Video Game / Rhythm Heaven

On-beat play, offbeat action.

"Go for a Perfect!"

Rhythm Heaven, known in Japanese as Rhythm Tengoku and as Rhythm Paradise in European languages, can best be described as WarioWare meets Elite Beat Agents. The series is a collaboration between Nintendo (specifically, the team that develops WarioWare) and Tsunku♂, a music producer known for heading the Hello! Project. The first game in the series was released on the GBA in late 2006, making it the last game that Nintendo developed for the system, and later in arcades as a joint project between Nintendo and Sega. Naturally this meant that it would be released only in Japan, not unlike the case with Mother 3. Despite this, the DS sequel (known as Rhythm Tengoku Gold in Japanese) would receive an overseas release to a positive reception, with two more sequels following.

The gameplay is fairly simple. The game is divided into sets of four or five music-based mini-games, which are completed by pressing buttons (or flicking and tapping the touch screen) in time with the rhythm. Upon completion of each mini-game, the player's performance is evaluated and given a ranking: Try Again, OK, or Superb. If a player gets a Try Again rating, they can't progress to the next mini-game until they can get one of the higher ratings. A Superb rating awards the player with a medal; collecting these allows bonus features such as endless mini-games to be unlocked. Sometimes the game challenges the player to complete a mini-game flawlessly. Doing so nets a Perfect rating, which unlocks bonus information on the mini-game or adds another song to the sound test. After completing a set of games, the player is challenged to a Remix game that includes each game of the set. Completing the Remix unlocks the next set.

The mini-games themselves are exactly what one would expect from the team responsible for WarioWare: Quirky, bizarre, and generally addictive. Examples include:

• Hitting baseballs expelled by a flowerpot while floating in space
• Helping a rabbit jump across whales and turtles to reach the moon
• Stomping around a garden to pluck beets from the ground
• Shaking and tossing flasks to create hearts in a laboratory devoted to studying the science of love
• Controlling a member of a quartet of dancing shrimp
• Piloting a rocket powered by anthropomorphic tuning forks across a surreal landscape
• Translating what's being said by a jellyfish-like alien on live television
• Helping a sentient street toss fruit, rolling out of pipes, into basketball hoops

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Half Rhythm Game, half Minigame Game, Rhythm Heaven is a definite hidden gem in Nintendo's catalog. On an interesting note, it is one of the few rhythm games to actually be about "rhythm" and not just rapid timing. That is most prominently featured in Lockstep in Heaven, where you'll cruise after you get how to switch from the beat to off-beat, but completely flop if you just try to "muscle" your way through.

The third iteration, Rhythm Heaven Fever, also known in Japanese as Minna no Rhythm Tengoku (Everyone's Rhythm Heaven), was released in the States in February 2012. The European version (called Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise) was, after an enormous wait, released in July 2012.

Rhythm Heaven/Paradise Megamix, known as Rhythm Tengoku: The Best+ in Japanese, is the fourth installment in the series, released in June 2015 in Japan, June 2016 in North America, and October 2016 in Europe. It contains 108 games — 30 new and 78 returning from the previous three, some with new variations. It has no physical release in North America, though, only digital (unforunately, because of this, the game was delisted when the 3DS eShop closed down on March 27, 2023, meaning it is no longer available to purchase in North America).

Tsunku♂ has expressed an interest in making a fifth entry for the Nintendo Switch, but only time will tell if that actually happens.

Note: For shorthand, we'll be calling the GBA version Tengoku, the DS version Heaven, the Wii version Fever, and the 3DS version Megamix.

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This series provides examples of:

Tropes #-B

• 100% Completion: Good luck getting a Perfect on every game!
• 555: All of the phone numbers for Heaven's Phone toy start with 555. In the North American version at least.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Tons of minigame names. Some examples: Rhythm Rally, Blue Birds, Love Lizards, Freeze Frame, Munchy Monk, Drummer Duel, Love Lab, Space Soccer, Beat Bag, Double Date, Figure Fighter, Samurai Slice, Tap Troupe, Shrimp Shuffle, Animal Acrobat, and Pajama Party.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The samurai in Tengoku can cut fog with his katana.
• All There in the Manual: Winning the gifts will give you background on the various characters. Lampshaded in the reading material for Blue Birds, telling you that it will make the montage scene shown in the game make more sense.
• All Just a Dream: Blue Bear in Megamix.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: While most humanoid characters have regular skin colors, a few have more unusual colors. Snow-white skin also seems fairly common.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Pretty much every animal in the game. Most notably, the Huebirds of Happiness in Flock Step.
• Amazon Brigade: The Marchers according to Megamix, though their masculine voice clips and all-concealing helmets make it hard to tell.
• Ambiguous Gender: Because of the nature of the series, it can be difficult discerning the gender of several characters. For example, the player rocker in Heaven has an androgynous appearance, and is never referred with any pronouns.
• Ambiguously Human: Several but the Chorus Kids in particular look more like anthropomorphic Somethings more than anything else.
• Amusement Park: Remix 4 in Heaven, and Remix 6 in Fever.
• Animal Motifs: Monkeys, monkeys, and more monkeys. They're everywhere!
• Animal Stereotypes: Heaven has a group of singing frogs, and Fever has pigs as businessmen.
• Anime Hair: Mandrill's hair in Fever grows to twice its length in Hole In One 2, and by Remix 9, it's grown past the screen and a monkey is climbing it.
• Annoying Arrows: The Sneaky Spirits in the first game can take an arrow up the nose and only get knocked through the door. However, this may be less because of the arrows and more because of the ghosts.
• Antepiece: Rhythm Rally has a complete static camera in both the original Heaven and the remake in Megamix. The original game's Rhythm Rally 2, meanwhile, rotates the camera all over the place to throw off your muscle memory and force you to rely on the rhythm. In the original, they launched you into it with no warning, but Megamix actually adds an antepiece to it. Rhythm Rally is part of the new Barbershop Remix, which features the camera slowly rotating throughout — not enough to trip you up, but enough to nudge you into paying attention to the rhythm rather than the visuals, prepping you for the more obvious camera swerves in Cosmic Rhythm Rally.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Talking to the Barista lets you skip any level you're having trouble with, provided you've tried it at least three times. You can do this for as many games as you want, excluding the Remix before the credits and the final one.
  • Fever's Barista gives players the option to watch a perfect run of the level, to see the proper rhythms.
  • Some longer minigames compensate for their length by being much more lenient with the timing. Being slightly offbeat will warn the player slightly, but it'll still count as a successful input and won't break a perfect run. (For example, this can be seen in action with Heaven's Frog Hop here.)
  • If you're doing badly on the practice sessions in Fever, the game allows you to see an auto play of the tutorial. Megamix instead shows a beat-by-beat breakdown of the inputs on the touch screen to tell you exactly when you need to press the button.
  • From Fever onwards, remixes will cue you when the next game is a "keep the beat" type minigame like Monkey Watch, Air Rally, or Donk Donk. Similarly, going from one of these games to a regular one will discount the first few incorrect button presses in case you got used to the beat of the previous game. Megamix plays with this; some of the remixes string parts where you're keeping the beat together, so that you don't stop keeping the beat as the games switch. This includes having one game having you press A every beat just before it switches, and then leading to a "keep the beat" game.
  • In Megamix, failing a Perfect Challenge causes the game to end immediately, saving the player the trouble of having to restart it manually. Also, games with lower-quality vocal cues (such as Marching Orders and Frog Hop) feature subtitles so that the player isn't thrown off by misunderstanding the cue.
  • In Frog Hop in Heaven, since the song ends on an interrupted cadence, the game disables the touch screen before the game itself ends so the player doesn't keep tapping by accident.
  • The gatekeepers in Megamix will let you by after failing one of their challenges four times, explicitly citing this trope (and that the game is intended to be fun) as to why.
  • When playing a Life Challenge on the Challenge Train, a Miss will give you a brief period of Mercy Invincibility so that you have a second to regain your bearings without your lives draining away.
  • In previous games, you were able to unlock the track to a game or some other extra flavor text-based material. The problem is, to do that, you have to get a Perfect to unlock that game's extra, which is easier said that done on some levels. In addition, every level either has one or the other, never both. However, Megamix allows you to buy both extras for each stage in the Shop at the Café, after getting past the game.
  • Glee Club in Heaven lacks a lot of cues to help the player, with the only obvious one being the "Together now!" cue for shouting together and a visual cue when you completely miss. When it was brought over to Megamix, several new cues were added: a heart appears next to your Chorus Kid if you were on the beat, the conductor waves his baton with a vocal cue when everyone needs to close their mouths at once, and the Chorus Kids crouch down before the "Together now!" cue. This makes it easier to keep track of the patterns and how well you're doing.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Samurai Slice in Fever involves hunting down some evil spirits who scare a little boy and his sister, trash their house... and steal the little boy's pinwheel. In Samurai Slice 2, said spirits go on to steal a stuffed bunny a salaryman bought for his daughter.
• Art Evolution: The games' overall style started out very simplistic, with almost all humanoid characters having Black Bead Eyes, but gradually become more detailed over time. Additionally the in-game sprites looked very sketchy. There's a noticeable change in Fever, the first console game in the series, where most human characters had sceleras and the in-game sprites became much smoother, making them look more like official art. Megamix also highlights this, with older minigames redone in the smoother style done in Fever.
• Art Shift: Overall, the general style of the series is Thick-Line Animation, but there are several deviations from that look. From the scribbles of Glee Club and Bossa Nova, to the painterly style of Fever's Samurai Slice, to the 3D polygons of Rhythm Rally and Airboarder, no two rhythm games are guaranteed to look alike.
• The Artifact:
  • In Megamix, Samurai Slice (the one from Fever that is unlocked in the shop) still displays "To be continued..." at the end, even though Samurai Slice 2 isn't in this title. By contrast, Blue Birds' "To be continued..." is replaced with "The end", since Blue Birds 2 isn't in this one either.
  • Also in Megamix, Clap Trap still has the doll's hands colored differently like in Fever (which corresponded to Player 1 and 2 in Fever), even though Clap Trap is only played with one player in Megamix instead of with two like in Fever.
• Artifact Title: The "Built to Scale" rhythm game in its various incarnations. It was named as such in Heaven (the first game to be localized) because that incarnation was about flinging rods to a harmonic scale. The version present in Fever and Megamix, though, keeps the same name despite having nothing to do with harmonic scales— and ditto to Polyrhythm in Tengoku's Fan Translation.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: Fever's Packing Pests has you working for a company that produces "Spider-Free Candy". Your job is to keep it spider-free.
• Asian Fox Spirit: Tram and Poline from Tengoku are foxes who transform into human children or back each time they jump. Being off-beat causes a partial transformation.
• Astronomic Zoom:
  • This happens during the climax of Flock Step in Fever. It's yet another trick the game'll use to mess players up.
  • Spaceball's difficulty is almost 100% derived from this; the camera keeps zooming out to show the starry void the player is practicing in.
  • This also happens at one point in Exhibition Match.
• Audience Participation Song: Fan Club in Heaven. Whenever the singer calls out certain phrases, the monkeys respond by clapping in rhythm. There was even a live version during a concert promoting the game.
• Babies Ever After: Getting Superb on Love Lizards in Heaven will reveal that the male and female lizard have four baby lizards. Similarly, the Moais in Moai Doo-Wop in the same installment also have a baby Moai in the Superb ending.
• Badass Family: As if Karate Joe wasn't Badass enough, you get to play as his father and teacher in the penultimate game of Megamix.
• Bait-and-Switch: The very first Karate Man in Tengoku hypes the player up by cranking up the tempo of its beat... only to just sic one last punch before ending the level.
• Barehanded Blade Block: Clap Trap, one of the endless minigames in Fever, plays like this, except the player has to stop a giant hand from karate-chopping them instead.
• Battle in the Rain: Both versions of Samurai Slice in Fever feature this.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Sneaky Spirits in Tengoku (where you have to shoot them with arrows) and Big Rock Finish in Heaven.
• Behind the Black: In the Megamix revival of Munchy Monk, the Practice mode and the start of the main game have Munchy Monk in his usual position at the far right of the screen. Then, just before the game proper begins, he moves forward to reveal that he's had a baby riding on his back the whole time.
• Big Eater:
  • Any version of Munchy Monk counts as this.
  • Forthington, the cat from Air Rally, seems to be one in the reading material.
  • Whoever is holding the fork in Fork Lifter.
  • Also, Beary the Blue Bear from Megamix. While he's binge eating to forget his girlfriend, he's shown to have quite an appetite even before their breakup.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The counting in Munchy Monk is in Chinese in the Japanese version.
  • In Kung Fu Ball, the text on the neon sign on the right-hand side of the screen (利頭夢) doesn't say anything intelligible in Chinese (which you might assume given the minigame's theme), but it can be read as "rizumu" ("rhythm") in Japanese.
  • Power Calligraphy, for the most part, consists of real Japanese characters. レ is katakana and stands for the sound "re". The dash is a comma. 力 is kanji that means "power". 己 is kanji that roughly means "self". 寸 stands for an obsolete unit of measure a little longer than an inch. 心 is kanji that means "heart". The last symbol is "tsurunihamarumarumushi"; simply a face made up of Japanese characters, based on the Henohenomoheji.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: According to the unlockable character notes, the table-tennis aliens from Heaven don't actually eat. They get their energy from playing ping-pong. Some have successfully weaned themselves off by switching to paddleball instead.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: Ringside in Fever. The girl asks questions of the wrestler and all we hear is "Wubba dubba dubba, 'zat true?" The wrestler is most likely not paying attention to the questions and is yes-ing her to death. Lampshaded in the game's reading material, where the reporter is asking him actual questions, and he still responds to everything with "Eh." It opens up the possibility that we're hearing what the wrestler hears.
• Bland-Name Product: The Cheer Readers in the American version of Fever & Megamix twirl books simply titled "BOOK". In Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise, said books are printed with four circles instead.
• Blank White Eyes: The Chorus Kids when they sing.
• Blush Stickers: A lot of characters have these, but most notably is Marshal, the mascot of Fever.
• Bo Diddley Beat: Forms the basis of the clapping parts of Kitties! in Megamix.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine:
  • The aptly named "Manzai" endless game exclusive to the Japanese version of Fever.
  • Some readable material in Tengoku has two of the Toss Boys do the act.
• Book Ends:
  • The first three games in the series have one remix that includes every stage in the game. The stages that come first in the remix always appear once more for the finale (Space Dance for Tengoku, Karate Man for Heaven, and Packing Pests for Fever). The Left-Hand, Right-Hand, and Final Remixes in Megamix also follow suit, with Blue Bear, The Clappy Trio, and LumBEARjack respectively.
  • Remix 8 in Tengoku, the final stage in the game, ends with Karate Man, the first stage in the game.
• Boss Rush:
  • Remix 7 in Tengoku is a medley of Remixes 1, 2 and 4.
  • The sixth set of ''Tengoku'’ consists of sequel games to the five games that concluded each of the first five sets: The Snappy Trio, Bon Dance, Cosmic Dance, Rap Women, and Turbo Tap Trial.
  • Megamix has two challenges where the player must play the first seven Remixes all in a row. Surprisingly, neither of them are in the third set of challenges and are instead in the second.
• Bottomless Pits: In both versions of Night Walk. Fail to jump over one and it's an instant Game Over.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Getting a Superb on Fever's Extra Games or Night Walk will not earn you a medal like the other games.
• Brick Joke:
  • The reading material for Monkey Watch shows that it was designed to help keep your spirits up by giving you a cheery way to look at the time. The reading material for Mr. Upbeat suggests he bought a Monkey Watch to act as a therapist for his depression.
  • In Heaven's Big Rock Finish, you play a small initial tune to get used to the game's moves. Later on, the tune is extended to an entire song in Remix 7. Guess what game the Remix will make you play right as it's about to finish.
  • The Rap Men in Tengoku complain about someone stealing their snacks at 3 PM. The game's sequel Rap Women reveals that the 2nd pair stole them earlier that day at 10 AM.
  • In Tengoku's Karate Man, the tutorial has a little ditty to help the player get used to punching pots. After you sucessfully clear the level, the music starts speeding up... and the ditty plays again, with a boulder thrown exactly to the timing of the tutorial.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • After getting a Perfect in all of the games in Fever you'll unlock the Endless Remix. The game itself isn't all that hard (in fact, it's arguably the most fun Endless Game in Fever and quite possibly the whole series); what makes it needlessly difficult at first is that, of the five Endless Games used, three of them aren't seen anywhere else, and they don't bother to tell you how they work. This basically forces you to figure it out on your own (or consult a guide) and keep losing until you get it right.
  • One challenge in Megamix forces you to play Lockstep four times in a row, with the "three mistakes and you lose" situation, while the tempo increases every time. Fittingly, it's called "Lockstep Hell" in Japanese. In contrast, the English version sells it in its short but very accurate description:
    "Look, this one's tough."
• Bullet Time:
  • Sneaky Spirits in the first game; their overdramatic moans are Played for Laughs.
  • There's also a couple parts in Iai Slash from Tengoku where the song slows down and you cut down one of the bigger monsters.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: You play as one in Bunny Hop from Tengoku.

Tropes C-D

• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": There are lots of these in Megamix. For instance, talking to Saltwater in the cafe will bring up a menu showing off various stats, including the ending cutscenes the player has seen. The endings are called "Memories".
• The Cameo: Several characters from past Rhythm Heaven games make occasional appearance in later games.
  • The onions and beets from Tengoku's Rhythm Tweezers appear on the books in Fever's Cheer Readers, as well as the character from Night Walk, DJ Yellow from Heaven's DJ School, and the Space Dancers from Tengoku. The beets also make an appearance in Heaven's Crop Stomp.
  • A Sneaky Spirit can be seen in Heaven's Big Rock Finish.
  • Halfway through Freeze Frame in Heaven a few characters from Tengoku appear watching the race. They are the Rap Men, The Clappy Trio, the Space Dancers, and the monkeys from Tap Dance. A rat from Rat Race, a Sneaky Spirit, and the ninja from Ninja Bodyguard also sometimes show up in the photos. In Megamix, some of the racers are also holding the type of bunny doll seen in Fever's, Samurai Slice 2. Additionally, in Remix 3, the white penguin from Showtime can be seen in the photos.
  • Tram from Tengoku can be seen on the rating screens of Remix 2 and Figure Fighter 2 in Heaven and Fever, respectively.
  • The character from Tengoku's Night Walk can be seen in Heaven's The Dazzles, hanging on to the stars that appear.
  • Texting "555-ROCK-OUT" in Heaven's phone toy results in the Rap Men's rap song from Tengoku.
  • The instructor from Tengoku's Marching Orders makes an appearance in Fever's Flipper-Flop, this time instructing a bunch of seals.
  • The girl on the platform from The☆Bon Odori shows up not only on Remix 7's results image in Heaven, but also in the background of Fever's Remix 9.
  • Radio Lady in Heaven appears wearing the Marchers' outfit from Tengoku in Shoot-'Em-Up 2.
  • Multiple characters from Heaven, such as the scientists from Love Lab and the Blue Birds, can be seen outside the window in Fever's Munchy Monk.
  • Pictures of the Rap Men from Tengoku can be seen at the end of Fever's Love Rap and its sequel.
  • DJ Yellow and his student make two cameos in Megamix: their cameo from Cheer Readers, and as alternate heads for the Air Batter during the Lush Remix.
  • As seen on the cover of the game, a member of The Clappy Trio appears as the conductor of Glee Club in Heaven.
  • In Megamix's Super Samurai Slice 2, the Wandering Samurai leaps onto the Ninja Dog's hawk from Heaven.
  • One of the aliens at Alien Ground Control in Megamix's Second Contact is the extraterrestrial in the flying saucer from Spaceball in Tengoku.
• Camera Abuse: At one point in Exhibition Match, the camera zooms out dramatically. If you manage to hit the pitch properly, the ball goes flying and cracks the "glass".
• Captain Obvious: Everyone indulges in this at some point. For example, Monkey in Hole in One:
  "It's my friend, Mandrill! (He's a mandrill.)"
• Cardiovascular Love:
  • Love Lab is about scientists studying love, and their beakers create hearts when shaken.
  • During the three newspaper poses in Ringside, the Reporter has five hearts above her head, implying that she has a crush on the Wrestler. However, it's only on screen for one second, and it's masked by camera flashes, making it a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
• Catchphrase: The descriptions for the Remixes in 'Heaven & Fever all start with some variation on either "It's time to mix things up!" or "Let's mix things up!", respectively.
• Cloudcuckooland: Everywhere. It's even weirder when you realize that all of the games and characters are set in the same universe.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • The first seven remixes in Megamix, where they are all in a Tower each to form a rainbow, to the point it'd be just as easy to name the remixes after their predominant color.
  • Also in Megamix, the Gatekeeper Trio are, from easiest to hardest, yellow (Saffron), blue (Saltwater), and red (Paprika).
  • Additionally in Megamix, Karate Man's light bulbs are color-coded depending on the upcoming combo. Yellow bulbs indicate a kick is coming up, while blue bulbs call for an uppercut.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: In Fever's multiplayer mode, Player 1 is blue and Player 2 is orange. This applies to both the regular games and the endless games.
• Comfort Food: Blue Bear from Megamix is about a bear scarfing donuts and cake as he forlornly remembers his ex-girlfriend.
• Composite Character: Oddly, Karate Joe's own father serves as one to him in Megamix, since he borrows techniques from all of Joe's previous appearances.
• Console Cameo:
  • A Wii U GamePad appears in Shoot-'Em-Up in Megamix, as the device used for communications between waves.
  • The museum in Megamix has shortcuts to every game, the icon of which is the system of the game it originated from. Games from Tengoku are shown in a Gameboy Advance, Heaven a first model Nintendo DS, a Wii for Fever, and a New Nintendo 3DS for Megamix (even though the game isn't a New Nintendo 3DS exclusive, and can be played on a regular 3DS just fine).
  • Night Walk from Tengoku takes inspiration from the Japanese-only GBA accessory, the Play-Yan. It even stars the exact same character.
  • One of the pictures that can be seen above the shop in Megamix is the Famicom Disk System's iconic yellow floppy disks.
• Continuity Nod:
  • All over the place. For example, pay attention to the Freeze Frame game in Heaven, and see how many stages/characters from the first game show up^note For the record: the white and black ninjas from Ninja Bodyguard, the white mouse from Rat Race, and the ghosts from Sneaky Spirits sometimes show up in photographs, and at one point you can see the Rap Men, the Clappy Trio, the Space Dancers, and the monkeys from Tap Trial watching the race. There's more in Heaven than in just that stage, but said stage is practically dripping with them.
  • The reading material for Rhythm Rally 2 shows that Space Gramps, leader of the Space Dancers, is also the chairman of the Rhythm League. Likewise, the reading material for Tap Troupe in Fever implies that he's also the leader of the Tall Tappers.
  • The reading material for Glee Club 2 in Heaven reveals that the conductor used to be in the Clappy Trio from the first game, but moved on to help the Chorus Kids.
  • The Extra Games menu in Fever plays, fittingly enough, a rearrangement of the game selection music from Tengoku.
  • During Remix 7 in Fever, the game briefly shows Karate Joe watching the Karate Man game from Tengoku on a TV.
  • Megamix features a few callbacks of its own in the new minigames. Pajama Party features a song in a very similar style to Love Lab from Heaven, even using the same vocalist. In the Lush Remix, the Spaceball batter from Tengoku is changed to a faceless version of the Pitcher from Fever's Exhibition Match, and she wears masks basked upon DJ Yellow and his student from DJ School in Heaven. Rhythm Rally 2 is also changed to Cosmic Rhythm Rally, with the Paddlers replaced by Cosmic Dancers to match.
  • Halfway through the final remix in Megamix, the music switches from a medley of minigames to a medley of the four games' respective title screen music. Each theme uses "sequel" minigames and an Endless game from its respective game: The Snappy Trio, Cosmic Dance, Tap Trial 2 and Sick Beats for Tengoku, Fan Club 2, Cosmic Rhythm Rally, Jumpin Jazz, and Coin Toss for Heaven, Figure Fighter 2, Working Dough 2, Hole in One 2, and Clap Trap for Fever, and Jungle Gymnast, Karate Man Senior, Super Samurai Slice 2, and the Rhythm Test for Megamix.
• Cool Shades: MC Adore has these by default, DJ Yellow and his student get these in Remix 4 of Heaven, Karate Joe and the Cheer Readers get these in Remix 7 of Fever.... The list goes on.
• Cool Toy: The Muscle Doll in Figure Fighter.
• Cosmetic Award:
  • In the first two games, Perfecting all of the Rhythm Games only gets you a message from the creators (as well as unlocking the rest of the Sound Test). It actually unlocks something else in Fever, though.
  • Megamix has badges for accomplishing certain goals, such as getting the medals from every game and levelling your goat up to Level 200. The goat itself only unlocks more pixel icons for the Loading Screens between games.
  • This is lampshaded in-universe with the Reading Material for Rhythm Rally 2, which is presented as a certificate of achievement:
    What? You want to know if you won? Oh, we don't know. See, winning and losing don't matter when you're having such a delightfully rhythmical rally. And here's your certificate!
• Creative Closing Credits:
  • In Heaven a minigame named Airboarder plays as the credits scroll, which becomes playable later. While it returns in Megamix, it doesn't serve as the credits.
  • Fever likewise has a remake of Night Walk from Tengoku, featuring Marshal as the playable character.
  • In Megamix, the credits appear as you first ascend from the land of Rainbow Towers challenge to the sky. The credits still play if you didn't complete all the remixes required, but you'll stop and fall down at the end.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Just text "STAFF" on the Police Call toy in Fever. The same cameo is unlocked in Megamix after collecting every badge.
  • Tsunku♂, the creator and main composer of the series, is the voice of the blue frog in Frog Hop. He sings the Japanese version of "Young Love Rock 'n' Roll", and that's also him saying "Thank you verrry much!" in the English version.
  • Tanaka Soushi, the vocalist behind "WISH - I Can't Wait for You", appears playing guitar near the end of Remix 5 in Tengoku.
• Crossover: While there were cameos in previous games, Megamix features two WarioWare challenges where characters from the series replace other characters in the minigames. Some examples include Ashley and Red in Tap Trial, Young Cricket and Master Mantis in Munchy Monk, and 9-Volt and 18-Volt in Super Samurai Slice, among others. It's worth noting that WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven are both created by the same development team, Nintendo SPD 1.
• Crush Blush: During Love Lab in Heaven, and at the end of Double Date in Fever.
• Cultural Translation: The Korean version of the Rhythm Heaven series, Rhythm World, changes a few graphics to match Korean culture more closely. Notably, there are different character designs for Samurai Slice and its sequel in Rhythm World Wii.
• Cute Little Fangs: The Chorus Kids and Marshal all sport some.
• Cuteness Proximity: One of the stages' flavor text seems to be affected by this.
  Title: Kitties!
  Description: THEY'RE SO CUTE YOU GUYS!
• Damned by Faint Praise: If you weren't nearly close enough to get a Superb, but still did better than a Try Again, the game will give you an OK with a comment along the lines of "Eh. Good enough."
• Deliberately Monochrome: Remix 8 in Fever is sepia-toned, since all the games are being played in old photographs. Most versions of Karate Man are monochrome, usually with blue or orange. Ninja Bodyguard from Tengoku is almost entirely black and white.
• Demoted to Extra: While this applies to several characters throughout the series, nowhere is this more jarring than with the RAPMEN; despite being two of the very small handful of characters to appear in every game in the series, their appearances outside of Tengoku have been strictly limited to brief cameos only.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The Japanese name for Catch of the Day is literally "Fishing for Fish".
• Destroying a Punching Bag: "Figure Fighter" features a boxing figurine that has to puff up in order to successfully hit a punching bag. As the song progresses, the toy will begin to knock the bags off the chains prompting replacements to be immediately implemented to keep the song going until the end.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Noticed that the counters on Quiz Show are only double-digit? Hitting the buttons more than 99 times in Quiz Show to see what will happen will make your podium explode. Hit it even more and eventually the host's panel and then the Quiz sign will explode.
  • In the event that you screw up Rat Race hard enough to get either your rat or the other two rats stuck out in the open when Ms. Whiskers is watching, they'll cower in fear and sweat nervously while she stares them down.
• Difficulty by Acceleration:
  • The challenge courses in Megamix often increase the tempo of the games, which usually makes them more difficult, though a few become a bit easier that way.
  • A few minigames throughout the series mix things up not by changing the patterns of inputs needed, but by altering the pace of the music to attempt to throw off the player. Tengoku's Sneaky Spirits and the Fever incarnation of Built to Scale are good examples.
• Disapproving Look: In several games, the player character gets this look from other characters if you mess up the rhythm.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Each game has a Remix that comes right before the credits and marks the divide between original games and Hard Mode Filler.
  • Remix 6 in Tengoku, which is oddly a Final-Exam Boss of all the previous minigames. In the other games, the final remix takes this role.
  • Remix 6 in Heaven has sort of a spacey feel to it, and most of the characters sport funny wigs or accessories.
  • Remix 7 in Fever has a cosmic Level in the Clouds vibe, with characters having cool shades and spacesuits.
  • While Megamix is different from other games in the series, Lush Remix still qualifies as the disc-one final boss, as it takes place before the fake-out ending. Since it's the game's first remix in general, it also shows the player that the easy-mode gloves are off.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In both Samurai Slice games in Fever, The Wandering Samurai slaughters several demons without remorse... just because one of them stole a kid's toy.
• Distaff Counterpart: Rap Women to Rap Men in Tengoku, Hole in One 2 to Hole in One in Fever.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Bossa Nova's vocals are... certainly something. They're made worse in the English version, somehow. The "Great bumping!" caption doesn't really help matters... This was apparently an entirely intentional choice, as the sound designer said in an interview that he saw the game's cute visuals and thought they needed an adult edge.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Most of the characters in the Rhythm Heaven series (mostly in Fever) are known for having generic names, such as Dog, Monkey, Reporter, etc.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: The police investigator from Police Call. One of his many idle conversations will be to wonder aloud who ate his donut, which will turn out to be the player.
• Dramatic Thunder: During the final stretch of Samurai Slice in Fever each perfect hit gets accompanied with these.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: The captain of the Blue Birds, whose idea of basic training is riding a tank while the recruits tow it.
• Dual Wielding: Dog Ninja in Heaven uses two ninjato.
• Dub Name Change:
  • In European languages, Heaven is named "Rhythm Paradise"^note except in Australian English, which is the same name as in North America, and Fever is "Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise". Likewise, in Korean, they're Rhythm World and Rhythm World Wii.
  • Additionally, certain names are changed, either for puns or for flavor. For example, Fever's Air Rally characters are Baxter and Forthington, whereas the European version retains the original Japanese names of Quick and Slow.

Tropes E-G

• Early-Installment Weirdness: Tengoku has a significant number of differences from its sequels:
  • There are two mini-games (Quiz Show and Night Walk) where you can fail in the middle of the song, rather than being judged on your overall performance at the end. Quiz also lacks music entirely outside of the introductory scene, making it the only game where rhythm is completely optional (although it helps remember the number of presses, and it's necessary to get the Skill Star in Megamix).
  • There are eight sets of six mini-games rather than ten sets of five.
  • The background music isn't always tailored to match up with the gameplay, some games only having looping music following the same general beat. Some games also re-use the same music for both versions and only change the tempo and cue patterns. This hasn't completely disappeared in later titles; Heaven has some games where the sequel uses an extended version of the first game's song (Shoot-'em-up, Moai Doo-Wop, and Fillbots), while Fever's version of Built to Scale uses a looping and tempo-changing short tune. However, it is much less common on the whole.
  • Several of Tengoku's mini-games don't have any practice at all, which makes it even more like WarioWare.
  • Some completely new gameplay elements are introduced during remixes (the multi-hit enemies in Sick Beats and the sign blocking your view in Rhythm Tweezers). In later games, remixes review what you already know.
  • There are significantly fewer audio cues, meaning the player must use their eyes just as much as their ears in many of the mini-games.
  • On a related note, the game is a lot less willing to use visual Interface Screw. Only five of the 25 games use it^note Marching Orders' soldiers being scrolled offscreen at the end, Air Batter using extreme zooming, the Sneaky Spirits lowering behind the wall, Iai Slice/Samurai Slice creating clouds of mist that obscure the enemies, and the aforementioned sign in Rhythm Tweezers from Remix 8. Later games use more interface screw to force the player into following the rhythm instead of watching for cues.
  • The remix featuring all the games is not the final remix, but rather the sixth of eight.
  • The first set of sequel games happens before the credits, whereas later games have them after the credits.
  • Speaking of Sick Beats, it's the only game in the series where you're allowed to fully miss an input and not have it count against you, as long as you manage to hit the virus before it reaches the heart.
  • There are more minigames based specifically around Japanese culture, with no less than five (Iai Slash/Samurai Slice, The☆Bon Odori, Fireworks, Power Calligraphy, and Ninja Bodyguard). Later games tone this down to only one or two, and otherwise keep the themes more general.
  • The original version of Karate Man features a "Flow" meter. Successful hits cause the meter to rise, near misses cause it to drop, and a complete miss empties the meter entirely. It must be above a certain level for Karate Joe to punch boulders. This is the only game where missing an input has a significant effect on the rest of the minigame, rather than just the rating. Later versions of Karate Man remove the meter, and in Megamix's direct remake of the original it's completely absent.
  • The recurring minigame "Kumitate"^note meaning "assembly", also known as "Built to Scale" in the English versions of Heaven and Fever, is themed around manipulating pegs in different ways within a factory made out of cubes. Tengoku's equivalent of this minigame is named "Polyrhythm" instead of using this later-established name.
  • Traditionally, the games are reskinned according to a theme when they appear in Remixes, sans the Final-Exam Boss. However, in Tengoku, the only full reskins are for Remixes 3 and 5 (the vocal Remixes); 1, 2, and 4 keep the games the same, while 7 and 8 use a mix of new and old skins, including different ones for the same games (Tap Trial in particular has five reskins in total). Heaven retained this weirdness slightly; Remix 8 only reskins Dog Ninja, while Remix 9 uses a mix of old and new designs.
  • The first two games in the series had a side feature in the form of music lessons unlocked via medals. Tengoku had "Drum Lessons", where you have to copy increasingly complex drum patterns by using every button on the GBA, while Heaven had "Guitar Lessons", which were special games of Rockers set to the music tracks of other games. Both music lessons used a letter-grading system, and the latter was connected to a "Battle of the Bands" Brutal Bonus Level where you played though several songs in a row. Fever quietly dropped music lessons and made Nostalgia Levels the third thing medals unlock.
• Easter Egg:
  • At the end of Honeybee Remix in Megamix, Karate Joe can punch away his thought about pancakes.
  • In Fever, when Samurai Slice finishes, Wandering Samurai can slice the "To be continued..." text that appears on-screen.
  • In Quiz Show from Tengoku and Megamix, pressing the buttons over 99 times will make the counter explode. Doing this even more will cause the host's counter to explode, followed by the Quiz sign in the background.
  • In Megamix, holding L and R while selecting a song from the museum or starting an epilogue slideshow accesses a drumming mode, where you can drum along to the song you picked using the buttons.
• Easy Level Trick: Can go both ways in Megamix:
  • You don't want to overwhelm your brain during games that want you to multitask between the A button and/or the B button/control pad? Simple Tap mode will get rid of all that and allow you to just tap your worries away!
  • You got a game that requires so many simultaneous inputs? You can use the control pad and the A button to get all of them!
• Edible Theme Naming: In the English version of Megamix, the Gatekeeper Trio are Saffron, Saltwater, and Paprika.
• Eleventh Hour Super Power: In Tengoku's final remix, Karate Joe enters "Serious" mode, is silhouetted in shadow, loses his flow meter, and gains the ability to consistently hit rocks no matter how well you're playing. The Karate Man portions will also add guitar twangs to the music (with the exception of the final portion) that's not present in the remix, otherwise.
• Endless Game: Several in each game, unlocked by earning medals on the main games. Most of the time, they're completely unique games, while other times they're looping versions of a main game. Either way, the goal is to go as far as you can without failing. The Rhythm Toys also apply, but unlike the Endless Games they're just for fun and don't keep track of high scores.
• Enemy Roll Call: Heaven and Fever do this. In Fever, as you might expect, most of the characters move to the music in some way.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: Invoked with "Second Contact" in Megamix, where messing up at certain parts will cause the alien's translation to read "(unintelligible)".
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: The first seven towers in Megamix, where they are arranged in rainbow order and, when all cleared, produce a rainbow that ascends the player to the next level.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: The Wandering Samurai, natch.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • Several of the games have titles that tell you exactly what they're going to be, in every version. Examples include Karate Man, Hanabi (Fireworks), Shoot-'Em-Up, Dog Ninja, Monkey Watch, and Love Rap.
  • This is more apparent when comparing the English and Japanese versions. Built to Scale is simply called "Assembly", Rhythm Rally is "Ping Pong", Packing Pests is "Sorting", and Micro-Row is "Small Organisms".
  • One game in Megamix is just called "Kitties!" No points for guessing what it's about.
• Exact Words: When playing "The☆Bon Odori" in Tengoku, you are supposed to clap every time the song says "pan". That includes the "pan" in "made in Japan."
• Excuse Plot: Megamix has a story than amounts to "Tibby fell down from Heaven World and needs to go back, but his way is blocked by people who need him to restore their Flow". Of course, you restore the Flow by playing rhythm games that are almost always unrelated to the story. Tibby starts Lampshading this later on.
• Extendable Arms: At the end of the Megamix game "Tangotronic 3000," when the titular dancing robot spins his partner away, he extends his arm with a long spring and pulls her back in for a finishing pose.
• Failed a Spot Check: Ms. Whiskers will fail to notice the mice in Rat Race, even if they're stuck out in the open with nothing to hide them.
• Fake Longevity:
  • This trope comes into play when trying to unlock the bonuses. As the game is played, the player is randomly given a chance to get a perfect on a randomly selected game. If the player fails three times, they must wait for another random chance. Once the player gets gold medals on all 50 games, they have unlimited "perfect" opportunities, however, it still goes to another one after three attempts. Made more annoying by the fact that some games will require you to perform perfectly (at least for the hard parts) just to get a Superb, making the Perfect system feel arbitrary at times.
  • In the arcade version of Tengoku, random minigames will start to show "Go for a Perfect!" if you're doing perfect so far partway through. This is to balance out the lack of saving your completion status.
  • The goat-feeding minigame in Megamix reeks of this, as it serves no other purpose than to unlock Cosmetic Awards to go towards 100% Completion, and it takes an excessively large amount of grinding coins to reach the required levels.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: At the end of Remix 10 in Fever. Twice.^{note (spoiler)}Astute players will notice that in the original "Packing Pests", they get their paycheck at the end of the song. Here, the two fake-outs don't hand out the paycheck, only the real ending does.
• Fan Boy: The Monkeys in Fan Club.
• Final-Exam Boss:
  • The first three games all have a Remix that consists of every game: Remix 6 in the first game, Remix 10 in the second and third.
  • Averted out of necessity in Megamix, since there are just too many unique games to make a true Final Exam Boss without it running excessively long. Instead, the final three Remixes (Left-Hand, Right-Hand, and Final) are condensed medleys upon themselves, with the Final Remix also featuring the title screen music of all four Rhythm Heaven games. During the title screen medley, you get to play parts of the sequel games, parts of the endless games, and a part of the Rhythm Test.
  • Megamix has a challenge that contains successive plays of the Remixes. The game even calls it a "remix of remixes".
  • Karate Man Senior, the final non-Remix game of Megamix, combines elements of all three versions of Karate Man across the franchise (the basic punching from Tengoku, the kicking from Heaven, and the combos from Fever).
• Foreign Queasine: Skirted with in the first game, which features a stage requiring you to pluck the hairs off of oddly-faced beets. Yes, the same ones that show up later in Crop Stomp. There's even a lampshade hung on how strange and unappetizing the beets look in one of the Guitar Lessons in Heaven. In fact, the developers for Tengoku actually wanted to put human faces on the beets, but later decided to use cartoon-ish ones, as they found the human faces on the beets to be "too creepy". invoked
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Quiz Show in Tengoku is the only stage that's not rhythm-based. Instead, it's a straight-up Simon Says Minigame. Matching the host's rhythm helps to keep track of the number of button presses, though, and it's required for the Skill Star in Megamix.
• Funny Afro: A lot of characters end up having afros, most notably the Clappy Trio in Tengoku. Other examples are the Love Posse in Love Rap 2 and portraits of Bach in Lockstep 2.
• Funny Animal: As mentioned elsewhere on the page, you not only have Dog Ninja and the strange chipmunk-man in Love Lab, but there's also Tram and Poline in the first game, who turn back and forth into foxes as they perform. At least, if you get the timing right.
• Funny Background Event: Odds are you won't notice them due to focusing on what you're hearing, but quite a few minigames, especially in Fever, have things going on in the background, and some of them can be amusing.
  • In Double Date from Fever, every time a football is kicked up on-time, you can see it fall in the background and get caught. This continues into Double Date 2, where barnyard animals will catch the football in the air.
  • In both versions of Working Dough, the Game and Watch guy leaves, and he can actually be seen in one of the balls that the player bounces. He then commandeers a Humongous Mecha in the background.
  • One of the things the Spaceball minigame from Tengoku does to mess up your play (coupled with copious Astronomic Zoom) is having the batter wear various silly masks. When asked about it in the associated email, he always dodges the question.
  • In Tengoku, near the end of Power Calligraphy, some dancers will appear on the sides of the screen.
  • During the Karate Man portions of Fever's Remix 9, a cat can be seen just behind Karate Joe. It can even be seen eating a fish a few times.
  • Near the end of LumBEARjack in Megamix, some more cats will appear, and start to dance.
• Gainax Ending: A few games. For example, See-Saw ends with See and Saw doing an Air Guitar and then exploding without explanation.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Remix 6 in Heaven contains one of these: if you're completely accurate in your timing, you'll end up tapping the touchscreen while the game is transitioning from Space Soccer to Lockstep, meaning that your input isn't registered. This can be a real slap in the face. The workaround is to tap the screen just after the game finishes transitioning, which allows your input to be registered just within the timing window required.
• Game of Chicken: "Charging Chicken" in Megamix. Charge the car too much, and it drives off a cliff. Charge the car too little, and it stops on a crumbling bridge. The driver is also a literal chicken.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Megamix might have a story, but it does very little to tie the stages themselves into the story, only explaining that clearing them creates "Flow", which the protagonist needs to progress on his journey back home. Considering that the stages can be about anything and can have you playing as anyone and anything, there isn't really a way to tie any of these together anyway. The terminology used to refer to the stages implies that they're each an in-universe videogame, but nothing is really clear.
• Game Show: Quiz Show, which isn't a Pop Quiz despite the name.
• Generation Xerox: The delinquent from "Ninja Reincarnate" in Tengoku is the descendant of the ninja from the first "Ninja Bodyguard" game, and his girlfriend is a descendant of the lord his ancestor defended. Naturally, they find themselves in a near carbon copy of the situation from the first game.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: invokedIn-universe example. According to the reading material for Double Date, the female student has a band that's really popular in Japan.
• Golden Super Mode: While feeding the goat in Megamix, if you successfully feed the goat a golden vegetable, it may turn gold and give you unlimited vegetables for a limited time.
• Grand Finale: The Final Remix in Megamix, as a cap-off to the series as a whole, contains the main themes for the four games in the series, featuring their sequel stages and corresponding Endless Game. (Megamix has its own original Endless Game, but Charging Chicken would be a bit difficult to adapt into a Remix form, so it uses the tutorial drumming sequence instead.) Together, they summarize the entire series in the span of two minutes.
• Gratuitous Disco Sequence: The Clappy Trio in Tengoku, Remix 6 in Heaven, and Remix 7 and Love Rap 2 in Fever.
• Gratuitous English:
  • In general, the counting for each game is usually in English even in the Japanese version. "Wan! Tsu! Tree! Fow!"
  • The Japanese version of Cheer Readers from Fever ("Let's everybody go!").
  • The music for Karate Man in Tengoku has this as well, which qualifies for "weirdest lyrics in any Rhythm Heaven game ever".
  • All of the speech in Space Dance, even if the game's vocal language is set to English. In fact, the English version has an entirely new intentionally Engrish voice track. Given Space Gramps speaks in Engrish even in text, it's practically a running gag of the game.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Minor one in Megamix. Quiz Show challenges you to hit the buttons the same number of times as the quiz show host. What it doesn't tell you is that the skill star for this game can only be earned by closely matching the host's rhythm. This is also the way to boost your score beyond 80.
  • In Megamix there are hidden goodies in each of the Endless Games that are made available in the museum by reaching particular scores. Not only does the game never once tell you of their existence, not even from a random tip from the Barista, the scores themselves are incredibly hard to reach and will escape the notice of anyone not that interested in the Endless Games. ^note The minimum scores needed are 30 for Coin Toss, 120 for Sick Beats, 20 for Chargin' Chicken, and 40 for Clap Trap.

Tropes H-P

• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: The back-up dancers from Frog Hop are an interesting case. In the first variant, they wear green-colored pants. But in the sequel, they wear sleeveless vests without any pants. The lead dancer and singer wear the same kind of pants in the first game, but they are both fully-dressed in the sequel.
• Hard Mode Filler: After the credits roll in the first three games, you'll be presented with a few extra sets of minigames which are simply harder, Palette Swapped versions of previous minigames. Sometimes they involve new gimmicks or gameplay mechanics, with Fever having more involved sequel games than the previous two, while Megamix does away with this altogether by mixing in sequels with new games up to the end.
• Hard-Work Montage: During Blue Birds, you see the birds' training routine in the background while the gameplay continues. This is lampshaded by the reading material, which outright says that reading it will help the montage make more sense.
• Have a Nice Death: Better get your timing right on Night Walk or else...
  The stars say...
  You fell down a hole.
• Henohenomoheji: The last part of Power Calligraphy has a face made entirely out of kanji.
• He Who Must Not Be Heard: Cam in Fever. While he does make an audible "Hmm!" sound in the beginning tutorial, he never says anything with a speech bubble.
• Hit Stop: In Tengoku and Megamix's "Sneaky Spirits", successfully shooting a ghost will briefly slow down the game and the music as the ghost lets out an appropriately slow "OOF!"
• Hope Spot: It can happen (a lot) that the results screen gives you a summary that looks identical to or similar to the one for a Superb...but about a second later, instead of a Superb, the game slaps you with a "but still just... OK". (In contrast, you'll get an "Eh, good enough" if you got an OK that was nowhere near a Superb.)
• Idol Singer: Fan Club is all about one. In fact, it's literally called "Idol" in the Japanese version.
• Implausible Fencing Powers: In Ninja Bodyguard in Tengoku, your objective is to slice flying arrows in half. In the sequel, Ninja Descendant, your objective is to slice rocks in half with a stick.
• Inexplicably Tailless: Some animal characters lack a tail. For example, Dog Ninja, the Lumbercats, and KITTIES!! This even applies to some (but not all) monkeys (who are explicitly called "monkeys" in-game), even though a monkey has a tail by definition ("ape" would be a more accurate term for a tailless primate).
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: Space Gramps, the leader of the Space Dance group speaks in broken English that would give even Fawful a run for his money.
• Interface Screw:
  • As a general rule, if a game can be played solely off of the audio cues, then the visual cues will be messed with or obscured at some point in the game.
  • Some of the harder games love darkening everything or putting things in your way, forcing you to rely only on your rhythm and your ability to detect audio cues. One of the most notorious examples comes in Samurai Slice in Fever, which blocks the entire freaking screen with translucent slides, creating a Fake Difficulty for what would otherwise be extremely basic games.
  • Heaven is also notorious for blocking out 95% of the screen for the third measure of Built to Scale. And this is the very first stage, mind you. On the other hand, it is inverted in Built to Scale 2. It looks like it'll do it again...but easily catches "prepared" players off guard by sending another thing while the lights are still off. The lights come back on immediately after this one.
  • One of the challenges in Megamix has the camera slowly pan out to reveal the minigame screen clutched in the jaws of a monster. The speed of the panning increases the worse you do, with it slowing/zooming in slightly for every perfect beat you hit. If you don't perform well enough, eventually the screen will get so small you can't see it properly any more, the monster will eat it, and you'll fail the challenge.
  • This is the main gimmick of Tengoku's "Spaceball" and its sequel "Spaceball 2", where the camera constantly zooms in and out to disorient the player.
  • Tengoku's "Samurai Slice" has a thick fog cover the screen during parts. It's especially bad on the original model GBA, as the screen isn't very bright to begin with.
  • In Tengoku's Remix 8, the "Rhythm Tweezers" parts have the hairs covered up by a sign that reads "Don't peek".
  • Halfway through Heaven's "Freeze Frame", the view of the other side of the racetrack gets blocked by spectators.
  • "Rhythm Rally 2" in Heaven has the camera constantly pan between different angles to disorient the player
  • "Air Rally" in Fever has clouds that will occasionally cover what's going on. This is Downplayed in Megamix, likely due to hardware limitations.
  • Bossa Nova in Fever has various things in the foreground cover the titular characters.
  • Halfway through "Monkey Watch" in Fever, a monkey in a hot air balloon will fly across the screen waving in an attempt to distract the player.
• Interface Spoiler: Averted in both Heaven and Fever by having more unlockables than there are minigames to get them from; the rest of the unlockables are automatically obtained once you get all the Perfects.
• Interspecies Romance: The farmer in Second Contact mentions that he's single and briefly flirts with the aliens. This elicits the same shocked expression the human scientists had in the first version of the minigame.
• Irony: Bertram's dislikes as noted on his Mascot include "romance novels". His favorite minigame (as shown when he shows up at StreetPass Terrace) just so happens to be "Double Date" despite this.
• Japanese Delinquents: The theme of Remix 5 in Tengoku.
• Junior Counterpart: Inverted in Megamix with a minigame called Karate Man Senior, starring Karate Joe's father.
• Kabuki Sounds: Iai Slash/Samurai Slice, Power Calligraphy, and Ninja Bodyguard from Tengoku are all introduced with these.
• Kaizo Trap:
  • Fever pulls this off in its 10th Remix. The last section of this medley is Packing Pests, and it tricks you into thinking it's finished, only to start up a moment later with a few more beats, then fades to black... and does it again when the music picks up once more for a few final beats. Fake-Out Fade-Out indeed.
  • In Monkey Watch and Flock Step, in which you must continue the beat all the way until the stage fades out completely, with no accompaniment from the music for the last few seconds. People going for a Perfect may be caught off guard when they realize there are a few more inputs at the very end than they expected.
  • Tengoku's Night Walk has this as a result of its unique win condition: you can get through the song and even maintain a perfect by only jumping when you absolutely need to... but you can't actually successfully complete the game without jumping on a preset number of boxes (many more than is required to leisurely reach the goal otherwise) without falling to your doom at the very end, at which point your Perfect streak will also shatter just to rub it in that much more.
• Keet: Everyone, but stand-out examples are the Space Dancers in Tengoku, DJ Yellow in Heaven ("Scratch-o, hey!"), and the Tall Tappers in Fever ("Okay!").
• Last Lousy Point: The badge for getting the goat to level 200 in Megamix. To elaborate, feeding the goat is done via a Pachinko minigame that gets harder at each 10-level interval. To further elaborate, the goat will likely be around level 40 by the time you've done everything else in the game (including all of the Challenges and Perfect Campaigns), and the game starts getting into Pachinko Hell territory at around 70 and becomes flat out unfair for the last 10 levels. Have fun.
• Last Note Hilarity: Tengoku's Karate Man ("Karate Man Returns" in Megamix) ends with the music becoming faster and more intense, only to end with the silly xylophone ditty from the tutorial.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Megamix has a few differences from the first three installments:
  • There's a plot framing the game to give you a reason to play through the minigames.
  • The strict "hit the beat or missed it" timing is still present, but now there's visual representation on the bottom screen showing how closely you hit the beat, with each minigame giving you a star for hitting one specific beat in it exactly.
  • There's a meter to show a player's performance along with the two or three sets of comments after each mini-game. Fever also had a meter that rated performance, but it was only used during the multiplayer mode.
  • Medals are still here, but have lost their role of unlocking extras. Instead there are coins, which are spent like currency to unlock bonuses instead of unlocking them when you reach certain thresholds. You can earn several coins at once depending on how well you do in a minigame, and you earn coins when replaying minigames, instead of just earning one for the first time you get a Superb. There are other ways to gain coins too.
  • Flow Balls are currency spent to unlock extra minigames from previous Rhythm Heaven games. Similar to the change to using coins, Perfect challenges award said Flow Balls instead of unlocking bonuses upon reaching certain thresholds of Perfects. Flow Balls are also earned through completing Challenge Trains consisting of several minigames in a row, with one or more twists thrown in to mix it up. If you've unlocked all extra minigames, the balls will be exchanged for 30 coins.
  • Instead of the credits and cast playing after all the main minigames are completed, there's a fake-out ending after completing the first remix, a real ending after clearing the other six, and a minigame roll-call after the tenth and final remix.
  • In a more minor example, neither of Megamix's new Karate Man games have lyrics, in contrast with all of the others.
  • After the main game, there doesn't seem to be any notifiers for the game characters during the character Role Call.
  • There is no one remix containing all the games. Instead, they are split across the three final remixes.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After getting through all of the minigames in Megamix's main story and obtaining the Superb for the Final Remix, you get the quote "We're so proud of everything you've accomplished!" which both refers to you the player, and the now grown Momotaro being praised by his parents in the win picture.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: In Megamix, if you head for Tibby's home of Heaven Land before clearing all of the Rainbow Towers, the music slows to a stop at the end of the credits.
• Level Ate: Remix 3 in Fever has a kitchen setting. There's also the Citrus Remix and the Donut Remix in Megamix.
• Line Boil: Several stages use this art style, including "Glee Club" in Heaven and Megamix, and "Blue Bear" in Megamix.
• Living Statue: Moai Doo-Wop reveals that the statues are rather talkative when nobody's watching.
• Lost in Translation: "Cheer Readers" in the original Japanese version of Fever is noted to have especially glaring and incorrect English ("Let's everybody go!"), but it's very much intentional if the Punny Name of "Cheer Readers" didn't already tip it off to you. In the English localization, however, the cheerleaders speak their English perfectly, so the "Engrish" joke is slightly lost. That's right, something was lost in translation due to the translation being too good.
• Lucky Charms Title: Tengoku has "The☆Bon Odori".
• Luminescent Blush: Really, if the character doesn't already have Blush Stickers to begin with, this comes into play.
  • Not entirely noticeable, but the captain does this in Blue Birds after a successful "stretch out your neck" flick.
  • So does Karate Joe in Fever after a successful combo.
  • The cheerleader you play as in "Cheer Readers" will give off this whenever you miss.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: The Donk-Donk game in Fever is so weird the English writers don't even try to give it an explanation.
• Marathon Level:
  • While most levels usually take around one and a half to two minutes, the first three games all have a remix that combines every other level in the game; in Fever, it clocks in at well over three minutes. In Megamix the medley is split into three parts, but the final remix is still nearly four minutes in length.
  • Some of the later Challenge Train stages in Megamix can string as many as eight games together at once.
  • "Frog Hop" in Heaven (and remastered in Megamix) features a complete song with verses, choruses and a bridge section, clocking in at just over two minutes - not super-long compared to some of the longer remixes, but it requires almost continual, repeated button pressing to a fairly fast rhythm (156 bpm) with no breaks, so it quickly becomes exhausting!
• Market-Based Title: Rhythm Heaven is titled Rhythm Paradise in European countries. For a more specific example, Fever is titled Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise in Europe and Australia.
• Mars Needs Women: Inverted with Second Contact in Megamix with a flirty farmer, to the bewilderment of his intergalactic audience.
• Martial Arts and Crafts: The samurai from the first game returns in an Endless Game in Heaven to... slice watermelons. Similarly, there's Dog Ninja, who uses his insane awesome ninja skills to... slice vegetables and other assorted objects. To be fair, he's just doing it for the money.
• Masked Luchador: Gets interviewed in the Ringside game.
• Meaningful Appearance: The statue that you control in Moai Doo-Wop is distinguished by the cute bow on it.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Tram and Poline, Baxter and Forthington, See and Saw, Bossa and Nova...
  • The Güiro lizards in Love Lizards are so named because the females of the species rub their bodies with their tails to make a ratcheting sound, much like the instrument they resemble.
• Medley:
  • The first three games all have a Remix that's a medley of all the previous games. For Heaven and Fever, it's the 10th and final Remix; for Tengoku, it's the 6th Remix before the credits.
  • In Megamix, the medley is split into three parts due to the sheer amount of minigames. The final remix also contains a medley of the main themes throughout the series, going from Tengoku to its own theme.
• Megamix Game: Take a wild guess what the Trope Namer is.
• Mercy Invincibility: In the challenge courses in Megamix, the Life Goal requires you to play the level with a limited number of mistakes. If you do make a mistake, you will lose one life, but you'll have a small while where you can continue to miss and won't lose another life.
• Mercy Mode: After failing a certain amount of times in a game, you can ask the Barista to pass it for you. This can be done continuously for every game, excluding a select few.
• Mickey Mousing:
  • Practically everything moves to the beat in this series, to help players follow the rhythm.
  • Rat Race ("Stealth Rat" in Japanese, "Cheese Heist" in the fan translation) gives you no audio cues past the tutorial and just tells you to "follow your gut" in hitting the beats, forcing you to rely on Mickey Mousing^note or paying attention to what the cat is doing, but who does THAT? as your cues. It's for this reason that when it later appears in remixes (and Megamix), it gives you the same cues as the tutorial.
• Minigame Credits: Subverted. Airboarder in Heaven and Night Walk in Fever play themselves the first time they're shown. They become actual minigames afterwards.
• Misery Builds Character: Tibby from Megamix is said to have been a lazy kid who was not sure if happy people had any problems like he did until he fell down from his world and learned that people still have problems anyway. This is what helps him learn about the world and happily tells him to his seemingly-possessed mother in Heaven World so that she can talk to him. Unfortunately, the heartwarming part of this speech is entirely lost on her as she had been holding up her breath to get rid of a bad case of hiccups. Tibby is speechless and miffed.
• Mission Control: The Radio Lady between rounds on the Shoot-'Em-Up stages in Heaven, and a group of scientists in First Contact and its sequel in Megamix.
• Moon Rabbit:
  • One of these appears in Bunny Hop from Tengoku, where it tries to reach the moon by jumping across the ocean.
  • Tengoku's Remix 7 and 8, Remix 2 from Heaven, and Working Dough 2 all feature Orbulon's rabbits from WarioWare.
• Multiple Endings: Besides the 3 epilogues, some games have different ending animations depending on if or if not you hit the final note. Super Samurai Slice, for example, ends with the princess running off and the samurai blushing with embarrassment if he fails to counter attack the final demon.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • The guiding principle of the game - especially the first game. Whoever thought that writing calligraphy could be so Hot-Blooded and chopping vegetables could be so cool?
  • The samurai's purpose in life in the Fever version of Samurai Slice is battling demons... to retrieve stolen children's toys. The last demon in the portal is always the one carrying it.
  • The mini-game See-Saw involves See and Saw doing acrobatics on a seesaw in order to test it, all while set to blaring metal music. Eventually, the one you control gets launched into the air several times in a row and, if you time the button presses right, he'll fuzz up and land with the explosion on the seesaw. At the end, they'll Air Guitar before exploding from pure awesomeness.
  • Ringside involves a Masked Luchador being interviewed by a reporter in front of the press set to catchy music. The reporter's questions are rendered as "Wubba dubba dubba, 'zat true?" and if done right, he nods to each question. The reporter going "Woah, you go, big guy!" and the crowd going "Pose for the fans!" are both cues to do two different poses, but in the case of the pose for the latter cue, it's either accompanied by dramatic background swirl or a cut to a newspaper article containing a photo of the Masked Luchador performing said pose.
  • Megamix's Final Remix has a unique scenario in which a man is proposing to a woman...only instead of presenting her the wedding ring, he flips the ring high into the air, and she skillfully catches it exactly 6 beats later. Yes, this is Coin Toss.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Invoked by the female Love Lab scientist, who swoons in her diary about her lab partner (the Nerd Glasses-wearing male scientist).
• Nerf: Air Rally and Catch of the Day were given less Interface Screw in Megamix, likely due to the 3DS being slightly less powerful than the Wii hardware-wise.
• No Fair Cheating: In Megamix's Final Remix, if you try to cheese your way through the "Clap Trap" segment by repeatedly tapping/pressing A, the game will penalize you by locking out your inputs for the duration of the subsequent "Jungle Gymnast" and "Karate Man Senior" segments.
• Noob Bridge: Each of the second tiers of most of the games features a final game before the remix that increases the difficulty compared to what came earlier.
  • Tengoku features The☆Bon Odori, which is not only one of the few games in the entire franchise to have the cues be based explicitly on the song's lyrics but also requires much more prediction from the player than previous games.^note You need to clap just as the "pan" is reached, instead of waiting for the cue to become fully audible.
  • Heaven features Moai Doo-Wop, a variable call and response game similar to Glee Club. Where it splits off from the likes of Glee Club is that it demands very quick inputs for an entirely different response type than just holding down the screen.^note The birds in the minigame poop on you as soon as you miss or overextend an input. This arguably makes it easier than Glee Club if you're willing to give up the Flow, since Glee Club only announces you missed the cue well after you've missed it.
  • Fever features Monkey Watch, a simple keep the beat game. Those generally don't show up until well over halfway into the overall game.^note Tengoku has Marching Orders, but Marching Orders is easy compared to other keep the beat games due to the large amounts of breaks and being shorter than Bunny Hop or Lockstep. While more skilled players can get through Monkey Watch no problem, newer players will likely struggle or give up when they find that they struggle to keep timing.^note Outside of "keep playing it until the game just clicks," the only advice that can be offered is that the game doesn't explain the purple monkies' gimmicks very well. Each monkey is actually high fived on every other beat, but the pink monkies need you to high five them on the offbeat of each beat. Thus, you make an input on the first monkey half a beat earlier than normal, and the second input is made half a beat later than normal, with an overall beat separating the two.
  • Megamix averts this, and doesn't really have a Noob Bridge like the other games. The only viable games are Fruit Basket (going purely by the structure of tiers being defined by the collection of games), Sumo Brothers (if you don't consider it the Wake-Up Call Boss of the Lush Tower), or Catchy Tune 2 (going purely by the structure of tiers being defined by the remixes). None of those three are nearly as punishing, or infamous, as Moai Doo-Wop or Monkey Watch, with Fruit Basket even being entirely possible to do off of visuals alone.
• No Name Given:
  • A bunch of characters. Notably, the boy and the girl from Double Date in Fever. Their labels in the cast are "A boy" for the boy, and "His crush" for the girl. It gets somewhat ridiculous considering the weasels have a collective name that's all capitalized (Weasel Couple), alongside other certain named cast members, being a fork (named Fork) and a set of nuts and a bolt (named Widget). They're named Romeo and Julia for the European version, however.
  • The cast of Donk-Donk also goes unnamed in the North American version, instead simply labeling them as "Uh...these guys?"^note In the European version, they're known as The Donkers. Then again, it's quite difficult to put a name on such a cast...
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: The second version of a minigame is supposed to be harder, usually with a faster tempo, longer stage, or added off-beat prompts. But some minigames mix things up by going with a different timing or slowing the tempo to throw off the player, so they ironically become easier in the process. Lockstep 2 is one such example with its slower marching pace.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Mr. Upbeat is implied to suffer from depression.
  • The Toss Boys actually consists of Two Guys and a Girl, the girl being Aka-chan.
  • The last part of Fever's Night Walk takes place during the day.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Most of the characters are drastically different in appearance, even in the same art style. Compare, for example, the Munchy Monk to the Wandering Samurai, or the Frogettes to the Space Dancers.
• Non-Standard Game Over: While you normally fail Night Walk in Tengoku by failing to successfully jump on enough nodes, you can also fail and end the game prematurely by falling into a Bottomless Pit. In Night Walk 2, the same can be achieved by jumping into an electric fish. Either way, the game gives you a special "Try Again" message.
• No Plot? No Problem!: The first three games have no plot whatsoever outside the rhythm games themselves to a certain degree. Averted in Megamix.
• No Sense of Direction: The samurai of Samurai Slice calls himself "The Wandering Samurai" partially because he follows the Samurai's code of Bushido and partially because he considers himself to have a generally poor sense of direction.
• Nose Shove: In "Sneaky Spirits," it's possible to shoot an arrow up a ghost's nose.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • Karate Man, the first mini-game of Tengoku, makes a reappearance near the end of both Heaven and Fever.
  • The Built to Scale game from Heaven has a factory setting much like Polyrhythm from the first game. The Built to Scale game in Fever manages to cram two Nostalgia Levels into one by combining the elements from both aforementioned games.
  • Fever also contains four remastered stages from Tengoku as unlockables, and the Mini-Game Credits sequence is a remake of Night Walk, also from Tengoku.
  • The English version of Fever, to make up for removing Manzai, remade Mr. Upbeat, an Endless Game from Tengoku.
  • Exaggerated in Megamix. The game has seventy-eight total levels returning from the previous three games.
• Once an Episode:
  • Karate Joe, the Samurai, and Widget Factory have playable appearances in each game — though there's no new Built to Scale game in Megamix, so the Fever version returns instead.
  • In every game in the series, the set containing either Remix 6 or Remix 7 will have one stage involving two or more pale-white men in single-color bodysuits doing some synchronized group activity: Cosmic Dance for Tengoku, Space Soccer for Heaven, Tap Troupe for Fever, and Rhythm Rally 2 for Megamix.
  • Except for the first game, each game contains one sequel stage involving farmers: The Dazzles 2 for Heaven, Double Date 2 for Fever, and Second Contact for Megamix.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: "Go for a Perfect!" (though you have a total of three attempts) and some games in Megamix's Challenge Train levels (once again, you have a total of three attempts).
• One Last Job: The fan translation of Rat Race as "Cheese Heist" paints it as this.
• Painting the Medium: The Tower stages in Megamix are stacked window-by-window, mirroring the minigames' iconic column lineup in other games.
• Palette Swap: In each Remix and subsequent sequel, the characters have different clothes and color palettes just to fit with the theme. However, said themes are considerably more elaborate than an average palette swap, such as The Clappy Trio being transformed from disco into the Wild West, or Remix 1 in Fever being entirely tropical-themed.
• Pantsless Males, Fully-Dressed Females: Beary from Blue Bear wears nothing at all, but his girlfriend wears a pink dress and a pink bow.
• Parental Bonus:
  • After helping two lizards sing their mating call, the game comments that they came together in the end. If you get a Superb, it shows these two lizards with kids, so if you put two and two together...
  • In Love Lab, the two scientists are literally "making love".
  • Meanwhile, Fever has Bossa Nova, whose narrators sound very... enthusiastic.
  • One of the phone numbers you can enter on the Phone toy in Heaven is 555-PECK-YES.
• Parrying Bullets: In Ninja Bodyguard, you play as a Ninja defending his lord from arrows being fired by a nearby rival clan. The ninja's chosen method of doing this is to stand directly in front of him and swing his sword with the same rhythm in which the arrows are being shot. Of course, this means that hitting an input perfectly results in the arrow being sliced in half and harmlessly falling to the ground. Getting a half-miss has the arrow being deflected away. An Exaggerated example appears in the sequel minigame, Ninja's Descendant, in which your character is instead wielding a wooden stick and using it to deflect and slice rocks.
• Perpetual Frowner: Cam could count as this. It's his default expression and, apart from face-signaling in the rhythm test, is only ever seen smiling once.◊
• Perspective Flip:
  • Listen first to the lyrics in Karate Man in Heaven ("Struck By the Rain") and then to the lyrics in Karate Man in Fever ("Lonely Storm"). The two songs tell the same story of a couple breaking up. "Struck By the Rain" tells it from the female perspective while "Lonely Storm" tells it from the male perspective.
  • For a more traditional example, Second Contact features the alien interpreting for a human to an audience of aliens, the opposite of its predecessor, First Contact.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Miss Ribbon and Cam from Fever.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The Pirate Crew in Fever. They just like to offer boat rides for pigs from island to island.
• Piss-Take Rap: Rap Men/Women in Tengoku and Love Rap in Fever. Both are Played for Laughs.
• Player Nudge:
  • There's usually something on the screen that moves to the rhythm as a visual hint. Even more subtly, if you need a hint of what's coming up next, you should look at the girl. The pitcher in Exhibition Match, the cheerleaders in Drummer Duel, and MC Adore in Love Rap are excellent examples of this. It's also usually a girl's voice that counts for you.
  • In Bossa Nova, if you mess up, the voices briefly say their cues louder before going back to their... normal cues.
  • In Samurai Slice in Fever, if you mess up during the part where the story covers the screen, the words and pictures will get knocked out of the way so that you can see yourself.
• Poor, Predictable Rock: Hairold, a hairdresser, hates rock-paper-scissors... because he always picks scissors.
• The Power of Love: A lot of the games deal with love, and so do most of the vocal songs. It goes further than the usual portrayal, however, in that there are also songs that deal with the downsides of love ("Struck by the Rain" and "Lonely Storm" cover a breakup, and "I Love You, My One and Only" is about unrequited love).
• Pressure-Sensitive Interface: The Nintendo DS' touchscreen can tell between a light and a hard press. In the game, it's programmed in a way that you can hold the stylus on the screen and flick. It also tells the difference between light and hard taps. Moai Doo Wop, in particular, requires the player to use both light and hard taps within the same game.
• Product Placement: The lyrical songs in Tengoku have an advertisement for "J.P.Room", who helped develop the game.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: The sumo wrestler you don't control in Sumo Brothers is wearing glasses. According to the game's item description, they're fake glasses he starting wearing so people could tell him apart from his brother, who you play as.
• Punny Name:
  • Tram and Poline from their eponymous game; Ann Glerr, the fisher from Catch of the Day; and Baxter and Forthington from Air Rally are a few examples.
  • Even the minigame titles get in on this; Flock Step, Fork Lifter, Cheer Readers...

Tropes Q-Z

• Rainbow Motif: The first seven remixes in Megamix all correspond to a different color in the rainbow: Barbershop/Red, Citrus/Orange, Honeybee/Yellow, Lush/Green, Machine/Aqua, Donut/Blue, and Songbird/Purple. When all are completed, they form a rainbow that leads Tibby to his home in the clouds.
• Readings Blew Up the Scale: "Quiz" in Tengoku and Megamix has a counter showing how many times you've pressed the buttons. If you press the buttons more than 99 times, your counter will explode. Continuing to mash buttons will also blow up the host's counter and the "QUIZ" marquee.
• Regional Bonus:
  • The European/Australian versions of Fever has both the Japanese and English soundtracks, as well as the voices.
  • The Japanese version of Fever has an Endless Game titled "Manzai". Because it was too difficult to translate properly, localized versions contain a remake of Mr. Upbeat from Tengoku instead.
• Remixed Level: An interesting take on this appears in Megamix; many of the main games are given stripped-down "story mode" versions with new music and visuals, while retaining the same gameplay.
• Retraux:
  • Starting in Fever, the practice music for each game is usually a stripped-down chiptune version of the game's actual song.
  • The Endless Game Lady Cupid in Fever is a homage to Kid Icarus, down to the graphics.
  • Megamix features a 16-bit styled rhythm game called Super Samurai Slice. The music and sound effects (aside from the demons exploding) are modern, though.
  • When you feed the goat in Megamix, it takes the form of a pachinko game that uses chiptune music and pixelated graphics.
• The Reveal: Several minigames throughout the series have some kind of twist at the end.
  • Played for laughs in Exhibition Match in Fever. The reason it takes so long for the pitcher's ball to reach the batter from behind the curtain? A monkey catches the ball mid-flight, waits, then tosses it out to the batter.
  • Screwbot Factory apparently has you screwing the heads onto tiny robots, but the OK and Superb endings reveal that they're actually Humongous Mechas.
  • Tap Troupe has the troupe's faces at the bottom and their feet at the top. The end reveals that they're actually extremely tall, thus the reason for the frames.
  • Getting a perfect in Heaven's Remix 10 reveals that the Blue Birds' drill sergeant is actually the leader of the Rhythm League.
  • There's a heartwarming one the end of Blue Bear. He hasn't actually broken up; he's just having a bad dream.
• Replay Mode: A variant in Megamix: after beating a game, you can access the three epilogue cards (the vignettes you see after getting a "Try Again," "OK," or "Superb" score) in the museum.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Certain minigame titles, like Crop Stomp and Micro-Row.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Many examples. From Fever alone we have the seals in Flipper-Flop, the Weasel Couple in Double Date, and any time monkeys show up.
• Running Gag: In Megamix, for any version of First Contact, whoever's watching the video feed (Ground Control, Alien Ground Control, or a family watching TV) will either whoop and holler or stare blankly at the screen depending on the action taking place. Particularly for staring blankly, it's the exact same expression drawn on their faces every time. The joke even carries over to Ground Control's cameo in WarioWare: Get It Together!
• Save the Princess: Super Samurai Slice in Megamix, fitting its Retraux theme. In Super Samurai Slice 2, you rescue four princesses.
• Say It with Hearts: During Love Rap 2, a pink heart appears in one of the speech bubbles.
• Seesaw Catapult: The central focus of See-Saw, a Rhythm Game that debuted in Fever and returned for Megamix. In the Rhythm Game, playground inspectors See and Saw "test" a see-saw by jumping on it to launch each other into the air.
• Self-Parody: Many of the notes unlocked for getting Perfects, particularly in Fever and Megamix.
• Series Mascot: Each game in the series has a unique mascot.
  • In the first game it's the Drum Samurai, who appears at the beginning of the game, as well as the credits.
  • The blue frog from Frog Hop takes the Drum Samurai's role in Heaven, but the real stars are the Chorus Kids from Glee Club.
  • Marshal, Cam, and Miss Ribbon (who are Suspiciously Similar Substitutes to the Chorus Kids) run the Rhythm Test and the credits minigame, Night Walk, in Fever.
  • Megamix has Tibby, who also serves as the protagonist of the game's story mode.
  • Some fans will say that Karate Joe is the mascot of the entire series (despite not appearing in marketing) as he has appeared in all four games. Others argue the Tap Trial player character (often named Rhythm Girl) is this instead, as she's also appeared in some capacity through the entire series and is the cover girl for Heaven and the arcade port of Tengoku (an expy takes her place on the cover of Fever).
• Shave And A Haircut: Used as part of Sick Beats and at the end of The Snappy Trio from Tengoku. A variation of the tune begins and ends Catchy Tune in Megamix.
• She's a Man in Japan: Mandrill is called "he" in the English version. The same character is called Mandoriko^note Japanese names that end in "ko" are usually feminine. and uses "atashi"^note a feminine first-person pronoun in the Japanese version.
• Shock and Awe: The electric fish in Night Walk 2. Jumping into one will shock Play-Yan for an instant Game Over.
• Shout-Out:
  • Rhythm Heaven makes many references to other games, such as WarioWare and even Nintendo's GBA-slot based MP3 player, the rarely heard of Play-Yan^note the guy from the Night Walk stage is the character from the menu navigation for the Play-Yan's interface.
  • Fever has a Game & Watch character cameo in Working Dough (the reading material refers to him as Mr. Game & Watch), and one of the baseball players in Exhibition Match looks remarkably like something Shigeru Miyamoto had drawn in the '80s.
  • The 2P Endless Game Kung Fu Ball in Fever stars Young Cricket as Player 1.
  • The Fever endless game Lady Cupid, in all of its 8-bit glory, is likely to be a shout-out to Kid Icarus. Her general appearance, including her green hair, could also be a shout-out to Palutena from the same game.
  • MC Adore from Fever's Love Rap bears similarity to both Cynthia and Curly Brace.
  • The European version of Fever adds one in; the boy and girl from Double Date are namechecked as Romeo and Julia in the credits.
  • A doll of Ashley appears in Megamix's Rhythm Museum.
  • The results screen for First Contact in Megamix is titled "Ground Control to Translator Tom".
  • In Megamix, one of the things Dieter might say at the Café begins with, "I met a strange lady" who made him nervous, quoting the line word for word from Men at Work's "Down Under."
  • In the Bird Remix of Megamix, the Wrestler dons a yellow bird costume, making him a humanoid version of Rawk Hawk.
• Sickeningly Sweet: Cutesy, cheesy love songs tend to show up at least once per game for lyrical stages, with the English versions of "Thrilling! Is This Love?" (Fan Club) and "Love Ooh Ooh Paradise" (The Dazzles) in Heaven being the most known.
• Silly Simian: Every game has at least one new minigame featuring a monkey in a silly situation, such as tap dancing, keeping time with other monkeys, or doing gymnastics in the jungle.
• "Simon Says" Mini-Game: Hoo boy. The Rhythm Heaven franchise is notorious for these. A few examples: Quiz Show, Shoot-Em-Up, Moai Doo-Wop, Drummer Duel, Love Lab, Working Dough, Rockers, First Contact, Rhythm Tweezers, Tambourine. The ("Super Hard!") "Copycats" challenge in Megamix is focused on these.
• Slapstick: Missing the beat on some scenes causes "you" to either bump against something, or get bumped by something.
• Slumber Party: Pajama Party from Megamix features a girl dancing with monkeys at a sleepover.
• Smug Smiler: The spiders in Fever's Packing Pests sport a smug grin if you catch them instead of slapping them away like you're supposed to.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: The Game.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Remix 8 in Fever features the usual silly minigames...all to a song about heartbreak.
• Space "X": Spaceball, Space Dance, Cosmic Dance, Cosmic Rhythm Rally, Space Soccer, and Space Soccer 2.
• Sprite/Polygon Mix: Tangotronic 3000 in Megamix has 2D characters in a 3D environment. Otherwise, it's averted, as 2D and 3D games are kept separate.
• Starfish Language: First Contact, a minigame in Megamix, features an astronaut interpreting for an alien lifeform. The alien speaks in a gibberish language consisting of squid-like symbols, and the astronaut translates it into his native tongue. It's inverted with its sequel, where the human speaks in gibberish and the alien translates for an audience of other extraterrestrials.
• Stealth Pun:
  • In Tengoku, Remix 7 is Remixes 1 + 2 + 4.
  • In Heaven's Glass Tappers, the lady they're trying to console is soon joined by a space alien, then a robot. In other words, they're at a space bar.
• Super Title 64 Advance: Super Samurai Slice in Megamix is an invocation, to match its 16-bit theme.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Marshal, Cam, and Miss Ribbon in Fever are similar to the Chorus Kids from Heaven. Marshal in particular looks almost exactly like one.
• Sweet Seal: Fever has a game called "Flipper Flop", where four baby harp seals dance by rolling around.
• Swivel-Chair Antics: Board Meeting in Fever.
• Take That!: Those pigs in the Board Meeting minigame from Fever? They're called "Executives".
• Take That, Audience!: An in-universe example with Quiz Show, in the fan translation for Tengoku.
  A game show that's all style and no substance... just what the viewers want.
• Theme Naming: Shows up here and there; for example, Ao-kun, Aka-chan, and Kii-yan of the Toss Boys in Tengoku are all named after their respective colors (blue, red, and yellow), and the characters from Air Rally in Fever are named Baxter and Forthington.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: One would think that a couple of hops would be enough to test the safety of any seesaw, yet See and Saw feel the need to repeatedly launch each other several feet into the air to accomplish this task, making one wonder exactly what these seesaws are being used for. The reading material related to See Saw implies that they might have a motivation besides simple testing, while the one for Working Dough explains See and Saw are also the emergency workers for whenever Rookie misses a fuel orb:
  Rookie: It's a good thing See and Saw were waiting below and ready to fling Mr. Game & Watch onto the ship!
  Veteran: Yeah, I keep them ready in case emergencies like that come up.
  Rookie: That was you? Wow, you are so on top of things! I hope to be half as good as you someday.
• Thick-Line Animation: Becomes more prevalent in later games, due to earlier titles relying on sprite-based animation.
• This Is a Song: The lyrics of "Thrilling! Is This Love?" start out with the vocalist establishing that she is singing a song for the listener.
  Hey now
  Here is my song
  For you
  Yeah, that's right
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: The lizards in Love Lizards — you play as the much larger female.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub:
  • The Manzai endless game in Fever was never put in localized versions because it's centered around a very Japan-specific form of comedy. To compensate this, other versions of the game contain a remake of Mr. Upbeat, an endless game from Tengoku.
  • Unlike Heaven, Fever doesn't have any dubs besides Japanese, English, and Korean. To make up for it, the European/Australian versions contains the ability to switch between Japanese and English on the fly.
  • None of the new Japanese songs in Megamix have English versions, and if the game is set to English instrumentals play in place of the lyrics. Thankfully, if the audio is set to Japanese the original versions can still be heard even in the localization, though the game won't display any info about them.
• Totally Radical: The English dub of Love Rap has the rappers spout intentionally corny lines like "Crazy into you!" and "Fo' sho'!"
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Munchy Monk's eggs/dumplings.
  • In Megamix's bonus material, katsudon (Japanese pork cutlet rice bowls) is so popular with Martians that they're even building a restaurant on Mars filled with nothing but them.
• Two Guys and a Girl:
  • The Toss Boys of Tengoku. It's more noticeable in Toss Boys 2, where the girl (Aka-chan) gains a more feminine appearance.
  • Also, the Love Posse and the mascots of Fever.
• Ugly Hero, Good-Looking Villain: In Exhibition Match, a cute pitcher girl tries to strike out a homely, mean-looking batter. You play as the latter. You might be thinking you're playing the villain in this case, until it's revealed the pitcher's been cheating with the help of a Mischief-Making Monkey.
• Umbrella of Togetherness: The logo for Love Lab in the Japanese version.
• Unwanted Assistance: Double-subverted with the Cheer Readers, in-universe. You'd think obnoxiously cheering in a library would annoy the hell out of people studying there, but their cheering somehow works! The kid in the Double Date game even praises the fact that he got an A on a recent test with the help of their cheering. Of course, this is all assuming that you did it well. If you screw up and get a Try Again, people aren't as appreciative.
  "Would you keep it down?!"
• Verbal Tic:
  • The Pop Singer in Fan Club has one, I suppose. And it's wonderful!
  • The captain of the Blue Birds has one too, waaugh!
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Nothing like swatting candy and catching spiders in Packing Pests.
  • Try getting a high score at Mr. Upbeat. Eventually as the music gets faster, Mr. Upbeat's comments of praise eventually become frantic begging for you to stop because his feet hurt.
    "So... tired... I think I can see through time..."
• Visual Pun: In Fever, a minigame involves shrimp hopping about to the beat in front of the sea, while a voice counts "1-2-3, A-B-C!". In Japanese, shrimp are called "ebi" (pronounced similar to "A B"), making this the Ebi Sea.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: According to the reading material, Baxter and Forthington, who act like a Straight Man and a Big Eater respectively.
• Voice Grunting: First Contact features this from both parties.
• Volumetric Mouth: The choir boys from Glee Club.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Remix 2 in Fever. The first one was relatively simple to get you used to the "no practice for you" aspect of Remixes. This one hits you with Monkey Watch straight off the mark. And it's short, so there's only a couple of mistakes between "OK" and "Try Again".
• Westminster Chimes:
  • They sound off after Double Date's tutorial is finished, signifying the boy and his crush are meeting just after school lets out.
  • They're part of the start and end of Love Lab's music, as part of the school lab motif.
• What Song Was This Again?: In the English localization of Megamix, three songs^note "Tokimeki no Story" for the Lush Remix, "Sono Hitotsubu no Ōkina Namida ni wa" for the Machine Remix, and "Classmate" for the end credits had their vocals cut out and replaced with an instrumental lead.
• What the Hell, Player?: Get used to being given annoyed looks by other characters if you keep messing up the beat.
• Where It All Began: Starting with Heaven, the last original minigame in each installment is a variant on Karate Man, the very first game in the series (as well as the first game played, in Megamix's case). The last Remixes in both Tengoku and Heaven end with Karate Man, as well.
• A Winner Is You: Winning Heaven is satisfactory, and getting medals unlocks stuff, but getting 1st place in the Battle in the Bands doesn't even unlock anything.
• World of Weirdness: The whole series; would you expect anything less from the creators of WarioWare? The weirdness gets plenty of Lampshade Hanging by the English writers, especially in Fever.
  Think you've got what it takes to tap-dance with the monkeys? (Has anyone ever written that sentence before?)
• You No Take Candle: Mandrill in the European version of Fever. He speaks more normally in the US translation.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Done twice in Megamix. First, after clearing the Lush Tower, Tibby thinks he'll be able to return home. The credits roll, only for Tibby to fall back to earth, where it turns out that you need to clear six more towers in order to produce enough power to actually get to Heaven World. Once all those towers are cleared, a second credits sequence plays in which Tibby does go back to Heaven World, only for the player to subsequently get a letter saying that things have gone wrong up there, meaning there is still more to do.
• Your Size May Vary: When Tap Trial from Tengoku was remade for Fever and Megamix, the monkeys got smaller — they come up to the girl's waist in Tengoku, but only up to her knees in the later versions. This was probably done for consistency with the various other monkeys in Fever.

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