Vib-Ribbon is an absolutely wonderful PlayStation game, by the developer of Parappa the Rapper (Nana On-Sha) and Parappa's producer (Masaya Matsuura). It stars Vibri, a stick-figure rabbit who is probably female - it looks like she's wearing a dress, although that's interpreted from the fact that her body's triangular and her leg-lines come out from the base of the triangle. Vibri dances, and quite well at that.
Vib-Ribbon has primitive graphics - they're entirely vector based, white lines on a black background, like the original Asteroids arcade game. There's a good reason for this, though - because of functionality that will later be explained, the entire game must be able to be loaded into the PlayStation's RAM.
Vib-Ribbon is a music game, and in some ways is typical of music games - the main object is that symbols move towards a point on the screen, in time with the music, and when they get there, you have to press a button, determined by the symbol. The game features six tracks by J-pop group Laugh & Beats that were written to make good game levels, and one track sung by Vibri herself that teaches you how to play the game. All seven songs are tracks two through eight on the game CD (the first track is the game data), which is a nice touch for those of us who were immediately addicted to the catchy tunes and sometimes humorous pronounciations of the English parts of the lyrics.
The great thing about Vib-Ribbon isn't the specifics of the gameplay system or the music it comes with, though - it's the replay value. Since the whole game can be loaded into the PlayStation's RAM, you can take any music CD, and switch it with the Vib-Ribbon disc, and play that CD's songs as game levels. There's no randomization here, the levels are based on the song's beat and tempo, they are unique to a song, and are always the same for a given song.
Unfortunately, Vib-Ribbon was never released in the U.S., only in Japan and Europe. The Japanese version is in NTSC video format, of course, so it will play on modded U.S. PlayStations, but it's in Japanese. That's not so bad, though. Once you look up what the menu selections mean (for instance, on GameFAQs.com), it's not so hard. The European version is in English, but you would need a PAL PlayStation to play it, and if that wasn't annoying enough, it's also missing one or two of the songs, because they had all-Japanese lyrics. Usagi tells me that his European copy has all seven songs. I may have read wrong information, or there may be two Euro versions. Be wary, importers.
Back to the gameplay!
In Vib-Ribbon, Vibri dances down a white line about a pixel thick that stretches off into eternity in both directions. (I think that's the "Vib-Ribbon") She's always walking forwards, so you only use the four buttons that make her avoid obstacles when she reaches them. The four are the L1, R1, down arrow, and X buttons - IMO, the four that are easiest to rest your index fingers and thumbs on, obviously laid out so you can always be ready to hit any of the four. If they had used the Playstation controller's four symbol buttons for the four actions, the game would be impossible to play. Also, each of these obstacles can be combined with any other obstacle, to form 6 different combined obstacles, that require you to push two buttons at once when you get to them. Timing ends up being almost everything in Vib-Ribbon. You have to push the right button or buttons right as Vibri gets to the obstacle to successfully avoid it, and when they start sending you obstacles that move down the Ribbon at different speeds relative to each other, or that spin around the point where they're attached to the Ribbon as they move towards Vibri so you sometimes can't tell what obstacle they are or when they're going to hit Vibri - well, then the timing becomes very hard to pull off.
Here are the four obstacles, and silly
mnemonic devices to remember which button goes to which:
L1: The letter L has a right angle, just like a rectangle that Vibri must climb over.
R1: R is for round! Loops are round.
Down arrow: Well, the obstacle is basically an arrow pointing down...
X: I soon realized that trying to memorize what buttons go with what obstacles in a way other than playing the game over and over until I learned them all was futile, so the best way I came up with to remember the X button obstacle was "
Xig-Xag", and that's just terrible.
_----_
______ - -
| | / \ __ \/
| L1 | | R1 | \/ /\
| | \_ _/
| | -____-
__| |_______-- --_______ _______/\ /\ /\ /\__
\ / \/ \/ \/
\ /
\ /
\ /
\/
In conclusion, Vib-Ribbon is a great game if you can get a hold of it and are able to play it, and it has as much replay value as your CD collection.
Some day later I'll add the diagrams of the six compound obstacles, but it's four in the morning and I'm taking a break from an assignment that's worth twenty percent of my biology grade to write this.
Go, Vibri, go!
Well, looks like I won't need to add the rest of the shapes.
MP3s of the 7 Vib-Ribbon audio tracks are available at the
Gaming Intelligence Agency, linked to the old Vib-Ribbon preview page that can be found in the "games" section. That site also has their own guesses at the lyrics, and titles they made up for the songs, and it's also a great website for news about video games, though it's mostly confined to
RPGs,
adventure games, and
puzzle games. (A bit of information in here was taken from the
GIA's Vib-Ribbon preview page: http://www.thegia.com/psx/vib/vib.html)
The last song is sung by
Vibri, in the same voice that she uses to read the option you select in the game's menus. She's explaining how to play the game, and in the game this song accompanies the gameplay demo that can be selected through the title screen. She also sings the music that plays on the title screen, a bit a few seconds long that loops.