Akihabara – Feel the Rhythm is an unusual combination of Tetris and a rhythm game. This is a unique combination that has the potential to be great, but could easily wind up being terrible. Unfortunately, Akihabara squanders most of its potential thanks to a handful of awful design decisions.
The gameplay is overly complicated and restricts player agency. The biggest issue is the game’s randomness. Tetris has a much larger playing area, while Akihabara is only 4 tiles wide. You can’t move or rotate shapes, instead you have to change each individual tile to make matches, similar to Bejeweled. This is already a fairly frustrating task, given that you can only change a tile to a randomly selected one. It gets worse once the rhythm portion of the game comes into play. To change a tile, you have to do it in time with the music. The difficulty of Akihabara is so unforgiving that you will often lose purely because of random chance. Tetris also has some elements of luck, but the player is given the capability to work around it, by either rotating shapes to fit or moving them horizontally. This is partly why Tetris is such a popular game. Akihabara can’t compete with such great game design, so it ends up feeling like a cheap imitation.
