Making too many mistakes causes poor Vibri to devolve, first into a frog, and finally an insect. The challenge is ramped up further by the fact that the stability of the ribbon (and everything on it) deteriorates when you hit a duff note the wildly oscillating wireframe can make it very difficult to time your next move, often leading to further blunders. On top of this, obstacles can also travel along the ribbon at different speeds and cross over each other, meaning that the later stages can be a little tricky. The game becomes more complex when obstacles are combined a loop with a pitfall in it, or a block with a loop on top, for example, requires the player to hit both buttons simultaneously.
The simplicity of design is matched only by the gameplay using just four of the controller’s buttons, the player must guide Vibri along the titular ribbon, navigating obstacles by pressing the corresponding button. The game relies rather heavily on its cute-appeal the badly drawn, angular lines of Vibri the rabbit look adorably childlike, and you can’t help but feel contented as she dances about, babbling on in helium-voiced Japanese and singing nonsensically at the score screen. Was it worthy of more attention than it received? Perhaps!Īs with designer Masaya Matsuura’s previous (and future) efforts, Vib Ribbon featured a very distinctive design aesthetic, displaying the entire game, including menus, in wireframe vector graphics. It was perhaps this quirk-overkill which dented Vib Ribbon’s chances it was released at a time when oddball Japanese music games were not in short supply. Small wonder it is, then, that their other 1999 release, Vib Ribbon, was left floundering and somewhat forgotten in the miasma of rapping dogs, groove-busting hipsters and gyrating space-ladies. Three years later and the market was swollen with games trading on the current music buzz, including NanaOn-Sha’s own Parappa pseudo-sequel, Um Jammer Lammy. In 1996, developer NanaOn-Sha propelled the rhythm-action genre into mainstream popularity with their seminal Playstation hit, Parappa the Rapper.
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