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Theatrhythm Final Bar Line: Premium Digital Deluxe Edition is a rhythm game developed by indieszero that released on the Switch and PS4 last year. It's the fourth Theatrhythm game to focus on the Final Fantasy series (There's also a Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts one). Effectively, it's an enhanced version of the Japan-only arcade game "Theatrhythm All-Star Carnival". Theatrhythm's gameplay is pretty similar to most arcade style rhythm games. A bunch of icons fly towards 4 circles on one side of the screen, and you need to input button presses and stick tilts in time to whatever song is playing. It's pretty standard stuff, but the thing that differentiates Theatrhythm from similar games is that the game asks you to build a party of up to 4 characters from the Final Fantasy series. You see, while you're playing the game, these 4 characters fight monsters in the background. The better you do, the more effectively they fight. Just like most RPG's, these characters can level up, and learn skills to make your life easier.
This is kind of the brilliant thing about Theatrhythm, no matter how bad you might be at rhythm games, the party system provides you ways to clear songs other then just "Getting good". If you're struggling, you can just put healers in your party and use their healing skills to help you survive through the whole song. Contrary to what 8-Bit Theater claims, 4 White Mages will work! That said, the game has a scoring system, which the party system has no effect on, so you might be able to brute force a clear, but your score will only be good if you're good. It's genius and serves to make it very accessible to all players.
This is helped by every single song (Over 400 in the base game, over 500 if you get all the DLC) having at least 3 difficulty settings, from "Anyone can do this" Basic, to "Some dexterity required" Ultimate. However, some songs have a fourth difficulty called Supreme, and yeahhh... That's the easiest song! Proper spaghetti fingers going on there. I can't believe I pulled off 9.8 million points here!
Speaking of, the game has a bunch of "Feats". Basically they're achievements, except some of them are way harder then the crummy trophies on the PS4 version. This is why it took me 600 hours to pull it off. A rhythm game obviously needs good music, and well, this is Final Fantasy, it's kinda known for amazing music (And Final Fantasy XIII is also there). It also has songs from some of the spin-off games, like Mystic Quest! The DLC then introduces songs from non Final Fantasy games like Octopath Traveler and Chrono Trigger. An absolute treasure trove of music is here, and it's insanely good value! This game's amazing, and despite reaching 100% completion, I'll still be playing this for a long time.  

the release date has been narrowed down to "Fall 2025"  

Thanks for the games. (hopefully I'll be earlier next week so that I can stream all of the GP's) Here's a link to this week's stream. - - - - - N-Europe Get Together! 16/05/2024)

Rereleased thereafter. Haha, I'm reminded of the end of Buffy episodes.  

Wow great turnout tonight. Not seen that many players since new DLC wave days.