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Does anyone else find HiFi Rush highly overrated?
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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I'm gonna go ahead and agree with you on this: Hi-Fi Rush was released in 2023—22 years after the first Devil May Cry game and we're still using some variation of the same goddamn style meter with little to no improvement. This needs to be addressed by action game designers at some point.
And tying ranks to points to unlock moves faster is not a strong motive, IMO, because you typically end up unlocking everything in your first playthrough anyway. What about "style to regain health" or something? Gungrave has a similar mechanic with demolition shots.
On the other hand, I still think part of it is on the player. I think ignoring the style meter while playing an action game is akin to having no desire to Catch'em All™ while playing a Pokémon game. Like, you don't have to complete the Pokédex, but this is kind of understood to be the ultimate goal and is in itself the reward, or at the very least, it's probably on your mind while playing through the game.
There would be lots of ways to make the style meter matter more that didn't feel too forced.
Agree that maybe you could lose health if you're not on beat, and gain it back for being on beat.
Nerfing move damage if you've used the same one too many times could also be a way. I know you get more style for varying your moves so it's almost there.
Creating intrinsic motivation in the player is a tricky one to pin down. The player needs to be invested themselves to want to do a self-guided goal, almost by definition. Pokemon nailed it by having an anime, banger song, and gambling-adjacent card collection game (all of them being insanely popular) surrounding the gameboy games. That fed into the desire of players to catch em all massively.
It is tricky, I agree.
Another point I think I need to try and comment on:
I think when people praise Hi-Fi Rush, they basically mean: "Hurray, a mid-budget, FINISHED action romp from a big publisher with a cool gimmick and no intention to drown me in microtransactions!" which is why you see the PS2/PS3/Xbox 360 catalog comparisons.
I don't think anyone actually means Hi-Fi Rush is the Jesus Christ of gaming—and if they do, I completely disagree.
We could use similar games though—specifically in the action game genre. We get very few of those nowadays.
It's the sort of game I think we should praise for those reasons, I agree. I'm definitely in the no-buy camp if a game has a cash shop. The indie game space is where truely high risk creative design is happening, AA is the space for slightly more ambitious titles that require that polish but can still take some risk. I respect Tango for that and definitely think they were done dirty BTW.