vib-ribbon

"Dancing rabbits, screaming Japanese pop music and replayability extending to the size of your CD collection."

After I plucked this game off the shelf and took it to the guy at the counter, he looked at it and said, 'So what does this thing do?'

I tried to explain with what knowledge I had, and we both agreed it would be pretty bizarre. It IS pretty bizarre!

I'm fanatical about Um Jammer Lammy, and vib-ribbon was the next musical game from NanaOn-sha, the same team who gave us 'Jammer' and Parappa the Rapper. vib-ribbon moves through similar musical territory, but goes off in a new and (at first glance) incredibly strange direction.

Vibri is the character you control, a dancing rabbit who speaks in a language that might be half Japanese and half English, but often passes for %100 gibberish. Anyway, she's intensely cute. 'Vib' is a name which evokes 'vibrato', 'vibe' and any other similar musical terms. The ribbon is a moving soundwave which travels from left to right or right to left across your screen, pulsing into different shapes depending on what the musical soundtrack is doing at the time. You have to guide Vibri along the ribbon, hitting different combinations of four buttons (L1, R1, down and X, often two of these at once) in time to the music to negotiate the obstacle course presented by the sound wave.

So yes, the basic music game idea is recognisable, but visually it's become a weird far-removed cousin of the platform game. The music creates a landscape, and your 'playing along' with the button presses makes your character leap, fly, duck, tumble and dance over the obstacles. If you handle enough obstacles correctly in a row, Vibri can evolve into SuperVibri, a flashier caped version of herself who can score more points. If you crash through nine obstacles, you de-volve into a frog at first, then again into a little worm (with what appears to be a television for a head) and then you DIE! Well, you don't really die. There's no violence in this world, you just flunk the level.

Now in the graphics department, you may at first be taken aback. The whole game transpires in black and white only, in the style of line drawings or classic arcade game vector graphics. It's a bold move, and gives vib-ribbon an utterly distinctive, almost psychedelic style. Just don't let this put you off if you've never enjoyed vector graphics before! It's part of the charm and personality of the game that you will quickly get used to.

There are five two-part psychotronic songs that come with the game, and they're decidedly weirder than anything in Jammer or Parappa. They're performed by an outfit known as 'Laugh and Beats', fronted by a young Japanese woman with the most emotive bubblegum voice to ever break glass. This is a world of elastic and screamy Japanese pop/rock with candy lyrics and mangled English, and then some more Japanese thrown into the mix. Savour the crunchy weirdness for yourself:

- From the song known as Overflowing Emotions

You're not the baby of my heart
I'm not your mummy
Do you know?
Can't you see?

Beautiful.

These wonderful songs are split over three difficulty levels of obstacle course: Bronze (easy), silver (medium) and gold (hard). If you're new to this genre of musical game, it will take some effort and quite a few bomb-outs to get a handle on basic play. Don't fret though, because I guarantee that it will come to anyone in time; I have watched everyone from a klutzy teen to an absolutely jaded twenty-something tackle this game.

The vector graphics are particularly handy for rotation to any angle, an element which the game exploits for some clever effects. It can zoom in or out, or turn the ribbon further 'into' the screen to give you a view far ahead into the song. It also reveals some interesting psychological hardwiring of the human brain that happened when you learned to read: When the music flips left to right, so that you're travelling leftwards, you'll find that your skill drops. It's not natural for us to read from right to left, and it shows.

On the other hand, if you've played games of this type before - maybe you're even good at them - it's entirely possible for you to clear all of the basic songs in thirty minutes.

'What!?' you cry. 'Thirty minutes? That's TOO SHORT!'

Hold onto your hats, because only now shall I reveal to you the most important element of vib-ribbon.

You can use any musical or audio CD in the world, put it in your Playstation, queue up tracks and watch and listen as the game generates levels based on the music therein as you play along to it! It's quite a revolutionary idea, an excellent use of the Playstation's capabilities that no-one else has exploited before, and it means you have potentially unlimited fun ahead of you.

Like a buzzed-up DJ, you will find yourself hauling out your whole CD collection, trying every genre of music and every song to see what kind of patterns and levels the game will throw up at you in response. The dynamic difficulty will shock, surprise and delight. Behind the cute and basic outward appearances, vib-ribbon must be a deceptively sophisticated program to analyse all kinds of qualities in the music and translate them into the playfield - speed and rhythm, frequencies in the low, high and middle ranges, vocals, and beats and noise. In my experience, dance music tends to produce simplistic, consistent levels that are easy to clear. Rock music seems to produce challenging, highly variable courses. The noisier or more raucous the track, the harder the level. And classical music produces swift levels with incredible variety; an urgent Beethoven piano piece was more than I could handle.

When you play your own CDs, there's also an option for a 'speed challenge', involving a combination of accelerating playfields and improvisation. On 'Hard', this mode will prove difficult or maybe even impossible to clear, depending on the song, and it's always fiercely addictive. Thus there's plenty of dexterous challenge throughout vib-ribbon for those who want it, and great scope for creating your own challenges. Just don't forget to relax the obsessions of your gamer's brain at some point. The higher purpose at work in vib-ribbon is the musical experience itself, pure and simple. It's about grooving, playing along, 'seeing' music and daring to enjoy the psychedelica of a singing and dancing rabbit.

The game has a miraculous proven pull upon onlookers, and at a party it's the rare console item you could leave running all night and which gamer and non-gamer alike might find equally beguiling. With its spiffy vector graphics, it doesn't look like a game that anyone is familiar with. Though this aspect also draws fire from suspicious geeks that the whole thing just seems too low budget. To be fair, I believe there's actually a grain of truth in the claim. NanaOn-sha could have included more songs from Laugh and Beats, and they could have coded in some high score saving. I doubt vib-ribbon required even half the production effort of Um Jammer Lammy. But quite frankly, who cares? It is what it is, and it's built out of simple elements which draw their strengths from freakish charm and the infinite scope for replayability.

All in all, vib-ribbon is a completely original, bizarre, and addictive game, with the ability to play new levels from any music CD you own a true gaming innovation. Music or dancing game fans should definitely chase up what is undoubtedly the strangest entry into the genre to date (and if you're in the USA where many an innovative game has not flown, including this one, we're talking 'the need to import' here.) Lovers of the curious or of Japanese weirdness should also hastily fall upon this game. As for the rest of you... you might be shocked, freaked out or totally bewildered. Some people will never like the presentation. But I suspect that if you like any kind of music, the dancing Japanese rabbit will hook you in the end.

-- vib-ribbon -- 8/10 --

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/00, Updated 11/14/01