I bought a copy of Rhyme Rider Kerorican for the Wonderswan tonight that I'd been staring at in the same game shop for a year and a half (and had apparently been in that store for nearly three years judging by the stock date on the price tag). I'll embed a longplay up top, but the main gimmick is that, unlike all other Wonderswan games, it's played neither horizontally nor vertically; you have to hold the system diagonally. Trippy! Part of my grabbing it has to do with just wanting more games to play on IPS-modded Color and part of it is just it being a game that's forever been on my to-do list since it's more or less a 2D redux of NanaOnSha's own Vib-Ribbon, a game that is tremendously responsible for sparking my interest in Japanese games to begin with.
Anyway, NanaOnSha games have always been incredibly hit or miss for me. I've never been super big on Parappa/Lammy beyond their aesthetics and the only non-Vib-Ribbon game I've enjoyed in the past was Mojib Ribbon, which mixes sumi-e visuals with proto-vocaloid raps and a control scheme that solely uses the right stick to emulate calligraphy brush strokes. Ultimately, I don't mind that most of their output hasn't been for me because, if nothing else, they're generally unafraid of being different, success or not. But man, somehow I'd never caught wind that Kerorican is all of four levels long and that button timings are damn near indecipherable. My physical aptitude for rhythm games might be tapering a little with age, but I like to think my sense of rhythm is still on point and yet for the life of me, I just cannot figure which beats in any of these otherwise pretty middling songs I'm supposed to playing to for the life of me. I'm just utterly baffled in a way I've never felt with pretty much any other rhythm game, even the ones I'm not so hot at.
I thought maybe the IPS screen having a different refresh rate than native Wonderswan screens could be the culprit, so I tried playing the game on my unmodded Swan Crystal and still the same issue. The only success I've found has been when I basically just pay the absolute minimum attention to the music and just focus on specific animation timings for each "enemy" I come across, which just defeats the purpose at that point. (Also the font is just god awful for my non-native brain in the way a lot of boldface, off-kilter Japanese game fonts tend to be, which makes even the slight tutorials its own ordeal to parse. I don't expect to be catered to for these things, but it still sucks big time!)
Probably gonna keep hammering at it for at least a little longer to see if I'm just missing something and need more time to click, but man. At this point, I'd rather play that embarrassing Vib-Ribbon re-release on PSN that doesn't let you import music into it because at least that game's built-in soundtrack is iconic (and there's 50 percent more music, to boot!). Can't win 'em all when it comes to bucket list games, truly. 😮💨