Jung Rhythm/Walkthrough

Menus
Okay, you've turned on the game and the intro song starts. Press Start to skip that if you like, and again on the title screen.. Then you get to the Main Menu. The options here are (from left to right):  New Game, Load, "Versus", "Training", and Option. Pick one and press A or C. I'll describe them in no real order:

Option Menu: There are three items here. The first one seems to be the Stereo / Mono setting. It defaults to left, which I'm assuming is stereo. (My hearing sucks.) The second item gives you a choice of having the lyrics displayed at the top of the screen. Left option is "on", right option is "off". Lastly, you can choose between system and cartridge RAM for your save file. If you're using a territory converter cart, you can only use the system RAM, but it only uses one or two blocks of memory, so no worries there. See a system FAQ if your internal memory battery is dead -- it should only cost you four dollars or so to replace it.

Training: This is useful if you haven't played this sort of game before, but if you've taken the time to track this game down, you're probably a fan of these sorts of games with little use for such basics. Just in case someone needs to know, here's how it works.. Course 1 is the bare basics, just the A, B, and C buttons. Course 2 is a little tougher and uses the D-pad also. Course 3 lets you press whatever you like with no guide. Press A or C to pick a course, and then press A or C to start the music after the loading screen. An example will play on the top music line, and you repeat it on the bottom line. After you play, it will ask if you'd like to do it again. Left is yes, right is no. To exit the training menu, press B. By the way, if you hear the phrase "Nakanaka ne?", that means "Simple, isn't it?"

New Game and Load: These are the one-player modes. Pick New Game if you've never played before and you'll start on Stage 1. If you choose Load, you can select which stage to play, assuming you've succeeded at the previous stage. Hints and such are later in the FAQ.

Versus: Neat, neat, neat! So neat, it deserves its' own section. Besides, there's a ton of sub-menus to tell you about.

Versus Mode!
First, you and your friend who you've coerced into playing this game can pick any of the characters. You both have to pick different characters, though. Then, you'll see some options. The first box lets you decide the difficulty. 1 is buttons-only, 2 is buttons and D-pad, and 3 is a more difficult version of 2. The next option box lets you decide which of the five songs you'd like to play. (These are not the same songs from the one-player mode.) The third  option lets you pick between what I'll call "friendly" and "fiercely competitive" modes. The "friendly" style lets you both take turns following the music line. Player one has the top line, player two has the bottom line. (There's no guide -- look at the line during your opponent's turn.) The score at the top of the screen doesn't always correspond to the Judgment screen (the one with scores at the end of the song), but I've never seen it declare the wrong  winner. "Fiercely competitive" mode, on the other hand, requires both players to be pressing buttons at the same time. At the end of each line, scores are given. Whoever has the lower score will lose part of his/her life bar at the top of the screen. How much is lost depends on the gap in scores. When one player runs out of life or when the song ends, a winner is declared. (There is a smaller bar underneath the life bar and sometimes you get a circular emblem with some English letters inside it.  I  don't know what they are for.  Sorry.)  Oh, back to the set-up  options. The fourth box just asks if you set the other options how you wanted them. The top answer is "yes" and starts the game. "No" is the bottom choice and lets you start over completely.

Hints on How To Play (Well)
This is written with the one-player game in mind, but applies to two-player as well.. It's not really in any order.

To advance to the next stage, you need a score of 350 points or higher. When you complete the song, you go to the "Judgment Screen" where five characters will give you up to 100 points each. They all seem to have different criteria, and you need to average 70 points from each. (That's what the center gauge is for.) Remember, that's an average -- if one judge gives you a 50 and another gives you a 100, that would be 75 from each. Each judge who gives you a 70 or higher even does a little dance if you pass the stage. :) And if you lose..  you can choose to  try it again.  Left is yes, right is no.  After you win, there's a  yes or no screen that asks if you want to save your progress or high score if you got one.  Pick "yes" on the left.

(Criteria Hint: The mother character seems to like it when you follow directions exactly.  Mr. Chorking likes to see you go wild on the Adlibs -- see below.  The other three I don't have clues  for yet.)

How to get all those points is difficult to describe, however. It's been my experience that pressing the right buttons the right number of times is more important than keeping the rhythm exactly right. If your button-presses don't line up with the example, DO NOT try to go faster to catch up! You might still get points if you keep the rhythm you have, even though your timing was wrong. On the other hand, if your timing is right but you miss a button, DO NOT throw off your rhythm just to fit it in -- you'll usually get a good result if you didn't miss more than one of the notes. (Timing is starting to press the buttons on the correct beat. Rhythm is keeping that beat.)

Sometimes you'll get the line exactly right and still get Boo'd. Life is just really unfair sometimes, and computers always cheat.

Next up is "Adlib Time". In the instruction booklet, there is a box showing three example lines that I think you're supposed to use during Adlib Time. Guess what? I found that when I stopped using those lines and starting pressing as many buttons as I could as quickly as I could, my end scores got a *lot* better. What I really recommend, though, is choosing the 5th Song in versus mode.. There's an Adlib Time in there, and you can use the points they give you there to judge what works and what doesn't.

At the end of each line, you'll get a "Wow" or "Boo". This seems to have little to do with your final score, but if the gauge on the left goes down all the way to "Boo" and stays there too long,  the song will end prematurely. (I've gotten several Boo's on a song and still scored a 90+ average at the end, so don't worry about a few slips here and there.)

On the first two stages, the character will sing a full line, and then you will. Starting on Stage Three, the guide will sometimes sing two lines. In the last stage (Stage Six), there are even some half-lines. Keep an eye on the "Next: :)" thing to the right above the music lines to avoid being caught off-guard.

Of course, the best advice of all is to keep tapping your foot and practicing. You can even stand up and dance while playing -- you might be surprised how much it can help!

Stages
There are six stages, and cut-scenes before each one. You'll get to see the cut-scenes when you pick the stage from the load menu, and can press Start to skip them. Briefly, the stages are:


 * 1) Getting ready for school with your mother's help.
 * 2) A rude classmate teaches you self-defense.
 * 3) Learning to be a better art student by painting a cow.
 * 4) Singing karaoke with your elders.
 * 5) Getting "Funky and Soulful" with a fast-food employee.
 * 6) Live on stage with your idol, Mr. Chorking.

Bonus Stage! There is a bonus stage (after Stage 6) where you and Mr. Chorking sing "Rock'n Dreamin'" (a variation of the game's opening song). It's a speedier version, and minus the back-up singers. It's **WAY** better than the intro version, and LOTS of fun to play! Also, a few English phrases are thrown in. To get there, you'll need to do really well on Stage Six. I did this by getting a total score of 486 points (that's a 95 average on the center gauge!), but I believe the real trick is to get a 70+ score from each individual judge, instead of getting the  70 average as discussed earlier. After you do that, there is a new cut scene (you and Mr. Chorking on stage celebrating your awesome  performance, instead of waking up from a dream) and the song will load. This stage is frantic, but a little more forgiving than the others in terms of scores and wow/boo's. Provided you complete this song with a passing score, you then get to see a "real" ending cut-scene, where the main character (what IS her name??) is holding a press conference or something like that after the concert. (As opposed to the "she wakes up and realizes it was all a dream" crud.) Then the game credits scroll by (with a cut-scene set to the original "Rock'n Ecology").

Quick advice on playing this song: Unlike the other stages, it's nearly impossible to memorize the lines during the guide's turn, as a lot of those lines are three measures. Just take notice of the first two or three notes, and try to do the rest on-the-fly. And be careful -- after all those three-measure lines, don't miss your turn on the one-measure lines! I've completed this song with a perfect score (500 points), but there's no special reward, so loosen up and have fun here.

So far, I haven't found a way to re-access the bonus stage without playing Stage Six again, and I don't know if you can try again if you fail this stage, either prematurely or on the judgment screen -- losing on purpose with a song this cool isn't my style. =)

Songs
I wish I could translate them for you, but no such luck.. But for those of you who didn't receive the Lyrics Sheet with your game, here are the song titles:

Except for "Rock'n Ecology" and "Jazz Round Up", all of these songs are audio tracks on the CD. Tracks 2 through 8 are the songs listed above, and 9 through 14 are tracks from training and versus mode. As always, never play track 1 on a normal CD player if you can't afford to replace the speakers.

Misc. Neat Things
Is it just my imagination, or does the painting at the end of Stage Three look better depending on how high your score is?

I feel fairly certain that Chorking's guitar is a Fender Stratocaster. Same shape and design, right down to the placement of the pick-up's.

Speaking of Chorking.. He usually wears circular hoop earrings, but in the bonus stage, they're triangle-shaped.

On the back of the CD case, there is a picture from Stage Four (karaoke guy).. but the picture on the wall in the background is completely different.

On Stage Six, the concert stage has "Chorking" written all over it.. Except for the big panel right behind him that says "Chorkin Live". He should hire stage-hands that can at least spell his name correctly.

All your high-scores appear on the Load screen if you're saving after each round like you should. (It's sort of a duh-thing, but it needed to be typed somewhere.)

On the music lines, the colors used for A, B, and C correspond to the colors of those buttons on a Japanese controller.

On Stage Six, there's a pig playing drums in the cut-scenes before and after and the song, but not during the performance. Same in the bonus stage.

In the instruction booklet, the picture of the judgment screen has different characters than those used in the game (except for the artist guy in the center). Is there any significance to this?

In the cut-scene before Stage Five, that _is_ a Tamagotchi that our singing star is holding. They were rather popular in Japan around the time this game would have been in development, although silly Americans never had much appreciation for them.

Funny but true.. In the cut-scene before Stage Two, there is a picture of Mr. Chorking with a caption that reads "I'm Chorking." For a long time, I thought it said "I'm Choking". :P

End Notes
That's all I can think of to write about this game for now. If you wanted to know the story line.. Sorry, you'll have to use your imagination and make one up like I did. It's more fun that way, anyhow.

I'll try to revise this sometime in the future with all of the characters' names, the things on versus mode I don't understand yet, and some better Adlib Time strategies. Also, I'll try to figure out why the background sometimes flashes white in AdLib Time and if anything special happens when you get perfect scores on all six normal stages.