#AND DONT HAVE THE FUCKING. DROP THE OG GAME AND ABANDON ITS STORY SHIT

[solomiracle]

i am curious on your thoughts on ruri tunes...I personally like it quite a bit but it definitely makes it harder to binge through chapters as i get tired of playing the same 7 songs lol. I also wondered how they'd keep it interesting, considering I'm only on ch 12 and am dreading having to go to 30 with the same songs on the same normal level

OH BOY OH BOY ANON IM ABOUT TO BE SO ANNOYING >:D

On it's own, I like Ruri Tunes! I love the gameplay and the chibi characters are so cute!! But as a whole... it just doesn't work. Ruri Tunes is a rhythm game that's awkwardly shoved in, then forced to be important in a completely different kind of game.

Outside of mini-games or events, rhythm games aren't a thing you can just slide into your unrelated game with no warning. They're a genre, after all. You can't just put one into a visual novel dating sim, make it the defining factor of gameplay, and think players who never would've expected nor voiced want for it to be happy. It'd be like if you wanted to play a board game, but after setting everything up, found out that you have to play a first person shooter to determine how many spaces your piece moves. They clash, it's awkward, and most importantly, a lot of players don't like it.

Luckily, I enjoy rhythm games, so Ruri Tunes isn't that much of an issue to me. But it is to a lot of others. I've even seen some people say they've dropped Obey Me because of it. And I get it!! Ruri Tunes is incredibly time consuming (though the devs have clearly stopped caring about that, since non-VIP players can't skip event dance battles in SWD without using devil points), repetitive (as you mentioned, anon, they only have so many songs to use), and not to mention disability unfriendly! If you're going to make it mandatory, at least do something like D4DJ and include an auto mode!! It's like Solmare hates making money or something.

And the worst part about this is that there's genuinely no way to change Ruri Tunes (at least, no ways I can think of) without either making it the center of the game or pushing it to the side entirely. In rhythm games like Bandori or Enstars, you can actually ignore the story and only focus on the songs. You can do this in D4DJ as well, but thanks to the auto mode, you can actually just view the game as a visual novel with a rhythm game mechanic. If the devs were determined to make a full fleged rhythm game in Nightbringer, they should've done something like that. But because they were too afraid to let go of SWD's clunky ass story and gameplay shoved together deal, we got an "evolved" version of dance battles basically... for the worse.

TLDR: Don't mix two drastically different game genres together, unless it was intentional (and advertised as such) from the start. You'll make some people happy, some more people just okay, and a lot more people dropping your game.