Appreciate the kind words! Many hidden gems throughout the eShop. Gotta take a chance and do some blind purchases once in a while, lol.
Pianista
Made a quick and dirty video of some gameplay using clips I recorded:
First off, this game is available on mobile for free. So if you want to try it out, by all means. One of the big differences is there are no touchscreen options in the Switch version.
On the main menu, you have various options:
Matinee - Arcade mode. 3 stages. Each stage has about 25 songs to choose from. A total of over 70+ songs.
Concours - Challenge mode. Each challenge has 4 songs and they give you a mission (for example, the first set asks you to get a total score of 5,500,000 or higher). 30 challenges in total (15 with 4 keys and 15 with 6 keys).
Both of these modes can be played with 4 keys or 6 keys.
4 keys involves Left & Up on the Dpad, plus X & A.
6 keys involves Left/Up/Right on the Dpad, and Y/X/A
For Arcade mode, you can choose between 3 difficulties: Light, Normal and Technical.
Ensemble - Co-op play with each person using a single joycon. You can also choose between the 3 difficulties. Each person can play on their own difficulty. This mode is sort of a mix between competitive and cooperative. You can aim to get the higher score between the 2 of you, but you're also trying to get 5 stars on the song as a team.
Library - This is where your stats are. Sorted by composer. You can see what songs you've gotten 5 stars on but you can't see the actual score in this menu. When you're choosing a song is when you can view your score. You can also read a little bio on each composer. To give you an idea of how many charts there are between 4 and 6 keys, there is a total of 2310 stars to collect in Arcade mode!
Piano - Your collectables. When you switch pianos, you change the look of the play field.
Settings - Not much to this. You can change the sync if you feel the music/timing is off. You can also adjust the volume of the sound you get when you miss a note. Not a fan of that sound so I'll probably turn it off.
For Arcade and Challenge modes, you can choose Single play or Ranking play. Playing on Ranking is the only way for your score to appear on the leaderboards. Each song has leaderboards but it's weird you can only view them after you choose a song. There's no menu for you to check whenever you want. Also, after you finish your 3 song set in Arcade, you'll see the total ranking aka the highest scores from the 3 combined songs. Sorted by Top 100 and wherever you're ranked in that 100 (if you made it).
When you're in the middle of a song and you pause the game, when you unpause it, there's a little buffer to give you time to focus so you don't lose combo.
Something that really bothers me is there's no Free Play option. There isn't a mode that has all the songs. You're forced to play through Arcade mode, only having a handful of songs during each stage.
There are 6 different ratings you can get depending on how you hit the note:
Super Marvelous
Marvelous
Excellent
Good
Fair
Poor
Pictures:
Your enjoyment of the game may depend on how much you enjoy classical music. It's a well made game but because of this simple fact, I don't know how much time I will put into it. Some weird decisions like not being able to view leaderboards at any time or some sort of free play mode bother me. I wouldn't say it's a must play game but I don't regret my purchase.
