Unbeatable
Apr. 12th, 2026 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlI finished the story mode of the gorgeous rhythm game UNBEATABLE, and I feel the same way about it as I did about Mouthwashing - I wish the scope was either a little smaller or a lot bigger.
(This will require spoiling the full plot of the game, as well as some details from the first two-thirds of 1000xRESIST.)
The split between light adventure-game walkarounds and rhythm challenges mostly works, but it's odd how nothing you do in the former affects how the latter plays out.* It would be neat to fuse them, embracing Paper Mario-style rhythmic combat in an RPG framework, but I get how that's a combinatorial nightmare of design and balancing that would produce a vastly different game.
However, I think my issues could be largely resolved if the script was much tighter. As-is, it sketches out some potentially-neat themes in its first five chapters before the final act tries to do way too much on a weak foundation. The stakes and metaphysics of this world just don't land the way they need to; the Silence - monsters summoned by music - never feel like a real existential threat, and the police state charged with suppressing them does not feel authentically brutal.
The character writing is undercooked, too - Beat is kind of an asshole, and we get occasional dream-monologues about her troubled past, but we don't feel the band's alleged struggles with money and morale and police attention. Adding some management-sim mechanics, even light ones, could do a lot to sell a sense of an exhausting pressure cooker - choosing gigs to balance income vs. risk exposure, for instance. And when the finale tries to grapple with how to handle people who have been deeply complicit in atrocities but want to genuinely change, it falls flat because the police state was such a cartoon the whole time.
And the final act's greatest reveal: This whole world is a dream or alternate universe** conjured when Beat in the real world fully snapped after a chain of personal crises, and the origin of the Silence is a clear parallel to her failure to handle the death of her mother. While this reminds me of Pengy's problems with OMORI, I think there is some real potential in the existential horror of living in a world fully extrapolated from your own trauma, knowing that all other people in it exist only to serve your metaphors. Like Masumi in The Power Fantasy, you can't trust anyone to talk to you honestly when the world objectively revolves around you; what does that do to you? Is this any better than struggling just as much at the margins? Even if it the story didn't go that route, these themes should inescapably strangle the whole story rather than come in at the eleventh hour.
1000xRESIST knew how to handle those themes, built from the start around a mundanely-shitty teenager becoming the God-Empress of the last stronghold of humanity. We get plenty of angles on what it's like to be a bit player in someone else's grand psychodrama, and our frameworks of The Protagonists and The Present Day get destabilized over and over. And wrapped around all of it is the beauty and tragedy of Hong Kong and its diaspora, which brings me to another persistent problem with UNBEATABLE.
Its Japanifornia setting is lovely but never really amounts to anything; it's possible I'm missing the subtext, but I was expecting it to have some sort of distinct commentary on Orientalism or the Asian-American diaspora. It isn't obliged to, by any means, but when the lushly-realized dreamworld cuts to one dingy little Chinese-American restaurant in reality, I expect that thread to keep going places. Nothing here is half as biting as RESIST's tiny pan-Asian bunker-city, with its grim joke of having to live and die and engage in serious politics in this ridiculous pastiche of an extinct culture.
The final rhythm segment wraps up my complaints nicely: after playing as just Beat*** for the whole game, we end with a grand performance from the whole band, switching characters every few measures, but there's no observable difference in how their sections play out. If we're not going to use the main gameplay for storytelling here, then what the fuck are we doing?
*Inexcusably, the cop-punching is the least interesting of the rhythm minigames.
**I appreciate the game's refusal to pin down what the two worlds' relationship is, that was the correct thematic choice.
***Well, Quaver shows up for times when you have to hold down two notes at once, but still
(This will require spoiling the full plot of the game, as well as some details from the first two-thirds of 1000xRESIST.)
The split between light adventure-game walkarounds and rhythm challenges mostly works, but it's odd how nothing you do in the former affects how the latter plays out.* It would be neat to fuse them, embracing Paper Mario-style rhythmic combat in an RPG framework, but I get how that's a combinatorial nightmare of design and balancing that would produce a vastly different game.
However, I think my issues could be largely resolved if the script was much tighter. As-is, it sketches out some potentially-neat themes in its first five chapters before the final act tries to do way too much on a weak foundation. The stakes and metaphysics of this world just don't land the way they need to; the Silence - monsters summoned by music - never feel like a real existential threat, and the police state charged with suppressing them does not feel authentically brutal.
The character writing is undercooked, too - Beat is kind of an asshole, and we get occasional dream-monologues about her troubled past, but we don't feel the band's alleged struggles with money and morale and police attention. Adding some management-sim mechanics, even light ones, could do a lot to sell a sense of an exhausting pressure cooker - choosing gigs to balance income vs. risk exposure, for instance. And when the finale tries to grapple with how to handle people who have been deeply complicit in atrocities but want to genuinely change, it falls flat because the police state was such a cartoon the whole time.
And the final act's greatest reveal: This whole world is a dream or alternate universe** conjured when Beat in the real world fully snapped after a chain of personal crises, and the origin of the Silence is a clear parallel to her failure to handle the death of her mother. While this reminds me of Pengy's problems with OMORI, I think there is some real potential in the existential horror of living in a world fully extrapolated from your own trauma, knowing that all other people in it exist only to serve your metaphors. Like Masumi in The Power Fantasy, you can't trust anyone to talk to you honestly when the world objectively revolves around you; what does that do to you? Is this any better than struggling just as much at the margins? Even if it the story didn't go that route, these themes should inescapably strangle the whole story rather than come in at the eleventh hour.
1000xRESIST knew how to handle those themes, built from the start around a mundanely-shitty teenager becoming the God-Empress of the last stronghold of humanity. We get plenty of angles on what it's like to be a bit player in someone else's grand psychodrama, and our frameworks of The Protagonists and The Present Day get destabilized over and over. And wrapped around all of it is the beauty and tragedy of Hong Kong and its diaspora, which brings me to another persistent problem with UNBEATABLE.
Its Japanifornia setting is lovely but never really amounts to anything; it's possible I'm missing the subtext, but I was expecting it to have some sort of distinct commentary on Orientalism or the Asian-American diaspora. It isn't obliged to, by any means, but when the lushly-realized dreamworld cuts to one dingy little Chinese-American restaurant in reality, I expect that thread to keep going places. Nothing here is half as biting as RESIST's tiny pan-Asian bunker-city, with its grim joke of having to live and die and engage in serious politics in this ridiculous pastiche of an extinct culture.
The final rhythm segment wraps up my complaints nicely: after playing as just Beat*** for the whole game, we end with a grand performance from the whole band, switching characters every few measures, but there's no observable difference in how their sections play out. If we're not going to use the main gameplay for storytelling here, then what the fuck are we doing?
*Inexcusably, the cop-punching is the least interesting of the rhythm minigames.
**I appreciate the game's refusal to pin down what the two worlds' relationship is, that was the correct thematic choice.
***Well, Quaver shows up for times when you have to hold down two notes at once, but still
