Heroic Songs: the Remix! takes you on an isekai idol adventure, saving worlds through the power of song. With a mix of visual novel storytelling and city-building gameplay with rhythm segments, it’s somewhat of an oddity, but an intriguing enough mix to give it a shot.
We’ll Make an Isekai Idol of You!
Akari Sunohara is an idol otaku, obsessed with idols in general and especially Ruri Tsukuyomi, one of the top idols in Japan. Her concerts are so amazing that people describe the experience as feeling like being ‘transported to another world’… which is exactly what happens. Suddenly, while at one of her concerts, Ruri collapses on stage. Akari and the protagonist, who were in the audience, find themselves in the place between worlds known as The Void. There, an odd, flower-headed man named Moku says it’s possible to get back to Earth, but only if an idol restores balance to the world. Idols aren’t just people who sing and dance: They’re people with innate world-influencing abilities… and he says that Akari has that something special within her.
While she’s not exactly happy about it, Akari sets herself on the path of becoming an idol, with the protagonist there to support her along the way as her fan, manager, and producer. That isn’t all they do, however. The mostly silent protagonist has a power of their own: the ability to wish buildings into existence, which lays the foundation for the game’s city-building mechanics. This power is the protagonist’s only notable feature. Outside of this, they are a mostly silent and undescribed character, serving primarily as a supporter of Akari (with occasional minor hints of romantic interest from her).
Unfortunately, this potentially interesting premise leads to a story that is fairly minimal and formulaic. It follows a general loop of visiting a world, meeting a new idol, resolving some problems, and then unlocking a new world. While the story touches on themes like seeing the real person behind the idol façade and problems caused by public perception, and these are handled thoughtfully, it never explores these ideas deeply enough to be compelling. Outside of a few moments near the end, the story wasn’t too engaging.
What is more charming about Heroic Songs: the Remix! is the characters. Akari can be quite silly in her obsession with idols, which leads to some comedic moments. The other idols have their moments too. There are a mix of those who seem kind but a little mischievous, to those who aren’t honest about their feelings, and one who has difficulty expressing themselves. While these are very short, each idol gets her own mini-arc outside of the main story to explore their characters a little further, and they have some nice moments there.
A City for Fans
The city-building gameplay is relatively simple. The idea is to buy buildings to house fans who will come to live in your city as you perform tours, and to build facilities that they can use to generate resources for you. Some facilities purely generate and need to be placed on specific resource tiles, while others have a running cost but can be placed almost anywhere. You can also decide where to put a handful of idol stages to give nearby facilities a boost. In many cases, the amount of buildings you can buy is limited to a certain number per type, which removes a potential layer of decision-making and complexity.
Essentially, it’s a case of placing the buildings to manage the six resource types (primarily four of them) to ensure they all increase as fast as possible. As even the facilities that use resources generate a higher amount of another resource, as long as you’ve got the initial resources to buy them, it’s simply a matter of placing down a balanced spread of as many facilities as possible. There isn’t much thinking required to manage it. These resources are used not just to buy further buildings, but to send idols on tours. Along with performing concerts, this is what moves the story along by unlocking the chapters.
I did find that the progress at the very start was quite slow, and I had to wait for resources to generate, but there was no real challenge to it. It is possible to mismanage and have decreasing resources of a type, but even if placing facilities randomly, you’d have to be quite unlucky. The only ‘difficult’ task was an optional achievement to earn a very large amount of gold, which was just really a matter of placing down some extra gold-generating facilities and then a test of patience. In the end, while you unlock more land and types of buildings as you go, it never gets more difficult and feels more like a casual resource gate for the main story.
Time to Perform
Concerts are where you’ll find the rhythm segments of Heroic Songs: the Remix! It’s a fairly basic case of pressing buttons in time with notes, with notes on a steady rhythm. Hit it with good timing to build up the meter enough to pass to clear it. Each concert song is very short, lasting about 30-40 seconds each.
The rhythm gameplay itself doesn’t feel particularly satisfying. There’s very little sense of feedback, no features like inputs coming on half-beats, and everything is very slow. There’s also no notable benefit to getting high scores.
Much like the city-building gameplay, this is incredibly easy. I’m not exactly great at rhythm games and I was getting mostly perfects throughout. From the tutorial to the five post-game concerts, I never even came close to failing a single one. It never gets more complex than a few levels, where you get two rows of button inputs coming at you instead of one. Even then, they’re separated into ones for the left-hand and ones for the right. It was only nearing the end when levels very rarely tried to ‘trick’ me by having two opposite side inputs at the same time (left button on D-Pad and right button on Face buttons for example), while at most other times it’s nice enough to make sure they always match.
You can also start concerts by spending resources to increase things like Ad Budget, Venue Setup, Staging Enhancements, and Dance lessons. Outside of testing, I never used these. The balance is just too off, with it costing quite a lot for almost no benefit.
Idols do level up by completing concerts, which can make performances easier. That said, considering that I never had a problem beating the final post-game concert with a level 1 idol, I only levelled up idols to unlock their story content, get achievements, and for their stage benefits in city management.
Minor Snags
There were a few other little issues in Heroic Songs: the Remix! which didn’t affect the experience too much, but are worth mentioning just due to the amount of them.
The controls aren’t the most comfortable at times. City building works well with a mouse and keyboard, while rhythm portions work far better with a controller. Trying to use a controller to play the city building portions however felt quite awkward when moving around the city, and with menu navigation requiring holding a shoulder button.
Unlocking certain side story content required grinding the same concerts quite a few times too. If they were more enjoyable, this wouldn’t be an issue. It can be mitigated if you know to switch between which idols to use for tours and concerts.
Other minor snags like a character popping up who was supposed to be unavailable at the time occurred too. These sorts of things were infrequent, but certainly not ideal.
Shining Lights and Dancing to Music
The visuals of Heroic Songs: the Remix! feel oddly mixed in style, at least when it comes to the character art. The idols certainly look nice, with a fairly standard anime art style. And while many other characters are certainly presented well enough, several seem to be drawn in more of a dark and gritty style with more shadows and a darker color palette. Perhaps this is purposely done to make the idols stand out and show them as something special, but it instead comes across as if these disparate designs shouldn’t be in the same game. The building mode has a more consistent look, and the various environments and buildings do look quite nice. There are also some CGs which were welcome treats during the story scenes.
The music worked well enough, but while understandable to a point as a budget title, it was more limited than I would’ve expected for a game based around idols. What also surprised me was that the number of vocal tracks or songs that I felt gave the feeling of idol music was quite limited. I was expecting something with a sense of energy, but I didn’t really feel that, despite the backing tracks being relatively upbeat. On the dialogue side, the game is partially voiced in Japanese, with fitting performances, if ones that didn’t particularly stand out.
Verdict
Heroic Songs: the Remix! is an incredibly casual experience. The story is fairly minimal and laid back, the city-building gameplay is far too easy, and the concerts require no effort and are over in a flash. However, there is some charm to the characters and amusement to be found in their antics.
WAIT FOR SALE ON HEROIC SONGS: THE REMIX!
If you are looking for another rhythm-based adventure game, take a look at our review of Patapon 1+2 Replay.
Many thanks go to Frontier Works Inc for a PC review code for Heroic Songs: the Remix!
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
