Rhythm Heaven Uses No Motion Controls For Samurai Mini-Game

Nintendo brought a playable build of Rhythm Heaven for Wii to E3. While Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS introduced flicking and tapping, the Wii title only uses button presses.

I started by playing the samurai game. Press A and the samurai will do a quick slash and cut one of the demons leaping out the dark gate in half. When a gaggle of green-eyed demons appeared I had to press A and B simultaneously to make the samurai spin his blade and dice up the group.

Just like other games in Rhythm Heaven, the song changed tempo and blocked the portal with graphic overlays forcing players to rely only on rhythm. While the most stylish out of the three playable games at E3, samurai wasn’t the hardest. Badminton was. A cat and a dog in the sky bounced a shuttlecock to a fast beat. Every once in awhile a vocal track interrupted the song and the cat hit the shuttlecock so high it soared off the screen. Without any visual and few audio cues players had to return the shuttlecock to the cat.

The other game had an easy to follow rhythm where pressing A on beat would make a fork catch a flicked pea. All of the music games in Rhythm Heaven are new, but you may see some familiar characters if you played the Nintendo DS title.

Rhythm Heaven is coming to North America, but does not have a release date.