Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure is a rhythm puzzle game initially exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS but later ported to iOS. It plays like a cross between Professor Layton and Rhythm Heaven. The bulk of the gameplay are rhythm based minigames. These are usually quite inventive and can either use the touchscreen or buttons, so you'll be swapping often between the two. You'll be tapping on the touchscreen in time with the music to fight enemies or escape via running on the roof and vaulting over obstacles. Then you'll be matching colors in time with prompts in order to hide or one of the most unique uses being sliding the stylus across the touchscreen in time with the violin strings, to simulate playing the violin. You will always look forward to what the game has next in store.
Most of the minigames have prompts but sometimes it is easier to ignore the prompts and focus onscreen or the music instead. For example, tilting the system for the dog to eat meat being thrown at him or determining when to tap and hold to receive food on a pan to cook and then plate it. At the end of each rhythm game, it will give you a rank. The way the ranks are calculated is very unfair. You could go the whole minigame missing nothing and then at the end you miss one or two and you'll drop down to a C rank. Conversely, you can do the first half badly and then in the second half do everything perfectly and you'll get an A rank. Getting all A ranks is required in order to unlock one of the bonus chapters.
The rhythm games start to repeat soon after, and slowly increases the difficulty. It's manageable until the seventh chapter where it throws much harder games that are annoying to get the timing down correctly. It doesn't help when it introduces a completely different one relying on motion controls but lacks in explaining what you need to do. That is one of the most frustrating parts of the game and massively drops the ball. The rhythm games in the last three chapters are frustrating and annoying. They change their tempos or styles midway through, the lack of proper explanations on the rhythms and the visual cues being more difficult. You'll start to fail them repeatedly and the game expects you to keep trying and trying and trying. This huge difficulty spike gets tedious and completely breaks the flow of the story.
The forced motion controls in some of the games completely break the rhythm and adds nothing to the game. It feels overly gimmicky when this happens. The other side of the gameplay is puzzles. These are usually easy and music based such as memorizing patterns or matching musical notes. The bulk of the single player involves a story mode where it follows Phantom R, a thief who only steals certain artworks. This is because he is trying to find his father, whose only clue is a certain mark, one that also shows up on certain artworks. After stealing a bracelet, he meets up with Marie, a violinist. Together, they encounter a resurrected Napoleon, who is curiously always on their tail and wanting something from them. This leads to a bigger more intriguing mystery.
The story is told via gorgeous animated cutscenes with really well done 3D and visual novel style cutscenes. There is a generous amount of animated cutscenes such that it never feels like a once-off gimmick at the start never to be seen again. As the story goes on, it gets more farfetched. Phantom R will meet allies and villains but the villain's objective is never truly clear or believable enough. After an out of the blue ending, it ends on sequel hook which is somewhat annoying. It's a bland story overall since it never seems to pick up and mainly just revolves around Phantom R's involving with Marie, a girl that he met on the street (and the obvious love interest).
You advance the story via an overhead map where you move from spot to spot on the top screen, and the bottom screen will show the environmental artwork which you can interact with the touchscreen. At each location, you can tap onscreen for coins to purchase story cutscenes and music for replaying at your leisure, finding unique sounds to solve riddles, and finding the hidden music notes. There are a total of 10 chapters in the main story and each chapter takes around 30 minutes. Therefore, the game is fairly short at only 6-7 hours or so. However, the longevity comes from playing the minigames again in order to achieve higher scores and better ranks, as well as the collectibles, which unlocks the first and second bonus chapters, while getting an A rank on all minigames will get you the third bonus chapter.
A few pieces of the soundtrack were excellent (all the violin pieces were great) but a lot of the soundtrack was unremarkable too. Overall, Rhythm Thief and the Emperor's Treasure work well as a combination of rhythm gameplay and a tighter (but still unrefined) story. The difficulty spike is a hindrance and significant flaw towards the latter part of the game but the gorgeous cutscenes and charm of the design helps overcome that.
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