Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
Given the massive cultural impact of games like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, it's hard to underestimate the influence of PaRappa the Rapper, a Japanese rhythm game that launched a genre on home consoles. Despite a more modest release in the states, it heralded the rise of the rhythm games that would make up a huge portion of the living-room gaming of my childhood.
In middle school, I spent hours after school at the "kids' club" of a local gym and recreation center while my parents were at work. I was largely unsupervised and the place was sometimes noisy, so homework had very little appeal. Instead, I spent much of my time with one of the few available video games: Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, set up in the far corner of the room on a PS2 with a dance pad controller.
I made friends with the other kids who frequented the dance pad, and we took turns trying to complete the most difficult songs, beat each others' scores, or "full combo" the songs we'd practiced for hours (nowadays, playing DDR mostly makes me feel out of shape). As I got older and had more autonomy, Guitar Hero with friends at home scratched the same itch.
PaRappa heavily influenced games that I loved as a kid, but despite this, I knew very little about it. With System Shock and even A Link to the Past, I was often surprised and fascinated by what I found exploring the earlier roots of my favorite genres. I hoped that PaRappa would be a similar case, and in some ways, I definitely got what I asked for.
What I Thought
The most prominent thing that I need to say about PaRappa the Rapper is that it's fucking difficult. Only after browsing reddit threads in search of tips did I start to comprehend that it's infamously difficult. This manifests in ways that defy clear explanation. The timing is sometimes very precise and sometimes oddly forgiving. The visual indicators frequently fail to line up with the rap vocals (and notably, the remastered version for PS4 also fails to include any calibration settings for display latency). PaRappa's sound bites — which play in response to player inputs — have their own delays that troubled my sense of rhythm, like trying to speak while hearing an echo of yourself. After a time, the only way I got through was to sort of feel it out, to find whatever sense of rhythm seemed repeatable and made the game happy. It was never too far from what I'd expect based on the prompts or the music, but it was very often not quite right.
This unevenness is perhaps an understandable shortcoming given PaRappa's sheer novelty. In an odd way, its technological nascency undermined one of my core expectations for the genre: careful tuning around input windows and visual precision. At one point, I truly thought I'd be unable to finish the game; it took a solid forty minutes of patiently repeating the same 2-minute song to finally break through.
But underneath the awkward implementation is a lot of creativity. Each stage involves a call-and-response structure throughout, in which PaRappa mimics lines established by various "master" characters. On his turn, PaRappa can embellish and elaborate on the pattern by "freestyling", which involves switching up the button inputs along with the beat of the song. When replaying a completed song, it's possible to enter "cool" mode, in which there is no instruction at all and your only goal is to stylishly rap along to the beat.
PaRappa the Rapper is also a game about, rapping, of course, which situates in a very different cultural place than many of its genre successors. Being a Japanese-published game about hip hop, made int the 90s, and helmed by Japanese and white American creators, I was honestly bracing for the worst. But despite being far from perfect, PaRappa manages to deliver more than just stereotype or cliche. The story plays out through cartoonish cutscenes interjected between the stages. In most stages, PaRappa must learn a new skill to overcome a challenge in front of him, all in the pursuit of impressing a girl he likes. It's earnest, positive, and more than a little corny. These stages frame the call-and-response gimmick around a teacher and student, layering in the freestyling mechanic that lets capable players show off their mastery and rack up a high score. In PaRappa's world, hip hop is about listening to the masters, learning their flow, and then bringing your own style into the mix. This is maybe a little trite, but it communicates a lot of love and respect for the culture it's drawing from. It's also encouraging that nearly all of the characters in the game were portrayed by Black performers.
With its relatively small number of tracks, PaRappa also manages to cover a nice variety of musical aesthetics and genre tropes, full of jaunty little instrumental riffs that nicely frame the beat of the song. Most of them are earworms through and through; even the goofy rap lyrics will get stuck in your head. It's ultimately a very charming game, at least as long as the difficulty hasn't soured it.
Reflections
At the end of the day, the core mechanics of PaRappa were unexpectedly rough. Repeatedly losing at the very end of a 2 minute song is deeply infuriating and tedious; I nearly gave up entirely.
What made PaRappa worth playing for me, though, was its quirky packaging and its joyful and unique musical identity. The shift towards peripheral-driven games in the aughts brought jukeboxes full of licensed music like Guitar Hero and DDR, shedding a lot of personality along the way. Despite their iconic song selections, they sacrificed the expressivity of freestyling, the distinct charm of original music and the storytelling built around it, however silly.
The peripheral-oriented games have receded to arcades (at least in the USA), but smaller developers without access to huge licensed music libraries are reconfiguring the genre to accommodate. Metal: Hellsinger and Hi-Fi Rush use licensed music sparingly and weave in action game verbs to build expressive and tactile play around a central beat or song, not so different from PaRappa's freestyling. Last year's Infinite Guitars still deploys note charts, but integrates them into turn-based RPG mechanics, where strong performances resulted in more effective attacks, weaving it all through a surprisingly affecting story; upcoming titles like Afterlove EP and Unbeatable are positioning themselves to do similar things. Through the years, numerous niche innovators have revived and reinvented the rhythm game: the Patapon series, the Rhythm Heaven series, Thumper, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and many more.
In these most recent iterations, rhythm game concepts appear less often as a distinct kind of game and more often as a kind of gameplay to be mixed and matched with other elements to tell stories. PaRappa the Rapper lives at the root of this lineage, and suggests to me that the layering of storytelling onto rhythm games is just as much a return to form as it is an elaboration. I truly don't know if I could recommend this game; actually playing it was sometimes more frustrating than enjoyable, and it might be hard for me to distinguish my retroactive fondness from the sense of relief at having finished it. But I'm glad I did, and for what it's worth, it made me love the genre even more.