"Not the best tunes, but the controller is neat"

Seeing as the number of remixes of Pop n’ Music has almost reached the double digits in Japan, there must be something about the game that I’m missing. As far as music games go, Pop n’ Music is definitely fun and challenging enough, but for me it didn’t have the same addiction factor as other music games such as UmJammer Lammy and Guitar Freaks.

Pop n’ Music is a “pure” music game in that it doesn’t run along any kind of story or plotline. While there are several different characters to control, the purpose of selecting them is merely because they open up different stages and offer different difficulty levels. There are also hidden stages to unlock depending on what stages you have played beforehand.

The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward as well. As a song plays, colored beads that represent musical notes and sounds scroll down the screen and you have to touch the corresponding button at the right time (as it passes through a horizontal line) to fill in parts of the music—a bongo rhythm, vocal samples, guitar riffs, and a selection of other instruments. During each song you are facing off against a computerized “opponent” on the other side of the screen who is attempting to complete the same song with a higher score. This opponent can attack you and do things like make the notes on the screen disappear for a while so you can’t see the notes that are coming up.

Pop n’ Music is definitely more fun if you have the special flat 9-button Pop n’ Music controller. With this controller, the placement of the notes is very intuitive, whereas it’s almost impossible to play the more advanced levels in the game with only a conventional PlayStation controller. I can’t stress this enough; if you’re going to bother with this game at all, shell out the extra cash and hunt down the Pop n’ Music controller for yourself, otherwise you’ll only get a shallow taste of what the game is really all about.

Where I take issue with Pop n’ Music is in its presentation. The graphics are rather weak and cheap looking. Not pseudo-cheap as in the 2-D cut-outs of UmJammer Lammy or PaRappa the Rapper, but just cheap. The graphics are flat with barely any animation, and the colors have a faded and washed out look that reminds me of the NES.

Moreover, and most importantly, I was not overly impressed with the selection of songs. If you’re a fan of fluffy J-Pop then you shouldn’t have an issue with the music, but I found most of them to be childish and lacking in substance. The quality of the sounds themselves wasn’t very good either, in that they sounded quite synthetic and flat. I would have like to hear better quality sounds in a music game.

Pop n’ Music is much more coy about revealing its hidden songs than other music games. Instead of just listing all the songs up front, and letting you choose anything from the very beginning, secret songs reveal themselves only after you take a specific route through a game (for example, combining song x + song y = secret song as the third stage). Because of this, I’m really not sure just how many songs are in Pop n’ Music altogether. Sufficed to say there is an adequate number to keep you busy for a while until you’ve mastered them all. Unfortunately, the songs quickly become cloying and likely won’t be enough motivation to revisit the game just to hear the songs again.

I can’t really figure out who this game is supposed to be for. Given the nondescript graphics, childish characters and the insipid music, one would think it was for kids, but then kids would never be able to handle the complexity and speed of the note patterns. I guess you have go into the game and just accept it for what it is without taking it too seriously. (Hey, you could even embrace it for its cheesieness, like a good B movie!) Then you will probably get some satisfaction out of it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/01, Updated 05/06/03