I’m going to start this review off by stating that I’m not a huge fan of rhythm games. For the most part I find their gameplay needlessly difficulty and more than a bit tedious for relatively little reward. That said, I’m a huge fan of some rhythm games, as certain titles not only deliver a fantastic original sound track but surprisingly addictive gameplay in the short-term. Japanese games like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!, Gitaroo Man, and now the recently released Rhythm Tengoku Gold, all fall within this narrow selection of rhythm games I actually enjoy playing.

Rhythm Tengoku Gold is the DS released sequel to the wildly successful Rhythm Tengoku for the GameBoy Advance. The primary difference between the two games is obviously in the hardware, as RTG takes advantage of the DS’s larger dual screens, stylus interface, and significantly increased memory and general performance capabilities. Players play the game by holding the DS open-book style, and use the stylus on the right side of the unit to interact with the game. The Rhythm Tengoku series is traditionally a large collection of minigames, each with its own original music and unique style of play. The game presents these minigames as a grid of three columns, each with four games followed by a surprisingly clever remix stage, which combines aspects of the previous four games together into a final stage before allowing the player to move on to the next column of games. Each of the games has a short training sequence the player can choose to skip if they wish, and while the game is entirely in Japanese, all it takes is a decent handle on the skills of common sense and patience to pick up the gist of each of the minigames fairly quickly.

The DS provides a strong foundation for the game’s addictive gameplay, and each of the games is graphically unique and simply oozing with charm. Rhythm Tengoku Gold uses the DS hardware to effectively blend quirky 2D art with simple 3D assets to produce some ridiculously entertaining scenarious with characters and settings ranging from hooting moai statues to trippy soccer-ball juggling spacemen to beaker tossing lab assistants in love. All of these games are delivered with catchy and even sometimes downright brilliant music tracks, all of which simply add to the game’s excellence. Your reasons for not playing this game are quickly diminishing!

Unless you happen to be one of the many DS owners out there with the means to import the game or otherwise acquire the game through various homebrew solutions, you might be wondering what the hell good this review will do you since you’re unable to even purchase the game to begin with. I’m happy to report that as of E3 2008, Rhythm Tengoku Gold will be releasing in the United States under the title Rhythm Heaven, which means you will have absolutely no excuse to head to the nearest establishment that enjoys making money through the sale of video games and buy it!