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After ten musical years, celebrates the Final Fantasy music/rhythm series by showcasing hundreds of tunes from Final Fantasy's thirty-five year run. Furthermore, this is the series's PlayStation and Nintendo Switch debut!
Is this your first time playing Theatrhythm? Or perhaps it's been a while since you played a Theatrhythm title on the Nintendo 3DS or iOS. In either case, we've spent several hours tapping music triggers, slaying bosses, assembling the perfect party, and gathering as much rhythmia as possible. We gathered several helpful tips and tricks from our experience to get you into that Final Fantasy groove in no time!
Experiment With The Controls
Theatrhythm offers plenty of flexibility regarding its control scheme. Most of your controller's buttons can hit Touch Triggers. However, Slide Triggers require directional inputs from your controller's thumbsticks. Both triggers manageable enough on their own. Unfortunately, you'll discover that quickly switching your attention from Touch Triggers to Slide Triggers gets tricky. And once you add Hold Triggers into the mix, the music stages become♔ even more hectic.
Furthermore, controllers come in various shapes and sizes. For instance, the DualShock 4 and DualSense place both thumbsticks in the controller's center. Meanwhile, dual Joycon control keeps thumbsticks off to the sides, with the left stick higher and the right stick lower.
On Basic difficulty, switching from button to thumbstick controls is less formidable. However, once you venture into Expert and Ultimate difficulty, you'll constantly switch back and forth. These high-difficulty music stages also include passages with simultaneous Touch, Slide, and Hold triggers!
Finding the right controller grip will help tighten your reaction times and sync you with the music. Maybe you work best using the face buttons for Touch Triggers. Or perhaps you're more of a ZL/ZR player. Like any musician, you must find the form that works for you.
Use The Trigger SFX For Rhythm Clues
Touch Trigger SFX are a fantastic diagnostic tool in Theatrhythm. For instance, the latency between the SFX and rhythm of the music will inform you if your timing is off. In addition, if you find the SFX and music are unreasonably out of whack, you may need to recalibrate in the MS Options menu.
The Hold Trigger SFX are beneficial for learning rhythmic themes and patterns in a song. Notice the little white nodes inside green hold trigger lines? These nodes wಌill play SFX when they pass through the target. Oftentimes these nodes reflect prevelent recurring rhyth💎ms in the song. Furthermore, these SFX are perfectly in sync with the music.
FMS Hold Triggers Require Less Precision Than You Think
Field Music Stages aren't too different from Battle Music Stages. However, one significant difference is the moving hold trigger, which requires the player to move their thumbstick in sync with the green line. When we first approached these unique hold lines, we struggled to match their positions ღprecisely. Fortunately, the movements required were less subtle than we thought.
You do not need to follow the position of green hold lines strictly. Instead, you need to move the thumbstick up and down according to the line's rises and falls. In other words, you do not need to delicately slide your thumbstick to mirror the hold line. Immediately pushing the thumbstick up and down will give you Critical timing. What's more important is changing direction in time with the music.
Save Harder Quest Missions For Later
Theatrhythm will not let you forget that it is an RPG at heart. Therefore, having perfect rhythm is not enough to clear high-difficulty quests. On the contrary, your party may be too weak to reach the music stage boss by the song's end. Or perhaps you lack the elemental ability necessary to complete an ability-focused quest. No matter the reason, you will find the unbeatable task that reminds you that you cannot escape the grind.
Fortunately, Theatrhythm allows you to queue up five unique parties. So you can level up your weaker parties on less challenging missions. Then, when the time comes, you can revisit a more challenging mission with a party you've developed for a long time. Playing game modes outside of Series Quest, like Music Stages or Multi Battle, will also increase your characters' level.
Suppose your party is strong enough to complete a quest mission, but your rhythm skills are not. In that case, you can perfect that hard-to-clear song in Practice mode. Practice mode is an excellent learning tool that lets you play a song without the risk of failure. Plus, practice mode allows you to move forward or backward in a song through the pause menu. So you can skip the easy stuff 🍌and focus on those handful of measures holding you back.
Sometimes a musical passage is too complex to figure out on your own. Thankfully, Auto Mode is another fantastic training tool showing you exactly how to play a song. Auto Mode, as its name implies, hits every trigger with Rainbow Critical timing. Like Practice Mode, you can skip to different song parts via the pause menu. You'll find Practice and Auto Mode on a song's item and party settings next to the Play button.
Use Music Stage Mode Suggestions To Unlock New Songs
Did you know you can unlock songs without clearing them in Series Quest mode? After completing a song in Music Stage mode, sometimes the game will show you a list of song suggestions based on what you played. These song suggestions are not restricted by how far you've gotten in Series Quest mode. If you choose one of these songs and complete it, you'll unlock the song to play in Music Stage mode! You'll only get three song recommendations at a time. However, you can refresh the suggestion as much as you wish until you find the song you want.
Party Ability Optimization Is Not Mission-Specific
One helpful feature you can utilize while organizing your party is Ability Optimization. This feature will automatically assign the best abilities and summonstone for your party. This sounds perfect on paper. However, this feature is not always the best option. Oftentimes you'll realize that you'll need specific abilities to accomplish certain tasks.
Here's an example. Suppose you're taking on a series quest requiring you to defeat a boss using a fire ability. In that case, you'll have to hand-pick each ability in your party to increase the chance that your final blow is a fire attack. So even if someone in your party has a practical high-damage ability of a different attribute, it may get in the way of completing this specific goal.
The automatic ability optimization feature does not consider your mission at hand. Instead, it picks each character's most effective skills, regardless of their enemy or your mission goal. This oversight makes it crucial to track your enemies' weaknesses and resistances. In addition, track each quest's damage effects. If a damage effect increases or decreases damage dealt by a specific attack attribute, you'll know what abilities you can take advantage of and what abilities you need to avoid.