this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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That right here is sus, TBH. Let me ask you:
If you did not, then this is pretty much the good ol' DMCV dilemma: game is so uninspired if you are not internally motivated—no bun intended—to style on your enemies, but styling comes out a bit more naturally on higher difficulties… except the typical non-action game fan will play a game once on normal difficulty and move on, so the real depth of the combat system is superfluous to almost everyone who played it.
Not that Hi-Fi Rush's combat is as deep or wide as DMCV, but it's more or less the same underlying concept here in terms of player experience.
In general, this type of action game requires some kind of intrinsic motivation—we could argue this is a design flaw, and I'd be inclined to agree to an extent; however, you're approaching this with way too much cynicism for no apparent reason, I think.
It just sounds like this game isn't for you, TBH, which's fine, it just doesn't make it a bad game. Also complaining about how limited the game is only to announce one sentence later you've been mashing the same two or three combos throughout the entire game kind of undercuts your criticism.
And let me be clear: your experience with the game is valid; I just think the logic behind your criticisms doesn't totally hold up.
Fair enough feedback.
I think it's up to the game designers to motivate certain playstyles. If there was a reason beyond the personal self imposed challenge to attain S rank in every fight, that would be a motivation, but there isn't a style rank cutoff for completion.
I didn't play Rhythm Master but it sounds like that should be the default difficulty reading the wiki now.
To be more accurate, I refrained from spamming abilities for 90% of the game and did use more than 3 attack combos. But the option to just do that was there. It was not my main criticism of the game anyway.
I should say I approached the game with an open mind, maybe a little too hopeful by the hype, and I grew up in the 5th/6th gen of consoles, so understand the game is a PS2 throwback in terms of the design.
Never have I given DMC a fair shake, maybe that's the kind of audience the game was going for.
Ultimately yeah, I'm saying the game isn't for me. But I often hear the game in discussions of what the industry is missing in terms of game design, and I don't think I agree that it's worth that level of praise.
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with you on this: Hi-Fi Rush was released in 2023—22 years after the first Devil May Cry game and we're still using some variation of the same goddamn style meter with little to no improvement. This needs to be addressed by action game designers at some point.
And tying ranks to points to unlock moves faster is not a strong motive, IMO, because you typically end up unlocking everything in your first playthrough anyway. What about "style to regain health" or something? Gungrave has a similar mechanic with demolition shots.
On the other hand, I still think part of it is on the player. I think ignoring the style meter while playing an action game is akin to having no desire to Catch'em All™ while playing a Pokémon game. Like, you don't have to complete the Pokédex, but this is kind of understood to be the ultimate goal and is in itself the reward, or at the very least, it's probably on your mind while playing through the game.
There would be lots of ways to make the style meter matter more that didn't feel too forced.
Agree that maybe you could lose health if you're not on beat, and gain it back for being on beat.
Nerfing move damage if you've used the same one too many times could also be a way. I know you get more style for varying your moves so it's almost there.
Creating intrinsic motivation in the player is a tricky one to pin down. The player needs to be invested themselves to want to do a self-guided goal, almost by definition. Pokemon nailed it by having an anime, banger song, and gambling-adjacent card collection game (all of them being insanely popular) surrounding the gameboy games. That fed into the desire of players to catch em all massively.
It is tricky, I agree.
Another point I think I need to try and comment on:
I think when people praise Hi-Fi Rush, they basically mean: "Hurray, a mid-budget, FINISHED action romp from a big publisher with a cool gimmick and no intention to drown me in microtransactions!" which is why you see the PS2/PS3/Xbox 360 catalog comparisons.
I don't think anyone actually means Hi-Fi Rush is the Jesus Christ of gaming—and if they do, I completely disagree.
We could use similar games though—specifically in the action game genre. We get very few of those nowadays.
It's the sort of game I think we should praise for those reasons, I agree. I'm definitely in the no-buy camp if a game has a cash shop. The indie game space is where truely high risk creative design is happening, AA is the space for slightly more ambitious titles that require that polish but can still take some risk. I respect Tango for that and definitely think they were done dirty BTW.