keita Sakai's past visual design in the madcap Anarchy Reigns and The Wonderful 101. A game developer is more than just its director, and a glance at the names that helped build Hi-Fi Rush makes the tonal whiplash from The Evil Within 2 a little less implausible.
I think the execution really bears emphasizing. With genre crossover between rhythm game and character action, the result could have easily become an obtuse, unreadable mess, unresponsive and unsatisfying.
The overall final result is an audiovisual feast that lowers the skill floor of character action games (a genre usually dependent on raw reflexive skill) by codifying the natural rhythms of a typical combat encounter into literal 4/4 meter, while doing everything in its power to ease players into a flow state similar to those from classic rhythm games. The execution barrier for character action staples like combos, launchers and parries is simplified and much more accessible for newcomers to the genre, but the overall challenge of resource and enemy management stays robust.
Invaders Must Cry (The Musical Character Action Game, Fully Realised)
Critically, every facet of the game’s audio and visual feedback serves the gameplay and supports the player’s grasp of the rhythm component of the action. Everything from the UI to the player character’s idle and movement animations, to the companion robot cat and the background environment elements, is timed to match the tempo of the music track being played. Even controller vibration pulses to the same beat, which is great for accessibility. The game uses every possible tool in the box to get players of varying musical skill into “feeling the beat”, all the way up to a literal metronome as an optional UI element.
If these cues are not obvious enough, Hi-Fi Rush really bombards the player with tutorials and skill checks. Even past the mandatory tutorial sequences, I actually appreciated the optional hints from the sentient smart fridges (personally voiced by director John Johanas), which provide great additional context and opportunities for practice. In other games I’d find this kind of constant tutorialization overbearing, but here the novelty of its mechanical fusion makes this kind of constant repetition necessary.
The most impressive part of this design bill is that even failing the mechanical skill requirements to master these, the game’s core combat is built in a way that maximises the reward of success while minimizing the punishment of failure - to a point. Attack button inputs are queued in a way that expresses their attack sequences to the same rhythm of the entire world built around it, regardless of the timing. With this small, barely-perceptible sacrifice of direct control, Hi-Fi Rush manages to produce a kind of choreography that doesn’t initally require the player’s mastery of rhythm to feel functional, which solves a minor foible with other games that use a rhythm-based gimmick like No Straight Roads or Metal: Hellsinger. Being bad at hitting a button on time to a beat doesn't become a death sentence for one’s enjoyment of the game.
The first chapter boss is probably my favorite tutorial boss in a game since Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, because despite being a test of only the most basic core mechanics - attacking, evasion and Beat Hits - it's an exemplar for all of the above design sensibilities. A large and in charge QA Lead-slash-cyborg pro wrestler cuts a promo for a bit in a cutscene, which loads straight into a simple giant robot from the QA department and its big QA shoulder rocket launchers. With long wind-up animations, whole bars worth of empty space in between attacks to let players acclimate, and a checkpoint at the 50% health mark, it's a very forgiving skill check that isn’t overlong. It locks down the bare essentials while still being a massive spectacle that sets the tone and personality of the cast, and does away with the chore of having to replay easier phases after a Game Over.
That it does all this to the tune of Nine Inch Nails' 1,000,000 (or its legally distinct streamer-friendly equivalent), is just icing on the cake.
Loading screens are minimal due to a combination of exceptional optimization from the team (particularly so for an Unreal Engine game, apparently) and smart nips and tucks using lavish transitional 2D cutscenes from animation studio Titmouse and comic artist Takeshi Miyazawa. Oddly enough, I thought the seamless cutscene transitions evoked some of the exceptionally kinetic cinematic editing of The Evil Within games, despite being completely different in art style.
Most critically, there’s a very obvious self-awareness of things to keep and things to cut for the sake of moving things along and avoiding undue fatigue and frustration. As an example, one of the game’s more obnoxious difficulty spikes, the middle acts in the Security Department, culminates in a boss fight solely consisting of the parry. It’s five minutes of nothing but a literal Simon Says minigame - out of context, it’s a weird lull in the curve. But it comes after hours of a barrage of newly-introduced, extremely tough enemies, a long, dense upwards gauntlet that culminates in some of the toughest mobs in the game (The backing music even includes sung lyrics by director Johanas, acknowledging the slog and encouraging the player to push forward).
All of it could have been capped off with a more mundane, profoundly technical boss battle, but instead the foot is taken off the gas for a bit in favour of a conversation-heavy two-button encounter which delves a little into the personality of the antagonist. Everything from the back-and-forth dialogue, the pulsing environment to the escalating soundtrack somehow makes it one of my favorite narrative beats of the entire game despite being on paper a sparse variation on a single gameplay mechanic introduced hours prior. I felt thoroughly well-tested by the game at that point, and the catharsis of resolving the chapter through a relatively less aggressive exchange felt unexpected and refreshing.
The bonus afterwards - a Simpsons-tier physical gag and a wink and a nudge about an even larger cut boss fight - brings me to what I love about the ways the game’s self-deprecatory writing recognises its own limits, and laughs away its own contrivances.
Sentimental Girls and Violent Jokes (The Tightrope of Good Comedy)
By admission of director Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush was conceived through a gameplay-first approach before even its world and story was fully built - but like the best games of its genre, its kitschy beat-em-up presentation belies biting satire and moments of emotional honesty sprinkled amongst its referential humour, childish dialogue and slapstick.
Of course, comedy is incredibly subjective. These days, people tend to fly into a violent rage if they encounter anything that smells vaguely of Joss Whedon’s influence, but what disarmed me about Hi-Fi Rush’s quippiness is that the story very immediately sets Chai up as an insufferable idiot. The protagonist gets away with an obnoxious personality with the understanding that he is a capital-L Loser, by admission of the story and a lot of the supporting cast, and the audience expects some form of personal growth and revealed empathy.
More broadly, the setting is cartoonish - not just in the literal sense, but in the ways that a parodic science-fiction exaggerates its corporate dystopia. A ludicrous personality of a protagonist doesn’t grate as much when everything around him is equally ridiculous. It’s everywhere in the game in both big and small ways. It’s the corporatese announcements about changing the calendar to eight-day weeks (with four consecutive Mondays). The emails from Human Resources personnel announcing their own obsolescence on the conveyor belt. The ultimate battle against the R&D branch, exploiting the ego of their Department Head to bait them into completely draining their software development budget. The Finance Department announcing record profits by cutting off the arms and legs of their developers. This metahumour even runs cover for the game’s own design eccentricities, like explaining away the excessive visual signposting in the environment because the company somehow managed to buy usage rights to The Arrow or any other iconography indicating direction.
It’s sly and incisive, little jabs snuck in at corporate (mis)management and hubris - and actually, ever more relevant in the year 2023 where the games industry has witnessed both an unprecedented calendar of releases of astounding quality, and a staggering human cost of displacement and suffering for the creatives that make up its lifeblood.
When everything is absurd, nothing is quite so out-of-place, which also helps in the moments that the game spontaneously dives into weirdly outdated pop culture references. What makes most of it relatively inoffensive is that the game doesn’t dwell on one too much, so even if Katy Perry’s upstaged Super Bowl performance took place like, eight years ago it doesn’t even register for that long because in a hot minute there’s a Michael Jackson pose and the whole thing is capped off with a Leon The Professional reference for no particular reason.
These moments are more hit and miss, the “lol random” brained referential humour of an older internet citizen, but when they hit, they hit like a truck. Maybe I’m spoiling the surprise, but I’m sure this has been well-discussed at this point - if someone told me that an Xbox-published game was going to reference Disc 2 of 1998 JRPG Xenogears as metahumour for their own massive swathe of cut content in the year 2023, I probably would have thrown a drink in their face. Taken as a whole, the weird esoterica makes the storytelling feel deeply, singularly personal in a way I wouldn’t have expected a Bethesda game to be.
Like, what the fuck.
Songs From the Heart (The Appeal of Generic Storytelling)
That sense of profound personal expression carries the charm a long way when the script decides to get a little more self-serious about its characters. Hi-Fi Rush isn’t especially heavy by any means, but I wouldn’t argue too much with anyone who found its dramatic moments a little cornball for their taste. It was hard not to roll my eyes a little when Peppermint reveals the truth behind her very heavily-signposted unspoken past, or all the affirmations of the power of friendship that come after. And it does seem a little laughable that after spending the entire time exploding corrupt, greedy managers and CEOs into atoms the whole plot resolves with reinstating One Of The Good Ones.
But the simplicity fits the Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic well. The game’s satire embedded in the world-building and storytelling is actually pretty relentlessly cynical, and the emotional honesty of a dysfunctional band of misfits coming together as found family turns out to be a bit of a salve. It does all of that while still navigating a tightrope balance with its self-aware humour, physical comedy, and towards the finale, the closure of some very excellent running gags. It’s the aspirational tone that wins out in the end, and it’s hard not to feel won over when director Johanas closes out the end credits with a song about how his development team poured everything of themselves into a game they weren’t entirely sure would land with their audience.
Just A Face In The Crowd (Another Banger On the Pile)
For as well as it landed, it did land in January. As I write this while the Golden Joystick Awards are announcing their winners, it’s becoming pretty apparent that the broader awards ceremonies are probably not saving a whole lot of mindshare for a game like Hi-Fi Rush. I think there’s a decent chance it will show up at The Game Awards 2023 in some form or fashion, but just like for the Ori games I’m not holding my breath. Smaller-scale non-indie projects (published by Microsoft) just aren’t necessarily the kind of games that bait these kinds of accolades.
That said, I’d love to see it at least show up in some of these categories, ordered by what I think is most to least likely:
Best Audio Design - I’d like to think a nomination or even a win for this category is a shoe-in, but who knows? Everything in the game is constructed around a near-flawless execution of audio design as the driving impetus for the gameplay, but games like Alan Wake II and Stray Gods, to their credit, also boast of scenes with outstanding flair in this regard. Maybe we’ll inexplicably see Modern Warfare III show up in this category like the second did last year. This is the category that I’m bracing myself for the most to see get robbed.
Best Score And Music - Also think a nomination/win here would be incredibly well-deserved. I’ve barely even touched on how much effort the soundtrack contains between its use of licensed music and the equally-superb streamer-friendly versions of those tracks in its OST. The prevailing noise on social media discourse so far seems to be that Final Fantasy XVI may take the crown - I would never begrudge Masayoshi Soken and his impressively fervent fanbase of admirers - but I beg anyone who plays Hi-Fi Rush to play the last couple chapters with streamer mode disabled.
The use of The Joy Formidable’s Whirring may be my favorite use of a licensed insert song in any media I’ve consumed in my entire life. It’s somehow both incredibly trite and an absolute fucking anthem of triumph that turns the final chapter into a victory lap. If Geoff Keighley had a single bone of good taste in his body he would have called up those guys to perform it on stage this year. (That, or Poets of the Fall. It’s time those guys got their dues.)
Best Art Direction - Another part of the game I’ve only really discussed a little, but only because I think any screenshot or footage of the game speaks for itself if you have a pair of working eyeballs. We’ve reached a point in graphics presentation where teams like Arc System and Tango have really nailed down the cel-shaded look that complements comic book/manga character designs - vibrant palettes and fluid, expressive animation. The latter I could gush about for days - it's absolutely bursting at the seams with flourishes that wouldn't need to exist in a game even with this much polish. I'm kicking my feet and giggling every time they play a transitory animation between fights. (There's so many of them!)
I fully expect Hi-Fi Rush to lose out here to any number of eligible games because the year 2023 is absolutely packed to the gills with Most Graphics candidates, but I’ve been surprised here in the past.
Best Action Game - I hinted at it before but to be clear, I really soured on the Bayonetta series after the last game’s real pain points. To me, Hi-Fi Rush occupies a similar space with just an overall far superior coat of polish and a better understanding of presentation and storytelling without the baggage of attempting to outdo its predecessors. But this year’s lineup of action games is wide and varied, and full of darling remakes and sequels that I’m betting will steal the show - anywhere from the Dead Space to Resident Evil 4 remakes, Alan Wake II, Armored Core VI, etc. I’d love to see it at least get a nomination.
(I would laugh if Final Fantasy XVI shows up here to crowd it out partly because I think FFXVI’s character action just feels diminished in comparison, but in a sane world it should be taking up a spot in the Best Role Playing Game instead. But who the hell knows with the Keighleys these days)
Best Game Direction - I won’t belabour the point too much for this because I’ve dedicated a massive chunk of this essay to talking specifically about design and direction (and also because this category has always felt weirdly vague) - but I do want to re-emphasize that Tango have pulled off a near-perfect cross-genre title in a way that enhances and advances both of the genres of video game they’ve borrowed from.
But this here just feels like an extension of the Game of the Year category, so take your pick of whatever to crowd it out for a nomination.
Game of the Year - the more games that came out in 2023, the more distant the possibility felt to even show up on the list. In a world where somehow a new Legend of Zelda game is no longer guaranteed to win, I’m fully expecting the nominations list to be completely filled with nothing but sequels and remakes. And I’d be lying if I said the thought doesn’t bum me out just a little.
Player's Voice - There are dozens of us. Dozens!
But to emphasize, all this salt of mine is mostly in jest. Having a deluge of amazing games in the slate of 2023 to the point where something as good as Hi-Fi Rush is forgotten about, is honestly an incredible ‘problem’ to have. But I’ll continue to think about this game for a very long time, my all-time favorite original IP to come out this year, and I’m beyond excited to think about what Tango Gameworks has planned even in a future without Shinji Mikami at the helm.
I can’t even conceive of where a direct sequel could meaningfully iterate given how cleanly it wrapped up, but it’s a great comfort that titles like this prove that there’s still a market for experiments with smaller scope, funded by financial safety nets like Game Pass. The video game industry landscape feels increasingly dire for a number of reasons as studio layoffs and shutdowns continue. I’m not going to pretend that multi-billion dollar corporations are ever going to be true bastions of art. But the ability for studios like Obsidian and Tango to greenlight projects that aren’t necessarily financial blockbusters that make up their core identity, gives me some small comfort.
Sometimes they don’t work out, other times they violently Ratatouille you back into the era of the Sega Dreamcast and the GameCube. I think in a perfect world, we would have more publishers willing to take that kind of chance on their rockstar creatives.
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