The Haunted Hoard: Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D (3DS)
Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is not the same game as the fairly similar WiiWare title Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove: Monster Mix, but it is the full version of Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove Mini, a shockingly bare game that is really more of a demo despite the player having to pay 4 dollars to play only 4 songs from the real game. The somewhat confusing state of the series only gets more strange as you look into the push Natsume gave this fledgling franchise, Gabrielle getting her own poseable figure, a life-sized statue at E3, and a handful of mobile spin-offs. Perhaps they were hoping she would take off like other occupants of the creepy-cute niche such as Ruby Gloom or the children’s cartoon Vampirina. This musing might not seem too relevant to the quality of the game, but if you start to play Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D, it can feel at times the game is more concerned with endearing you to its cast than providing its dancing gameplay.
Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is often labelled as a rhythm game because of it having about 22 songs to dance to, but with each one only taking around a minute to complete, it quickly becomes clear the 3 hour story mode has its priorities elsewhere. Even factoring in the similarly short minigames that crop up from time to time, most of your time spent in Gabrielle’s world will be as a passive observer to Gabrielle’s adventures in Monsterville. After sneezing her soul right out of her body, Gabrielle searches for a way to come back to life. The citizens of Monsterville quickly inform her that she’ll need the power of people’s screams to return to human form, but rather than trying to terrorize people to collect these screams, Gabrielle instead learns a spooky dance from the friendly monsters that will still draw out the shouts and be her ticket to coming back to life.
Considering you spend two and a half hours watching these characters communicate by way of small looping animations and unvoiced textboxes, you would hope the story has the proper level of substance to remain entertaining. Unfortunately, the game is written more like an episodic children’s cartoon rather than something that can justify the disproportionate devotion to the plot. Most stages in Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D have her and one of her monster friends encounter some personal problem that eventually must be resolved by the Ghostly Groove dance, after which that conflict is easily resolved and the next level can address a different subject. The game definitely feels its length because of the meandering stories and minimal amounts of gameplay, but oddly enough, some parts of the story do come off rather charming. Rather than being an excruciating slog, the cute chibi designs ease you into stories that, while lacking in substance, have the similar tolerable appeal that children’s shows like Sofia the First have. There is a competent level of structuring done to keep the episodic tales more palatable, and while the time it takes for the simple conflicts to resolve can be somewhat mind-numbing, it is easy to get attached to the simple plights of the residents of Monsterville. From the cowardly vampire trying to muster up the mojo to speak to his crush to the mummified bear and Gabrielle having to work through their sibling-like quibbles, there’s at least some thought into how the heroine interacts with the monsters. The definite highlight though might be the ongoing story of Frankie, the game’s take on Frankenstein’s monster having a bird’s nest atop his head and the player having to help him as he struggles to try and take care of the tiny chicks inside it.
Make no mistake, this story is definitely still closer to kids shows like Bubble Guppies and PJ Masks rather than providing the kind of narrative that warrants a considerable degree of investment, but once you come out the other side of it, the charming little tales told manage to dissolve some of the bitterness you might feel once you realize you’ve invested a considerable amount of your time into the plot rather than the dancing. Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is definitely hoping its endearing style and cute characters will be its selling point, the game even letting you unlock a healthy amount of customization for its protagonist so you can make her as adorable as you like. By spending the screams you collect during the all too brief dance portions, you can make her spookier with grey skin, dark sclera, and Halloween accessories like little bat ears on her head, or you can make her a bubblegum princess with pink pigtails, a tiara, and bright colorful clothing. You’ll end up with something adorable inevitably due to the art style, but letting you swing deeper into cartoon horror or just going for a character that is more likely to resemble the young female audience this game was targeting does give you some strong customizability, and the story can feel surprisingly different if you move Gabrielle away from her sleepy default expression to one of the other options. She’s friendly but not a pushover, but the degree her harsher moments and friendlier gestures are felt can certainly seem different just based on how you dress her up.
When the game deigns to give you some of the dancing gameplay you came for, the mild goodwill its charm built up begins to crumble away. When playing story mode, the dance segments are not only incredibly short, but they are ridiculously easy. There are harder versions of the songs available, the so-called Impossible difficulty finally encroaching on something that could be labelled somewhat challenging, but to unlock a song on Impossible mode you must first clear the story mode entirely, then play through every unlocked song on all of the lower difficulties sequentially. Their short length makes this more achievable, but it’s a long way to go for little reward. The dances are also mostly set to slightly peppy versions of classical music, small segments of things like Ode to Joy and Mozart’s symphonies not exactly fitting the spooky aesthetic even with the instrumental twists added to try and pass some of them off as such. Not all of them are identifiable as borrowed works at least, and a rhythm game could potentially make good use of such recognizable classics if the gameplay was up to snuff.
Most of why Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is so easy though derives from how it structures its rhythm gameplay. While many DS and 3DS rhythm games have you tap the touch screen to hit the notes, here you are instead presented a central medallion you hit while watching the notes appear on the top screen. This is likely a measure meant to help you watch the dances of Gabrielle and her monster friends while you play, and since most of your involvement in dancing is simply tapping the bottom screen with proper timing, this design choice doesn’t actually hurt the game at all. Skulls stand in for the notes you need to watch here, rings shrinking in to tell the player when to tap the touch screen. You’ll earn better scores if the ring is wrapped right around the skull when you touch the medallion, but storywise, you’ll always get enough screams to move on so long as you don’t do incredibly poorly. There are a few small shakeups introduced along the adventure to make it more than tapping in time with the music, mandrake notes requiring the player to drag their stylus upwards to successfully hit that beat and the trace notes requiring you to properly move a skull across a small path. This can be a little hard considering you’re looking at the top screen as you move your stylus to try and match it on the bottom, but figuring out the speed the game wants you to do it is the more likely cause of any error you might experience. There are a lot of songs that reuse note sequences repeatedly so you shouldn’t mess it up more than once, but the leniency prevents any punishment for misjudging the path tracing parts of songs.
Near the end of a dance, you’ll find yourself engaging in Thriller Time, a portion where humans appear on screen and you need to collect the screams they spit out. These are small minigames that are all incredibly easy, such as launching Gabrielle’s cat Lola about to grab them or having a spider grow its web out to snag them through rapid tapping. Only the skeleton themed one seems like it might not reliably snag all the screams, the player shattering the skeleton and sending its bones spinning around the screen randomly to hopefully hit the little screams. These minigames are inoffensive because they’re so basic, something that can also be said about the stages during the story that only feature somewhat longer minigames without any dancing. Feeding Frankie’s birds, finding the right sequence of characters as they pop out of haunted house windows, or guiding one of your friends to collect items is again far too easy to begrudge but they’re not really helping the game be more interesting with their unremarkable presence. Just like other odd side activities such as getting a tarot reading from the game or trying to collect all the Monster Badges and picture book pages, nothing can really keep the player from realizing far too much of the game is made up of a story that didn’t warrant the degree of attention it receives.
THE VERDICT: Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D is a cute albeit overstuffed tale about a girl interacting with a town of friendly monsters, but it attempts to masquerade as a rhythm game by tossing in a few minutes of gameplay between hours of low quality storytelling. If you came for the dancing you’d be immensely disappointed by its basic design and low difficulty, but while its episodic story mode isn’t interesting enough to justify how much time it fills, it does have a certain charm to it that prevents the game from leaving an entirely bitter taste in your mouth. While poorly structured on the whole and lacking in many areas, Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D won’t leave you hating it because of its adorable characters and their tiny troubles, but it certainly can’t salvage the entire experience with cuteness alone.
And so, I give Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D for the Nintendo 3DS…
A BAD rating. The fun characters and Halloween-like embrace of fun horror iconography may make Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D easier to bear, but make no mistake, the tedious tales being told still wear down the overall experience. If you came to it only for the story it would still come up short, most of its tolerable aspects more like the parts of a kid’s show that make it possible for the parents to sit and watch it with their child rather than something they’d be interested in on its own merits. The balance in Gabrielle’s Ghostly Groove 3D really should have swung the other way around, the play given brief bits of story framing for more substantial dances, but instead, you eke out the moments of interactivity between long sections of having paper thin plots stretched to their limits. Perhaps the visual appeal and innocence of it all disarms me too much to rate it lower, but even though the brushes with the dancing and minigames are brief, they’re mostly just too easy for their own good rather than poorly designed.
It’s hard to imagine this taking off as the tent pole for a larger brand, but I guess the brand Hello Kitty isn’t really defined by her initial appearance on a coin purse. In the end, the mild amount of extra material surrounding her games was potentially just Natsume testing the waters on this character’s viability. She certainly feels like a better fit for the world of merchandising than as part of a video game franchise, and considering the state of the game she stars in, we’d all probably be better off if her creators were devoted to peddling her brand elsewhere instead of trying to deceive players into thinking her game would actually be about the dancing.