Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D Review
Young Gabrielle is an average little girl until one day a massive sneeze separates her spirit from her body. With the help of her cat Lola, she’ll have to learn the Ghostly Groove to maintain her ghost form and find a way back to life. With rhythm-based gameplay and a cutesy graphics style, Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove works as a child-friendly rhythm game but ultimately is too simple and bare-boned for wide appeal.
Gabrielle is in a tough spot when she accidentally loses her corporeal body. Her cat Lola has a suggestion, though: visit Monsterville and find help from the local witches, vampires, and werewolves. The friendly monsters tell her the only way for her to stay in Monsterville and recover her body is to scare humans with coordinated dancing. Yes, this is a very silly plot and never attempts to over-complicate things. Gabrielle befriends the local monsters and dances with them; expecting any more depth out of this story would be fool-hardy, though it’s hard to say whether or not even children would find interest in vampires that don’t drink blood or vegetarian werewolves.
Tap the bottom screen while the characters dance up top.
Similar to Elite Beat Agents, Ghostly Groove has you tapping, sliding, and flicking the touch screen in time with songs to maintain Gabrielle’s dance moves. The odd thing in this game is that the icons appear on the top screen despite the fact that you are tapping the bottom screen; this means you don’t have to aim while tapping the icons, you can just tap anywhere on the touch screen. It’s a minor change for the regular tapping action, but it becomes annoying when you have to slide along with a moving icon. The disconnection can makes it more difficult than necessary to follow the button, and it is too easy to accidentally move off the touch screen and interrupt your rhythm. The baffling thing is that this whole problem could easily have been avoided had the icons been on the bottom screen, but as it is the controls come off as needlessly awkward.
The crucial aspect of rhythm games is the music selection, and though Ghostly Groove makes a good effort, the songs are overall disappointing. The game offers a mix of original tunes as well as a few remixes of classical songs such as Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons (Spring)” which, combined with dancing werewolves and skeletons, makes for a rather amusing spectacle. The remixes aren’t bad but the original songs lack a lot of personality, yet the biggest problem here is how short each song is. This game errs on the extreme side of brevity–most of the time it seems as though as soon as you get into the groove the song is over and you’re back to the pointless chatter of the characters. Granted, long levels in rhythm games can be annoying, but the tunes need at least a little more time to develop melodically and give each level a more satisfying feel.
A couple of mini-games break up the rhythm of the game.
The graphics here are undeniably cute–even monsters are charming and adorable with over-sized features and minimalist designs that emphasize simple shapes and colors. Adorable though it is, the basic art design wears a little thin after a while. The characters are sometimes noticeably blocky and the animation lacks variety. Furthermore, the stereoscopic 3D hardly adds anything to the game. Obviously there’s no 3D effect during gameplay, but even as the characters chat with one another or when you customize Gabrielle’s appearance with new outfits or accessories the 3D appears bland and a little careless. And as already said the music selection is somewhat wanting.
Despite including approximately twenty five different levels, this game is incredibly short. Thanks to how brief each individual song is, you can easily burn through the entire game in just a couple of hours–plus the game is generally pretty easy. You can, however, replay the game on harder difficulty levels which feature more notes at a faster tempo, but even so this game really doesn’t last long. In addition, there are tons of collectibles for you to earn or purchase–including new outfits and accessories for Gabrielle–but since these are completely superfluous, they act as small incentives to play the game repeatedly. For the amount of content that the game provides, the full price of $39.99 is absurdly over-priced.
Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is adorable. Unfortunately, that is not enough to base an entire game around. The rhythm gameplay is decent but lacks a lot of polish and sensible controls, while the song selection leaves much to be desired, particularly in length. The game could potentially appeal to a young audience, but even so there are better investments on the 3DS. Even if your curiosity gets the better of you, be sure to wait for a price drop.
Rating: 
