Quick Review: Frederic: Resurrection of Music (Director's Cut)

I’ve been waiting to write about this one for weeks!

Discovering the present.
Oh, how things have changed in... 165 years!

Frederic: Resurrection of Music (Director’s Cut) was developed and published by Forever Entertainment S. A. and released to Steam on April 21st, 2016. (The original was released on May 16th, 2014.) This is the story of Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, better known as Frederic Chopin. Yes – the classical pianist. He is brought back to life, albeit in a cold, very corpse-like state, by three muses telling him that music itself is endangered by an evildoer nicknamed Mastermind X and the greed of the music industry. By the way, puh-lease, I’m sure that’s nothing compared to the greed of the gaming industry in recent years.

Frederic meets his first opponent.

However, he needs to find the location of Mastermind X, and this takes him on a trip around the world aboard his magical, golden, flying horse carriage. And for some reason, everywhere he goes, someone tries to pick a musical fight with him. Piano duels!

Rewatching the recording of my playthrough.
Wow, I was bad at this game when I started.

The Story Mode is available in four difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard and Chopin. The game is a rhythm music-playing title à la Guitar Hero, substituting the five frets of the toy guitar for seven keys of your computer keyboard. The original configuration is WER-ASDF, but after some testing I settled on the Z-to-M row of keys. That’s what worked best for me, though someone might prefer to keep it to a configuration similar to the original (a group of seven keys where the four bottom keys are white notes while the top three are black notes). You can hold down some notes, which scores more points. Many successes in a row fill the score multiplier gauge. Missing a note will empty the score multiplier gauge. After a successful streak of notes, a special golden note may appear, requiring you to hit one particular letter key on your keyboard that isn’t currently being used for piano keys – these extra keys net you a nice amount of points.

The Most Jamaican Man Alive.
Soon followed by The Most Canadian Man Alive?

In Ireland, do like the Irish:
Beat up come Leprechauns with music.

Each level is a duel against an opponent introduced in an animated segment (examples include a Jamaican pothead, a Japanese otaku, and so on – yeah, the game’s pretty unsubtle about stereotypes). There is a second gauge indicating whether you’re “winning” or “losing” the encounter; if it’s filled above 50% at the end of the level, you win! Below 50%, you lose. Obviously, each successful note fills both this gauge and the score multiplier gauge – and missing a note also depletes the Win-Lose Gauge as well. On the Easy difficulty, it’s pretty lenient; the gauge increases quite a bit with every successful note, and a missed note won’t decrease it much. Try harder difficulties, and the game gets more and more punishing – on Chopin difficulty, hit notes won’t fill the Win-Lose Gauge very fast, but missing one will deplete it a lot. And, well, since it’s the highest difficulty of the game, it’s also the one with the toughest partitions to play.

Grand classical attack!

Also, at key points of the song, if the score multiplier gauge is filled halfway, you can press the Spacebar and Chopin will unleash a special move onto the opponent, increasing greatly the Win-Lose gauge. It’s a very fun and interesting system to use, I don’t think I’ve seen any other music games implement duels this way.

Speaking of, instead of going for pop hits, this game’s soundtrack is composed (heh) of famous tracks by Frederic Chopin, adapted in a wide variety of musical genres. Unless you’re a big classical music nerd, you likely won’t know most of these (unless you seek them out on YouTube), so part of the difficulty when you start playing is to actually learn these songs. Thankfully, some of them are very creative and the arrangements can be quite enjoyable.

As you may notice from these screenshots, it took me
some time to figure out the best combination of keys.

Is that… Is that the Funeral March as a peppy country tune? Best game ever! Seriously though, the soundtrack to this game is AWESOME. The animated introductions to every level are pretty great, too. Every level can be played once unlocked in the Story Mode, and in every difficulty – beating all levels on higher difficulties unlocks three bonus levels, too! Oh, and there’s a multiplayer mode as well, in which you can play against others in musical duels, playing as any of the characters from the Story Mode, Chopin or one of his many opponents.

Also, there's a ton of little Easter Eggs during the levels,
if you're willing to look for them.
But then again, playing the partition matters more.

All in all, a great game. I definitely recommend it. The seven-note piano takes some getting used to (it’s more complicated than just five colors!), but it’s very rewarding. I like to play these levels over and over, sometimes on higher difficulties (the Chopin difficulty is very tough, but the feeling of accomplishment when you beat each level... ahh, so great!). The story isn’t fantastic, but the animated segments add a nice color. If you're willing to look past the stereotypes, that is.

If you’re looking for a new music game to play, this is one to try. It’s available on Steam for roughly 6$. But wait, there’s a sequel! Tune in soon for a review of it.