Eat Beat DeadSpike-san

It used to be that if you developed a popular franchise, then the next obvious step was to spin it off into a kart racing game. You don't see as much of that these days, but maybe a new trend has taken its place. Between Persona, Fire Emblem, King of Fighters and Final Fantasy, we're starting to see more and more popular franchise get rhythm game spin-offs, and I love this trend. BlazBlue is the latest franchise to get the musical makeover, and while Eat Beat DeadSpike-san isn't especially deep and lacks a lot of the features you expect from the genre, it's still a button-tapping good time that does a lot to highlight the awesome soundtrack.

First released on iOS and Android device back in 2015, Eat Beat DeadSpike-san is finally seeing a home console release on the Switch. It's a simple rhythm game that has you tapping the left and right shoulder buttons in time in order to gobble up the food on the screen. If you're too slow or miss one of the prompts, you'll lose a little health and your combo chain. Miss too many of these prompts and you'll be forced to start the song all over again. In other words, it's a rhythm game.

This brand new Switch port offers twenty songs that span the entire BlazBlue franchise. These are all fairly short remixes of popular battle songs and character themes, with each one attached to a cute and cartoony stage full weird food and other objects to destroy. The soundtrack is mostly instrumental and largely veers into the rock/metal category, though it's almost always upbeat and fast-paced. As somebody with only a passing familiarity with the franchise, I'm not sure if all of the fan favorites are represented here. What I do know is that a lot of these songs are catchy and the soundtrack is easily the best part of this package.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game pales in comparison. Eat Beat DeadSpike-san is a shallow rhythm game that squanders a lot of its potential. When I say that all you do is tap the left and right shoulder buttons, I mean it. You'll occasionally need to hold the button down and mash both buttons at the same time for a big rock finish, but there really isn't anything else to the gameplay. I found that the repetition started to get to me after only a few songs.

It doesn't help that the calibration is tough to get right. You can fine tune the target timing in the options, but it's a little unclear and didn't work as well as other rhythm games. Even after fiddling with the options, it felt like I was missing notes I should have hit. For what it's worth, this is a bit better when playing in handheld mode. What's more, if you do decide to go that way, you'll be able to control every part of this game with the touchscreen, just like the mobile phone versions.

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In a lot of ways, this feels like a big step back for the genre, especially when it comes to some of the fundamentals. I can get over the fact that there are only twenty songs and nothing in the way of a story mode, but where are the leaderboards? Where are the multiplayer modes? It's one thing to not include two-player support, but it still would have been nice to compare your scores to the rest of the world. I found that there was very little incentive to go back and replay the stages, so unless you love these songs and don't mind playing the stages in order to hear them, you may find that the fun is short-lived.

On a more positive note, I like the cartoony graphics and variety in backgrounds. It's cute how the characters will chomp and destroy the food in their way, and I like that there are a few pairs to choose from. It's also nice that all of the music is unlocked from the start, so you can jump right to your favorite song and even play it on different difficulties. Most of the elements are here, but Arc System Works hasn't figured out how to put it all together.

I don't know if it's because this started its life as a mobile game or the developers simply ran out of ideas, but Eat Beat DeadSpike-san is a shallow experience where the fun comes in short bursts. This is a title that never rises above the surface level, instead giving us a fairly generic rhythm game that gets boring quickly. This awesome music deserves a much better game.