Symphonica Review

Fan-favorite Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! developer iNis is laying it on thick with iOS Square Enix collaborations these days, first with Demon’s Score and now Symphonica, available now for iPhone and iPad. While Demon’s Score channeled Ouendan directly, this latest effort is more of a mash-up between the DS classic and Guitar Hero, with a heavy focus on classical music and lengthy narrative interludes.

Each of Symphonica’s music tracks present gamers with a series of taps, holds or patterned swipes appearing at varying tempos. Build combos of successive and precise hits without misses and you’ll rack up a higher score for the song and a better overall rating. The trick here is that you won’t be tapping to Gaga. Instead, you’ll be matching the mad beats of old-school composers like Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

Interspersed between the gameplay you’ll get to know the cast of characters that make up your symphony, the Fayharmonic. You play as lead young conductor Takt, a hero aspiring to be his best. Cue Eye of the Tiger… or in this case, maybe Ravel’s Bolero?

The narrative cut-scenes in Symphonica felt like they took up more than half my time playing the game. The characters were generally one-dimensional and the whole story experience felt like a selling point that was tacked on to make the price reasonable, when what I really wanted was more songs and more challenge.

The gameplay isn’t thrillingly difficult. While you might not achieve the heralded “SSS” score at a song’s finish, you’re also not likely to ever actually fail. The bigger annoyance is that whether you perform well or poorly seems to have little to no impact on the story – S-Rank or C-rank, the Fayharmonic progresses upward and onward through the game’s musical storyline

The true star of Symphonica is its collection of 500-year-old classical music. It’s absurdly fun to play a modern rhythm-based game to Symphony No. 5 or The Planets, “Jupiter” by Gustav Holst.

Unfortunately, Square Enix seems to love making something that would be an obvious purchase at standard iPhone pricing a hard-to-recommend at “Square Enix pricing.” You get a few movements (episodes or chapters, basically) to play for free with the download of Symphonica, but after that each movements (usually a single song and a few story-based practice attempts) are $2.99 each. Movements can be grabbed at $6.99 for groupings of four or $14.99 for all 12, plus bonus episodes.

Allegro! Andante! Conducting a touch-screen orchestra is oddly satisfying.

Overall there are 16 episodes and 20 songs available for $14.99. If this sounds like you’re paying a lot for a single song’s worth of gameplay, that’s because you definitely are.