Arcaea

Two young girls explore a shattered world filled with sound: a past to be uncovered.

Not the tagline I’d have gone with personally, and a lot of people seeing the logo out of context probably got confused by this too, but in reality while Arcaea is a rhythm game, it also has a lot of story stuff going on in the background. Anyways, Arcaea is probably one of the best mobile rhythm games out there right now, and this is coming from someone who’s played a lot of MRGs.

So Arcaea plays kinda similarly to the Konami game Sound Voltex, and the inspiration is very clear. Both games have 4 button lanes on the bottom, and a blue and red laser. However instead of using knobs for lateral lasers like Voltex, the lasers in Arcaea move up and down the field as well as laterally, leading to a lot of interesting charting where it feels like your fingers are dancing around eachother during the charts. At higher levels, Arcaea also introduces Sky Input notes, which are blue notes that can appear anywhere in the 2D input area, not just along the floor.

Arcaea is a bit of a tricky difficulty curve to get into, as not only do you have to manage timing, but also location on the screen, but to ease you into it, the charting does follow a few rules. Past (easy) charts only use the floor lanes, and the lasers are snapped to the top of the sky input, and Present (normal) has some icons that pop up before a laser moves up or down in the field. It will take a lot of time to get used to the 2D nature of the game’s inputs however, so don’t be discouraged if it takes you some time.

On mobile, the game is free to play with a solid library of music available off the bat, and more unlockable through “World” mode, which is the stamina based mode. But, it uses an in-app currency called Memories to unlock additional premium songs and song packs, with the usual rate being ~100 Memories per song unlock. Unlocking a pack usually costs 500 Memories and gives you access to 5-8 songs, usually an extra partner character, and for non-collab packs, some of the game’s story.

On Switch, the game has a cost for entry, but comes with most song packs unlocked as part of the initial fee. Some subset of packs that were released after the switch release are available as paid DLC to the game.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moe.low.arc Free to play
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Arcaea-1964682.html £34.99