Editing review as I'm playing more through the game.
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I want to preface by saying I'd rather give it a mixed review, but I'll play devil's advocate similarly to the other reviews of this kind.

I purchased this on a bit of an impulse, but that's because I could tell the music is very fitting and the art style is very very cute. Additionally, after playing through it, I can also tell that there was *work* put into this game, especially for recreating patterns into the scope of this game's gameplay and the ways certain ideas for the characters are meshed into it. It's very eye-candy to see and play.

However, this game is plainly difficult by design, and it might not be obvious why at first when you play it. You control Suwako, who only has "free" horizontal movement and follows a set route vertically, in which you have access to the top and bottom halves of the screen respectively depending on if you've timed the button at the bottom where she hops. Because of this, the game is a mix of trying to keep the rhythm going while dodging danmaku, which can get really confusing for the brain. The saving grace is the guidelines that appear on the screen, but a lot of practice probably has to get drilled in for my brain to not consistently high-jump over and over again in a death spiral when I'm wanting to wait to stay on the bottom half. That's not a problem on it's own, but it gets punishing in a game like this where a lot of stages are dependent on this multi-tasking, especially for characters that have specific "win conditions" for their patterns.

And yes, that means there are certain intended ways to defeat characters. At first the gameplay is very simple and even helps you out by showing the timing for the first stage at the bottom of the screen, but after that you're on your own. It's not really a matter of being a "rhythm" game as much as it is a puzzle avoidance game especially after mechanics start getting added per-character that you may get blindsided on (such as Rumia's darkness making the majority of the screen dark) or dealing with legendary gatekeeper bosses like Kanako and co. who rely on the mechanic of having to time your shots & memorize the beat timings to shoot other objects that will clear away bullets. It's a good and cool addition that feels natural, but I think the problem is that there's not a tutorial/example stage that'll help you get tuned-in as much as the first stage does. So, arguably, the game is not frustrating for some, but it feels like a head-scratcher for me at times.

Unfortunately, I've also discovered that there's no strict limiter on how fast you can shoot - meaning even between beats or by rapidly mashing, you can shoot the enemy many times within a second. This sadly turns a bunch of patterns into trivialized wins if you're solely looking to clear, and after the Kanako bump, I managed to defeat the second half of the stages very easily knowing this without having actually learned or engaged with the patterns. At some point, trying to learn both the horizontal danmaku patterns + getting accustomed to things such as BPM/measure changes felt like too much of a chore.

This brought be to (nearly) seeing everything there is from the game within less than an hour in terms of doing a basic clear of every stage. There's 16 stages, which *does* sound like a lot, and, again, I don't want to under-estimate the amount of work that must've been done for the finished product, but I think another problem is that you're expected to get the value out of MoriyaRhythm by getting perfect clears on every stage (via combo, no-hit and speed, the last which I've accidentally gotten using the button-mashing method). Typically, I only reserve perfect play in these arcadey-type games as the end-goal, whereas here it seems to be the way you should end up fully experiencing the content. I think a game like this could've benefitted from difficulty options or maybe different modes like randomization or "mash-ups", because I can see it being like Rhythm Heaven in terms of intent. I'd dare say Early Access could've helped it if they intended on adding much more content so that we could see more characters/patterns, or have more feedback and testing to see if the kinks could be ironed out. In the end, my opinion is that even when the audio cues are "plainly" there, it's chaotic to focus and understand what to do with them with everything else going on.

This might be scatterbrained as I'm writing this before going to bed, but I do notice that watching other videos do some stages make more "sense" in my head. I'll try to see if I'll have the drive to go back and genuinely beat the stages without cheesing them and maybe go for the medals here and there, but I'm not particularly inclined to. I'd love to see more tweaks to the formula in the future because I do think the foundation is very promising - I could see full side-scrolling stages with mooks being a possibility, but for all I know, this could be a finished product unless I'm missing public update posts somewhere.

I think the price for this game could be a dealbreaker for its current state due to the length, and for the particular type of gameplay it has. Again, there are arcadey games such as the original BIT.TRIP series that function a similar way to MoriyaRhythm's formula, except they didn't really require mastery to fully appreciate. Unless you really love the artstyle or just want to shell out money to support more doujin fangames popping up on Steam, I think there's plenty of games at the current price point to give it a pass.

Anyway, I'll still be curious on what this team makes next if they end up making more games. I'll still have to applaud the presentation and UI. I still wanna re-iterate that I didn't dislike playing the game - it felt like a sweet treat if anything, but that's why I hope there will be additions or some reworks to how the game plays out, even with the risk of making it easier. There's probably others who have more eloquent and specific opinions on what they feel needs changing, but I'll leave it with this:

still being able to get hit by the top and bottoms of Kanako's pillars even after clearing them away in the faster segments is a lil bit evil!

P.S. I'd like the Wireless Audio warning to be dismissed, it entirely blots away the character art and we've had studies on wireless speeds for a while...

This game is enough to make you to remove your Brain
very stress-friendly game, trust me !

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