Pastel☆Parade is an extremely cute and colourful rhythm action game in the same vein as Rhythm Heaven, Rhythm Paradise, and Melatonin. I call these call-and-response rhythm action games because they mirror that type of musical structure. The player hears a rhythmic beat and needs to replicate it afterwards. Pastel☆Parade does this incredibly well, even teaching some musical ideas about timing in the process, to make for a fun and approachable rhythm action game.
The story is wild and follows four friends as they travel to different locations on a completely bizarre adventure. It’s children’s TV unhinged, but it sets up the stage for the music to take place. Most of the rhythm games fall into two categories. Ones like the soda pop game to shake and spray soda over people, tap out a one or two-button rhythm beat for the player to immediately replicate straight after. These play with timing and memory, but rarely ask you to think for more than two bars of music. The second type of game is about following a visual or audio cue to press a button as part of a sequence. Be it cooking food at a campsite, opening an umbrella, or posing with your friends, these are about spotting the rhythm and taking note of the visual cues to know when to step in. There are also band performance stages that combine both of these elements, and it’s no surprise that these stages were the toughest to get perfect scores on.
Whilst Pastel☆Parade has over 30 tracks, they are split across two runs of the story. The first 18 are tied to your first playthrough, and the second set is pitched as harder versions of existing setups. The music is fresh and new for the new set, and once played, you can listen to them in a music menu. They are also replayable to attempt getting a 100% clearance and platinum medal for each stage. Oddly, whilst the music is jaunty and varied, it isn’t very memorable. This is likely due to how simple the rhythms are that the player has to follow. It makes total sense when playing the game, but there’s little that stands out when listening back outside of the in-the-moment gameplay. This is a case of cute graphics and jaunty upbeat incidental music doing a lot of heavy lifting, but it works a charm.
The flipside of this issue is that Pastel☆Parade is probably one of the most accessible rhythm games of this call-and-response style out there. The requirements for clearing a level are quite low and the tracks are about 90 seconds long. The difficulty curve is gentle and tops out at the medium difficulty setting for most other games of this type. If you ever wanted to get into a call-and-response rhythm game but you are worried you don’t have innate rhythm, this game will be a good starting point.
Pastel☆Parade comes with an audio/visual sync tool, which aligns your timing and rhythm for the charts, but I still found a couple of minor issues with the band stages. I also found that moving from stage to stage on the cute overworld maps didn’t always trigger the next stage, meaning repeatedly fiddling to get underway. The biggest technical issue I had with Pastel☆Parade was actually getting the game going altogether. It took 12 attempts to progress beyond the main menu screen, and that seems to be down to using a game controller. This game needs a game controller patch in general, as most of the UI issues for things not triggering seemed tied to using a controller over a mouse and keyboard.
Despite needing to wrestle the UI to the floor to get it working, Pastel☆Parade is a delightful, gentle rhythm action game. It is full of character and charm. Graphically, it’s a vibrant cartoon of fun. Rhythmically, it plays with time signatures and bars of music in a clever and simple way to make it approachable for most gamers. Whilst more experienced, expert music gamers will find this perhaps a bit easy, it still stands out from a presentation perspective, so I’d recommend it as your gentle giant of rhythm gaming. Cute.
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