Hidenboh Tap Dance Hero is a rhythm game for the Vita and was only released in Japan. There was no English translation, so everything is in Japanese, but given it is a rhythm game, it isn’t too hard to figure out the menus. There is a story mode, and you can use something like Google Lens to get an idea of what it is about, since it’s told in a visual novel format.
It has a shortish story mode where Stan is hoping to become great at tap dancing. A fictional version of Hideboh (given that Hideboh is a real person that the game was based upon) appears, and along with Airi and a robot, they form a trio group, learning tap dancing and facing off against others, ultimately performing in a competition. It is a simple story and one that’s frankly not that interesting, but it introduces the game to the player and gives it some sense of purpose.
The rhythm game aspect is decent, considering all the inputs are regulated to the touch screen. As far as button prompts go, it is quite simple, with only two styles, tapping the screen, and sliding your finger against the screen. Weirdly enough, the prompt for tapping has three different styles, but then again, there’s only so much variety it can give you using touch screen only.
Given that it is exclusively using the touch screen, it is somewhat lenient in its timing and the rating it gives you for successfully completing the prompt. This is good because the lack of tactility doesn’t give you much to go off if you’ve succeeded or not. Furthermore, your fingers are constantly covering up the screen so in faster songs, it will obscure the next prompt.
The story mode only takes about five or six hours to complete. A lot of those hours are visual novel scenes. The rest are short sections, they’re short because due to aligning it with the story, it represents Hideboh teaching sections of the songs to the characters. Thus, you’re learning a song that’s split into three parts, before you then play the whole song together. This makes it easy to lose interest.
The story ends up being very mediocre in the end as there is a lot of fluff to drag it out, However, the difficulty does get harder towards the final few chapters, and this is where the flaw of the game comes in. By being purely touchscreen, it is too easy to obscure notes and can be hard to tell where the new ones start, especially on the faster beat maps. The result is that there are times when you’re not able to see when a drag prompt ends and the next one starts. Compounding this issue is the lack of tactile feedback from taps.
Once you’ve finished the story mode, the only content left is Arcade mode. Story mode only touches upon roughly half of the songs on offer, and Arcade mode is where you get to play the rest. There is a total of 30 songs across three difficulties, which is a decent amount of selection. Only the songs from the story mode will have the characters dancing in the background, whereas the other half have generic backgrounds. While the same issues persist, such as needing to memorize the beat maps as they are nearly impossible to reach fresh without having already played it, at its best, the beat maps do correspond in time with the music and is a lot of fun.
Overall, Hideboh Tap Dance Hero has an interesting concept and is initially fun. However, it’s a bit too generic in its story and its gameplay. Basically, the only actions are tapping and swiping. Even though there are something like five different types of button prompts, four of them are still just tapping at the right moment. You can’t help but feel that this game was developed in the height of the touchscreen craze and the gameplay suffers from it, lending to some higher difficulty if you’re into testing your skills.
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