Hi-Fi RUSH is a hybrid of action and rhythm games. I think this is an excellent combination, as most action games are all about timing and rhythm already, so this is honestly a pretty obvious step to take. It’s also remarkably good at accessibility: It has multiple colorblindness filters and subtitle options, and the entire game environment moves with the beat, so you can time yourself visually even if you have a bad sense of rhythm. I enjoyed it a lot, even though the battles did get a bit too frenetic for me to follow at times. In particular, I think its best feature was sharply segregating combat and platforming sections; each combat encounter is a major one-time setpiece instead of you running into enemies all the time. jRPGs, take note.
I don’t want to talk about the gameplay, though. The story and writing are actually much more noteworthy. I believe it to be a very instructive example of Rebellion Chic: Despite being a cyberpunk story about a ragtag resistance fighting an evil corporation, its core messages are actually very conservative and pro-capitalist.
(Spoilers for the ending, but I don’t think they’re particularly ruinous.)
So, first, the good: The game is hilarious and I recommend at least watching a playthrough for that alone. It’s extremely absurd while still having characters with strong, consistent personalities that play off each other very well. My favorite joke was the running gag about the broken coffee machine, and my favorite character was the main villain Kale; he is just self-aware enough to play a fantastic straight man to this cast of hams, but simultaneously completely lacking in self-awareness when it comes to his own ridiculousness, allowing him to play both sides of comedy wonderfully.
It’s the dramatic side where the writing falls short. The story wants to do a typical power-of-friendship plot where a group of misfits evolve into best buds, but the extremely compressed timescale of the plot makes that a very hard sell. The entire story takes place over maybe two days at most, with a few gags pointing out how little the characters actually know each other, but by the end of those two days everyone is professing undying loyalty to one another and waxing philosophical about how they’ve made each other grow as people. Like, cool your jets a little? Maybe get to know each other for, I don’t know, at least a week first?
The fairly compressed plot also makes the necessary character development very choppy and bare-bones; Chai spends the entire first half of the game being a raging dick to Peppermint for no reason and insisting he doesn’t want to help her take down the corporation, then just… suddenly stops, with no apology or explicit change of heart. I kept expecting him to at some point acknowledge he should stop the villain’s evil plan for moral reasons, but he remains entirely self-motivated until abruptly declaring that actually he cares about Peppermint so much and will follow her to the ends of the earth, which just makes it come off as insincere.
Chai and Peppermint’s dynamic also leans way too heavily on the “exasperated female sidekick has to babysit idiot male hero” trope, which I hoped we could put to bed by now. Yes, I get that that’s a funny dynamic, but why does it always have to be in that gender configuration? And in this case, Chai is older than Peppermint, which just makes it worse that she has to babysit this manchild who should be more mature than her.
Also also, it’s really bizarre that you appear to murder the characters you defeat, yet no one seems to care about this or acknowledge the gravity of it, even Macaron the self-described pacifist. (Additionally, the robot characters you kill in droves are clearly sapient.) Like, Chai openly brags to the management team about murdering one of their coworkers and gets barely any reaction. I get that that would be too much of a downer for the madcap comedy tone, but most similar works get around this by defeated characters not actually dying. They could at least not make Chai look like a sociopath by cracking jokes about it.
But that’s all just gravy. The meat here is in the main plot and its resolution.
The premise: Vandelay Technologies is a robotics and cybernetics company run by an evil CEO and a bunch of self-absorbed psychos that is comically abusive towards its workers and cares only about profits. The main character is an applicant for their latest cybernetics program who replaces his disabled right arm with a robotic one; however, an accident during the surgery marks him as “defective”, so Vandelay spends the rest of the game trying to kill him.
However, halfway through the story, we discover that actually, the company used to be good and beloved when it was run by the previous CEO, a self-made woman who started the company out of her garage. Its inventions apparently solved several energy and environmental crises, and it only went to pot after her evil son deposed her as CEO. The resolution is to put her back in charge of the company, thus solving all problems forever.
This is a pretty insidious bait-and-switch. We are introduced to the story as a smash-the-system takedown of evil capitalists, only to be told that actually the problem is just a single bad apple, not the system itself. It’s a modern version of the “restore the rightful king” plot: Capitalism would work fine if we could just replace all the bad people with good people, you see?
But that’s a trite and naive lesson, because of course that’s true of any system. Absolute monarchy is also great if the monarch is a being of perfect light who only ever does the right thing! But that’s never what actually happens, because no one is perfect. Systems must be judged by their worst-case scenarios, not their best-case. How easy is it for a bad person to gain power? How hard is it to remove them if that does happen? What behaviors does the system incentivize and disincentivize?
And because capitalism is an inherently competitive and cutthroat system, we have to ask uncomfortable questions of someone who does so well at it: What exactly did Roxanne have to do to grow her operation from her garage into a multinational corporation? Where did she get the money? How much did she charge for her life- and world-saving inventions, and to whom? How much profit was she taking home from this, and how much was she making compared to her workers? What exactly about this couldn’t have been done by a public program with democratic oversight?
And my earlier comparison to monarchy wasn’t arbitrary, either. Vandelay begs the same questions we ask of monarchies: Why was the company so centralized as to allow a new CEO to do so much damage, with even the department heads powerless to place any checks on this new king-in-all-but-name? What happens when Roxanne retires for real, how do you ensure her successor doesn’t go mad with power like Kale did? What about their successor? (And though capitalism is theoretically more meritocratic in its succession, in this story we have a literal dynasty, with Roxanne’s daughter playing a large role in the restored company if not outright groomed as her successor.)
There’s something else, too… the ultimate moral of the story is the cult-of-work rhetoric that you should work hard to achieve your dreams instead of taking easy shortcuts, and explicitly applies this moral to Chai, who was disabled. The moral would at least make sense if Chai was perfectly capable of learning to play guitar the hard way, but he wasn’t. His prosthetic wasn’t an attempt to become a rockstar without “earning it”, it was necessary for him to pursue his dream at all.
Now, in fairness, the story does apply this moral even-handedly, as the villain’s master plan is to mind-control consumers into buying his products instead of doing the work of actually making appealing products — but it’s just so naive to support the basic premise of capitalism, which is maximizing profit above all else, and then act scandalized when people cheat the system to do so. That’s capitalism working as intended, not the corruptive force of a single bad apple.
Granted, it’s not like I’m surprised by any of this. It would be silly to expect a AAA game by a major studio to express a serious critique of capitalism. What I find notable here is the insidiousness of it: It disguises a very pro-capitalist message with the appearance of punk and anti-capitalism, allowing you to believe it opposes the system when in reality it supports it. None of this, of course, is to say that it’s a bad story or a bad game; it’s still a very enjoyable and well-crafted experience. It’s just also important to remain aware of what we’re being sold.