So I've shown off Beatstar: Touch Your Music, a cool rhythm game with an impressive tracklist and solid difficulty, and Livly Island, the cure and quirky Japanese pet-raising sim where your currency is poop. But have you ever wanted to raise cute Japanese pet characters and play a rhythm game at the same time?? Well have I got the game for you!
This game is based on Sanrio's character line "Beatcats," which I had never heard of before this game. I just saw it on the QooApp new games list and had to try it out based on the tags -- both "Raising Sim" and "Rhythm Game" were on there...
Beatcats Official Fanclub is a hybrid rhythm game and pet-raising simulator. How exactly does that work? It's actually pretty streamlined!
The main menu is your cats' home. You can decorate it with all kinds of cute items like furniture and wallpaper to keep your five cats happy. They're sadly quite expensive, though, so I just have a cardboard box that was given to me for free for playing the game. The rest you can buy with in-game currency that you earn by doing daily tasks. I have enough to buy some of the cheaper things like a solid-colored wallpaper, but even to get an essential item like a bed, it seems like you'll have to play multiple days to save up coin.
From your home, other than just decorating, you can choose to put on a live show (that's the rhythm game component) or train your cats or give them presents to make them happier and get to know them better.
The training isn't normal pet training, though. These cats are superstars, after all! You'll have them do all sorts of strange things like bowing to staff members, singing training... or even standing under a waterfall dodging falling rocks and logs! Each type of training is a simple rhythm-based minigame where you generally just tap to a beat or something like that. After you finish training, your cats will improve in levels such as Teamwork or Intelligence.
Giving gifts is pretty simple, you grab a gift from the gacha and then give it to the cat of your choice. Each cat actually has a name and personality, and can talk (and sing, of course). And they talk. A. LOT. When I first started I was tapping through the introduction scene for literally minutes as the cats nattered on with one another about singing and eating sweets. And when you give them gifts you unlock cutscenes with them. There is so much talking...
When you're done raising your cats (you'll have five 'training hearts' to spend each day on training, and you can only give gifts as much as you can afford them with gold coins), you can choose to put on a live show and play the rhythm game portion of the game!
As far as I can tell, you can play this mode as much as you want with no cooldowns or stamina bars or anything like that. I played quite a bit trying to get full combos or all-perfects on stages.
The rhythm game is quite simple -- a Beatcats official song will play (apparently these cartoon kitties actually release music singles in Japan that you can buy) and notes will arc out from the side of the screen in heart shapes. When the hearts overlap one of the two buttons near the bottom of the screen, you tap the heart. There's also hold notes and releases, which gets interesting when they make you tap at the same time as a release with the other finger, which confuses my poor little dumb hands. With only two buttons, though, there's only so much that can really happen, and it makes the game quite easy.
The music is all very cutesy. Just imagine what you think a j-pop group made of adorable anime kittens would sound like, and that's all the music in Beatcats. I've only unlocked 4 tracks so far, and two of them are variations on the other two, but there seems to be more music in store for people who want to play a lot.
Also during the live stage, sometimes a giant pawprint will fall from the center of the screen. If you tap on this, 3D versions of the cats will appear and dance for a while, or you'll see an album cover of the song you're playing on-screen for a bit.
When you've finished your rhythm stage, you'll get a grade (I got "Great Success" no matter how I performed, though I never missed more than a couple notes in a song) and you'll get some experience toward your fanclub level. When your fanclub levels up, the amount of decorations you can have in your house goes up and you're rewarded with... more talking cutscenes. So... many... talking... cutscenes... I guess it's cute for the little Hello Kitty fans the game is aimed at, but I just wanted to tap rhythmic hearts!
Oh, there's also an hourly weather report you can check. I have absolutely no idea what this does, but it shows it to you when you log in and it has its own button on the main menu. Very strange.
But like anything strange and cute, the game certainly caught my attention. I don't know if I'll actually continue to play the game, though, because the rhythm aspect is way too easy, and the decorating aspect is way too expensive. I'm not above playing games aimed at kids, though. I love seeing what kind of interesting things developers can come up with, and this was definitely an interesting one. Maybe I'll play again today (the day seems to have just rolled over, as I was checking the game to see some things for writing this) just to see if I can figure out what the weather forecast does.
