Review: Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

destructoid.com:

Last year, I visited Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to see the 35th-anniversary edition of the Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy concert series. I don’t love every Final Fantasy game, but sitting in that concert hall, with a comically overpriced music box in a bag at my feet, for a couple of hours, I did. And when I play Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, I love every Final Fantasy game again.

Depending on which games you want to count, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, a mechanical celebration of the music of Final Fantasy, is somewhere between the third and seventh Theatrhythm game. I love the series — developer indieszero has an impressive understanding of what makes music interesting, and these games have always done a fantastic job of translating songs from the ears to the fingers. Unsurprisingly, the studio has done its thing once more, and Final Bar Line feels amazing.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line (PS4, Switch [Reviewed])Developer: indieszero Corporation, Ltd.Publisher: Square EnixReleased: February 16, 2023MSRP: $49.99

The first thing I noticed when I started playing Final Bar Line was just how much stuff there is. The game’s campaign mode, dubbed “Series Quests”, features 29 “Title” banners. Each of these banners features a series of quests (oh, hey, that’s why they’re called Series Quests) full of music from a single Final Fantasy game or, in some instances, a small handful of related titles; the shortest of these questlines features five stages, and the longest boasts 32, with most of them leveling out somewhere in the 10-20 range.

Immediately, I was worried. The last Theatrhythm Final Fantasy game featured 221 tracks at launch. My favorite indieszero rhythm game, Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, features