I miss when rhythm games were weird. The runaway success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band standardized the genre, turning most rhythm games that came after into musical performance simulators. But before that, rhythm games were really funky in their presentation. You’d still be playing music, hitting buttons in time with the beat, but the hows and whys were always so much more than “become a rock star!” Gitaroo Man, which released on the PS2 in 2002, is one of the last of its kind, the “weird-ass, cool-ass” rhythm games that flourished before everything turned into Rock Band.
Gitaroo Man is Sailor Moon set to music. Talking animals, transformations, monster of the week, Sailor Moon. Young “U-1” (as he’s known in the English version, in Japanese he’s called the much more normal-sounding Yuichi) is a drab, kinda dorky kid, picked on by his rival Kazuya, and in love with the girl next door, Pico. Accompanied by his talking dog Puma, one day as U-1 tries and fails to get Pico’s attention, the entire town is suddenly attacked by aliens. Puma transforms into a robot and hurls a guitar-like weapon to U-1 which transforms him into a taller, handsomer, more powerful version of himself: Gitaroo Man.
To defeat the invading aliens and other enemies throughout the game, Gitaroo Man must fight them with the power of music. Songs are divided into stages in which Gitaroo Man powers up, guards against enemy attacks, then delivers a finishing blow.
As each song plays, a line shoots to the center of the screen that you follow with the joystick as it squiggles around. Layered on top of the line are notes you must hit and hold with button presses. The result creates the effect that you’re playing a guitar. Both of my hands are engaged as they would be on a real instrument. The strumming is pressing and holding buttons while changing notes on the fret is following the line as it jiggles across the screen. It’s much more simple than what Guitar Hero and Rock Band would later demand of us, but it’s still clever in its execution.
Already I’m in love. Visually, the game is stunning, especially on PS5. It’s just as distracting looking at the antics of colorful characters dancing around in the background as it is trying to manage half a dozen PS controller buttons zipping across the screen. Over my many years of playing rhythm games, everything has kinda bled together into different flavors of thin-to-no plot stretched over lanes of notes shooting at you. For being a game that came out 24 years ago, Gitaroo Man feels fresh with its music fight setup. And by god, is it a fight.
Because Gitaroo Man is such a different format from the rhythms and the games that I’m used to, it’s quite difficult to play. I expect to see the game’s UI pulse in time with the beat, that’s been a rhythm game standard for a long time. Not so with Gitaroo Man. You hit the button when it reaches the reticle in the middle of the screen. Is it on the beat? Half beat? I don’t know, figure it out, doofus. This game is also not for the faint of visual processing heart. During a song’s guard stage, you have to hit the different face buttons as they zoom toward the center of the screen from the four cardinal directions. It’s hard to keep track of what to hit when as they all fly toward the center of the screen seemingly at once, only to switch to squiggle-line gameplay half a second later and, oh god, I’m dead. Game Over.
You do get better over time, but an insidious part of Gitaroo Man’s design is that the song is never quite the same each time you play it. It’ll remix sections during a song’s battle stage, meaning to learn a song, you don’t memorize it in sequence, but in little chunks you then piece together as you play.
Is it evil? Yes. Is it fun? Hell yes. Gitaroo Man’s gameplay helps me understand why rhythm games evened out the way they did, but it also makes me appreciate how damn unique it was. One thought I had playing this game was how much it inspired the same joy that playing Elite Beat Agents did on the Nintendo DS. Little did I know that Gitaroo Man was its ancestor, designed by the same man, Keiichi Yano. That game, which leveraged the DS touch screen to do almost the same thing Gitaroo Man does, was also a vibrant, different, rhythm game—one that still brings me nigh to tears when I think about some of those songs. (If you know, you know.)
I want rhythm games to feel like that again. The Guitar Hero era was fun, it was enjoyable to rock out to some of your favorite songs with friends. But I wanna get weird with it again, clever with it, the way Gitaroo Man was.
The story you just read is part of the 2002 edition of Warp Week, a Kotaku series that takes readers back to gaming’s past through a mix of time-dilated reviews, retrospectives, and on-the-ground reports.
