Okay, so, not to call anyone out here, but there appears to be five factoids about Vib-Ribbon that it seems anyone writing about it is contractually obliged to mention:
- It’s from the people who made PaRappa the Rapper.
- It has a vector-based artstyle.
- You can use your own CDs to play the game.
- It is “Japanese”. (We can get into the usage of the word “Japanese” to mean “thing that is vaguely strange and/or incomprehensible” some other time.)
- It is a cult classic.
I have a small gripe about the typical usage of the term “cult classic” in relation to video games. Not just this one. I’m talking about video games in general.
The term “cult classic” is a holdover from the days of magazines and physical media, when knowledge about a piece of media was reliant on either local availability or word-of-mouth. Earthbound was a cult classic because a quirky RPG with relatively “simplistic” graphics wasn’t of much interest to the average gaming magazine critic or 90’s teenager.
At least, that’s what they tell you, anyway.
I say Earthbound was a cult classic because, well, is it really that obscure anymore? Ness — Earthbound’s protagonist — is a playable fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the best-selling fighting game of all time. For $3.99 USD a month (including tax), you can play Earthbound on the Nintendo Switch, the third best-selling console of all time. Earthbound regularly makes it onto “Best Video Games of All Time” lists, where it is almost always referred to as a cult classic. It’s now gotten to the point where Earthbound’s popularity is used as both set-up and punchline in reference to the games it has inspired.
Making a “quirky RPG inspired by Earthbound” isn’t impressive anymore. It’s too mainstream.
I feel kind of the same way about Vib-Ribbon. Don’t get me wrong, there’s roughly a Grand Canyon’s worth of disparity between Vib-Ribbon’s popularity and Earthbound’s. Vib-Ribbon wasn’t even released in the US until one of PlayStation’s money men realised they never actually got around to it, and it’s still confined to the PS3, Vita and PSP, none of which Sony make anymore. But, at the same time, Vib-Ribbon isn’t exactly “obscure”. I first heard of Vib-Ribbon from a YouTube video with 1.3 million views. If you happen to miss the “e” in “vibe” when searching YouTube, “vib ribbon” and other associated searches are the first to be suggested.
Yes, I know YouTube isn’t the best gauge of a game’s popularity, and I also know that what is an obscure hidden gem in the western world is mainstream elsewhere. Dragon Quest being represented in Smash was met with a lot of confusion and crying over a “wasted” DLC slot, but Dragon Quest is literally in Yakuza 0. Maybe Vib-Ribbon is still really popular in Japan? On the other hand, have you even heard of Hot Pixel, Atari’s simultaneously hilarious and hilariously bad WarioWare knock-off for the PSP?
Vib-Ribbon is in the Museum of Modern Art. Hot Pixel isn’t.
What I’m trying to say here is that I know that I’m not exactly breaking new ground when I restate about three of those aforementioned factoids later in this piece. Maybe you already know about Vib-Ribbon. Maybe you don’t. I chose to write about Vib-Ribbon because I found the specific way it chooses to interpret CDs to be interesting. If you just want to hear about that, skip the next section. If not; well, here’s a dumptruck’s worth of context for you:
“okay, cool, but i still don’t know what vib-ribbon is”
Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm game developed for the original PlayStation by NanaOn-Sha, who also developed the far more popular PaRappa the Rapper. In Vib-Ribbon, you control Vibri the rabbit as she travels down the titular Vib-Ribbon. This is where Vib-Ribbon’s plot begins and ends.
The Vib-Ribbon is a straight line that seemingly continues forever. If there is an end to it, I’ve never seen it, and there’s no telling where exactly the Vib-Ribbon began, either. There are no landmarks, no suggestion of which material the Vib-Ribbon is made out of. If Vibri and the Vib-Ribbon didn’t exist, the world of Vib-Ribbon would be an empty void.
But this isn’t as terrifying as it sounds. No, quite the opposite, as whenever music is playing, the Vib-Ribbon vibrates, and when it vibrates, it changes. This is where Vib-Ribbon’s gameplay resides. Press L1 to leap over a block. Press down on the D-Pad to cross pits. Press R1 to navigate loop-de-loops, and press X to roll over spikes. Use these four buttons to navigate the obstacles that the Vib-Ribbon forms in time with the music.
Vibri doesn’t just navigate these obstacles, however. She parkours over the blocks, extends her legs to cross pits, and slides through loops. She doesn’t walk, or run, but skips along the Vib-Ribbon. When you finish a stage, Vibri excitedly tallies up the score. No matter how poorly you did, Vibri is always pleased with the result. If you get a high score, Vibri bursts into song. This isn’t just conveyed through text, either. Vibri has a voice, and speaks in crunchy, highly-compressed Japanese. She sings the tutorial to you, yelling out inputs in time with the music. Her first words when you start this tutorial are “La la la la~ Oh, what fun!”. It’s obvious that navigating the Vib-Ribbon is how Vibri gets her kicks. Conversely, pressing the wrong button or mistiming an action causes Vibri to collide with the obstacle, screaming in anguish. If you get a game over, Vibri might tell you to practise more, or she might just burst into tears, or even start screaming at you. Navigating the Vib-Ribbon means everything to Vibri.
Navigating the Vib-Ribbon means everything to me, too. When I miss a jump in Super Mario 64 and Mario hits the ground with an “Oof!” as he’s cartoonishly squashed by the impact, I’m annoyed. When Vibri gets hurt by an obstacle, I feel bad. The world of Vib-Ribbon is represented by simple vector lines, and when Vibri is hurt, she loses parts of herself, devolving into a frog and then a worm as she loses complexity and composure. If you play well, though, Vibri is transformed into an angel, with an intricate crown and wings. Vibri is my avatar, but she’s also my friend, and I don’t want to see her get hurt. I want to see her flourish. I can’t think of that many games where I care this deeply about the wellbeing of the protagonist, but Vib-Ribbon manages to turn every correct input into a triumph, and every mistake into a desperate struggle.
“Desperate” is perhaps an understatement. You see, you need to perform twenty correct inputs in a row to evolve, but it only takes nine mistakes to devolve, and that count doesn’t reset until you either evolve or devolve. When you take a hit, both Vibri and the Vib-Ribbon continue to vibrate long after the impact, with the effect intensifying as you inch closer to a devolution, which makes it all the more difficult to visually parse the road ahead. Vib-Ribbon is a game where your victories are often temporary, but your mistakes tend to stick around.
And that isn’t the only trick up Vib-Ribbon’s sleeve. Shifts in a song’s tempo can cause the game to slow down or speed up, with sudden changes causing obstacles to shift around the Vib-Ribbon erratically, tightening the period you have to enter the correct input and clear them. In the last set of stages, Vib-Ribbon introduces combined obstacles that require two simultaneous inputs to clear. Perhaps a block has spikes on it, so Vibri must roll as she clambers over it, or a loop has a sudden pit at the top, meaning Vibri needs to jump from one part of the loop to the other instead of being able to clear it in one smooth motion.
This seems about as good a time as any to actually discuss the music that makes up Vib-Ribbon’s stages.
It’s… fine.
It’s fine!
I fully admit that I’m not that well versed in music. I often find that I have trouble with describing different sounds or being able to pin a song or artist down to a specific genre, so I apologise in advance if my descriptions and comparisons are inaccurate. But with that said, Vib-Ribbon’s music is generally inoffensive 90’s J-Pop. If you absolutely needed to, you could compare it to City Pop. If you’re some kind of Sick Freak, you might describe it as Dreamcore, or Hyperpop. It’s Shōwa-era Idol J-Pop, if Shōwa-era Idol J-Pop was actually interesting. If you spend as much time digging through Spotify playlists as I do, you’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again at least one more time before you die.
Despite these somewhat wide-reaching and vague comparisons, the soundtrack often blurs together into The Sound of Vib-Ribbon. “O-Sampo” (perhaps better known as “Polaroid”) and “Do You Know?” (AKA “Laugh & Peace”) stand out by virtue of being more experimental, but since there’s only six songs in total on the Vib-Ribbon disc, they simultaneously feel too prominent and too inconsequential in relation to the rest of the soundtrack. With the exception of the aforementioned “O-Sampo”, the lyrical content is nothing too special, either, discussing growing up, relationships and partying. Most songs are sung in English — with the last two featuring Japanese lyrics — but all of the lyrics have a tendency to blend with the noise of the instruments, making it difficult to parse what the singer is actually trying to convey.
What Vib-Ribbon lacks in musical substance, however, it makes up for in level design. The first song, “O-Sampo”, serves as an excellent opener, with the base of the song made up by four drum beats followed by the sound of a camera shutter for the fifth beat. This acts as a sort of metronome for the player, teaching them the timing required to clear each obstacle. At around the 1:58 mark, the song gradually builds and speeds up, throwing obstacles quicker and quicker at the player, asking them to demonstrate the skills they just learnt by keeping up with the increasing tempo.
It’s a taste of what’s to come. This is where Vib-Ribbon tries to sell you on Vib-Ribbon.
Levels in Vib-Ribbon are presented as sets of two songs, each divided by difficulty. After “O-Sampo”, the game switches to the far more traditional-sounding “Oops!” (also known as “Sunny Day”). Despite the slight genre shift and relatively faster tempo, obstacles are still timed to the beat, which is kept clear and distinct from the rest of the track. It’s a different sounding song, but the core is still the same.
The second set starts with “Do You Know?”, which begins by clustering the obstacles a bit tighter than the first set, before introducing the concept of a shifting speed, starting with a near-glacial slowdown and ending with an intense speedup. This is followed up by “Hot Play” (also known as “Universal Dance”), which consists of three sections which each repeat their own set of obstacles, with each section being slightly faster than the last. It’s a somewhat bruteforce way of drilling the input timings into the player, and one that sticks out somewhat from the rest of the levels, but I suppose it does get the job done.
The final set begins with “Trip Out!” (also known as “Overflowing Emotions”). “Trip Out!” is something of a culmination for the included songs, cleverly introducing the concept of combination obstacles by having you clear their individual components first. It then evolves the time distortion introduced in “Do You Know?” by asking you to clear a similar section, but now with the added challenge of clearing combination obstacles. It also rather subtly introduces the concept of shifting obstacles. This leaves the final song, “Going On” (also known as “Roll Along”), feeling a bit flat. The song doesn’t really have anything else to introduce apart from some as-yet unseen combination obstacle types, so it reads as more of an encore. Perhaps appropriate, considering its upbeat-pop instrumentation and (if we’re to believe existing translations) cheerful lyrics.
“hey, that’s cool and all, but why did you feel the need to write about this?”
Okay, to be fair, you did click on an essay with the word “pointless” right there in the title. Vib-Ribbon is a game that I like, and playing it made me want to write about it. Maybe it doesn’t need to mean anything.
But I didn’t write this essay simply to go “Whoa, look at this cool hidden gem on the PlayStation!”. I wrote this because I have sixteen gigabytes worth of audio CD images on my hard drive, and it’s all Vib-Ribbon’s fault.
See, due to its vector-generated artstyle and heavily compressed voice clips, Vib-Ribbon’s core gameplay can be stored entirely within the PlayStation’s two megabytes of RAM, allowing the player to eject Vib-Ribbon’s disc and insert their own CD, and this is where Vib-Ribbon turns from novelty to obsession. The game has broken free of its six-song shackles, and now threatens to swallow your music collection whole, begging you to try any and all styles of music to see how it affects the Vib-Ribbon.
However, this isn’t a perfect process, and that’s where things start to get interesting. For starters, I don’t actually have a music collection to use with Vib-Ribbon. Don’t get me wrong, if I like someone’s stuff and it’s on Bandcamp, I’ll happily pay for it. I’m not a monster. But for the rest of the artists I like, whose record companies obfuscate who actually gets paid in the end, I stream their music on Spotify’s free tier like the little parasite I am.
And even if I did have a CD collection, my computer doesn’t even have a disc drive in it, meaning that I’d have to drag my external DVD drive out of storage every time I wanted to use a CD with Vib-Ribbon. There has to be a better way.
Enter MagicISO. MagicISO is old-ass software from the Windows XP days for burning music to a CD, but it can also convert music to the binary image format Vib-Ribbon expects. MagicISO expects you to pay for this privilege, refusing to cram more than 300 megabytes worth of music into a single image unless you cough up. Except what the software doesn’t know is that MagicISO, Inc. doesn’t even have a website anymore, meaning its constant pleas to “Order Now!” fall on even deafer ears than they would have back when the company was still around.
And the fun doesn’t stop there, because I’m dumb enough to insist on using 4K Video Downloader for converting songs that I’ve legitimately acquired through YouTube Music to MP3, meaning if I download too many songs, OOPS! Guess I can’t download that video file I need for editing the video version of this essay!
Even after all of that, it’s not as simple as just “Insert MP3, get CD”. MP3s have a tendency to slow down when imported, so first I have to batch convert my MP3s to Audio CD WAV files using VLC. This decompresses them, which means I can only fit around twenty to thirty minutes worth of music in a single image, and that in turn means I’ll need to split my music over multiple images.
Someone could write something interesting about this. Not me, though. I’m here for the Big Time.
Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time”, that is. See, the PlayStation — even back in the day — wasn’t exactly a powerhouse. This means Vib-Ribbon has to work under two technical constraints: It can only see ahead to generate new obstacles by eight seconds, and it can only detect changes in frequency, as opposed to tempo or melody. This means a track like “Big Time”, with an easily distinguished rhythm, coupled with a prominent guitar and Gabriel’s trademark vocals provides a near-official experience.
“Big Time” is an exception, though, not the rule. Vib-Ribbon really does try its best, but it often misreads the song ahead, throwing in seemingly arbitrary obstacles just the same as it throws all semblance of rhythm, game balance and game design out the window. While Vib-Ribbon’s included tracks offer a smooth difficulty curve, custom songs often throw you in the deep end, asking you to clear several complex combination obstacles in a row without any kind of beat or rhythm to guide you. And so, it creates a sort of “Anti-Rhythm” game, one where most songs actively try to throw you off, rather than guide you. You stop trying to develop a rhythm for your inputs, and instead read each obstacle visually as they come at you, like reading a piano roll.
It’s perhaps appropriate that Vib-Ribbon is recommended when you misspell “vibe”, as it asks you not to memorise each input, but instead to vibe and play with the cards that you’re dealt.
The way it uses these changes in frequency to generate levels isn’t easy to predict, either. This is quickly evidenced by feeding Vib-Ribbon’s music back into itself, generating remixed level designs that actively go against what the game initially taught you. “O-Sampo” is transformed from a slow-paced introduction to Vib-Ribbon’s mechanics to a turbo-charged Heck-Gauntlet. It’s a complete betrayal of everything “O-Sampo” stood for in favour of crude overload. I love it.
The game has shown you heaven, and it has shown you hell. Now, it asks you to spin the wheel once more. Any song in your library could be a new kind of sleeper hit, rendered unto Hamlet by a decades-old monkey’s procedural generation typewriter. Vib-Ribbon, in a way, will live on indefinitely. There’s always new music coming out, so there’s always more stages to play.
Kero Kero Bonito — probably my closest reference point for Vib-Ribbon’s built-in music — initially seemed to produce the kind of near-official levels you’d expect, until songs like “If I’d Known” and “Lipslap’’ absolutely blindsided me. While “Time Moves Slow” most certainly does not move slow, I found that Vib-Ribbon’s spartan black-and-white presentation only enhanced the feeling of melancholic regret and longing. “Tires on Fire” proves that if Vib-Ribbon was released on Steam right now with MP3 support, it’d be up there with Beat Saber. The already haunting “The Ocean Floor’’ became absolutely unreal when paired with Vib-Ribbon, and “Supervillain”, “The Evil One” and the all-time anthem for burnt-out twentysomethings; “Bugbear”, all almost seem to be constructed with Vib-Ribbon playback in mind.
And I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface here, because it took me sixty-two seething minutes to beat “Scratch The Surface” from The Week That Was, and after that I thought I had reached the peak of difficulty for Vib-Ribbon custom songs, until “Zombie” by Bad Pony ended with obstacles that came at me so fast that I’m not actually sure if it’s humanly possible to clear them without taking damage. “Genesis” opens with a downright masochistic level layout; a gruelling endurance test that then gives way to a drop that, after which, for just the briefest moment, manages to sync up exactly with Vib-Ribbon’s generated level layout.
For 35 seconds, Vib-Ribbon is a perfect game, free of any and all limitations. It doesn’t take long to come crashing back down to reality. Broken, off-beat reality. I kept playing for two-and-a-half hours after I barely finished “Genesis”. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to being hypnotised by a video game.
And so, the Vib-Ribbon continues on, endlessly. Victories and failures alike are fleeting, discarded with every new song. Vib-Ribbon is a game you cannot ever truly win, and can never really lose. Vib-Ribbon only ends when you’ve decided you’ve had enough and turn the game off. It is, in a word; pointless.
Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
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