Rhythm Paradise Groove review – Nintendo’s final Switch 1 game

Nintendo draw a veil over the original Switch, with their final first party game for the system and a revival of a rhythm action classic from the Game Boy Advance era.

And so, we come to the end of the Nintendo Switch’s long and glorious career, at least in terms of being a recipient for new first party Nintendo games. A good case can be made that the Switch is both Nintendo’s best console and the best video game hardware of all time, but inevitably its software support has been a case of fading away rather than going out with a bang. Although as finales go, Rhythm Paradise Groove is a lot better than most other consoles manage.

To be clear, new games will continue to be released on the original Switch, especially when it comes to indie titles, but currently there are no plans for Nintendo to release any new, internally developed games for it. But while the original intention seems to have been for Rhythm Paradise Groove to draw a line under Nintendo’s support for the console, they have subsequently hinted that there may be more titles in the future – no doubt a reflection of the ever-increasing cost of making high-end video games.

Rhythm Paradise Groove is part of a series, known in North America as Rhythm Heaven, that has been around since the Game Boy Advance and celebrates its 20th anniversary in August – although this is the first new entry in 10 years. Back in the mid-2000s rhythm action games were all the rage but Rhythm Paradise has always taken a very stripped down, minimalist approach to the concept, mixing its hardcore rhythm-based gameplay with surrealist imagery. And that is still the case in this latest sequel.

The series’ origins on the Game Boy Advance are still very obvious, given that most of the 80+ minigames in Rhythm Paradise Groove require the use of only one or two buttons. Even with the wackier minigames there’s a strange kind of utilitarianism to the gameplay, as the visuals are often very limited, with little or no background detail or animation, and the music is all chirpy little chiptunes rather than famous songs or other extravagances.

In terms of the presentation, the vibe is of a featherweight distraction, but the reality for most people is a game of punishing difficulty, that offers no alternative but hard graft and being a literal slave to the beat. There are no perks or buffs that will save you here and while rote learning can help to a degree, your one and only goal remains to keep in time with the beat by pressing the buttons at the right time.

Often, it’s not clear what you’re even supposed to be doing at first, but as difficult as the game can be for the rhythmically challenged you’re never punished for failure – just encouraged to try again. And yet even the very first minigame, where you’re getting weird circular creatures to jump through a hoop, is very difficult, until you learn to pay less attention to the visuals and more to the beat itself. In fact, some minigames purposefully emphasise this, by blanking the screen at certain points, so all you have is the music.

When Rhythm Paradise first came out it was right around the time Brain Training and its many spin-offs were becoming popular and although it’s never been as clinical as those titles it does feel almost equally instructional. You may start the game convinced that you have no sense of rhythm (or convinced you do, only to be rudely disabused) but by the end it really does feel as if you’ve learnt something, or you’ve at least got in touch with a previously unexploited talent.

Unfortunately, the minimalist presentation, and thoroughly weird concepts behind some of the minigames, has always limited the game’s audience and Groove can be no less off-putting. Helping a dog catch a Frisbee or mopping a steel girder are positively mundane tasks compared to other minigames that involve everything from feeding a walking plant monster to playing as a programmer debugging a platform game and bouncing fruit off a muscle builder’s biceps.

There’s no direct connection between Rhythm Paradise and WarioWare – they’ve always been made by different developers – but here the sheer strangeness of the minigames (and the fact that previous games had nowhere near as many) and the similar art styles make the comparison more obvious. But whereas WarioWare microgames rarely require much in the way of skill to complete, that’s not the case with Rhythm Paradise Groove.

The greater number of minigames not only adds variety to the gameplay but also the modes, with a number of four-player co-operative games and Remix stages which having you playing four games in a row and then a new fifth one that combines elements from all the previous ones. Unlike the regular games this also involves actual licensed Japanese pop songs, although that underlines the fact that most of the music in the normal minigames is pretty basic and uninteresting.

There’s also an unavoidable problem with modern TVs, which often suffer from lag compared to playing the game in handheld mode. There’s nothing Nintendo can do about that, and the game goes to a lot of effort to try and calibrate the screen properly, while actively acknowledging the problem, but before you try it there’s no guarantee the game will work well on your set-up.

The only other disappointment is the Beatspell role-playing mode, which promised a longer and more complex gameplay experience but proves to be very undercooked and repetitive. You could probably make a fun action role-player out of the basic concept, but it’d need a lot more variety and depth than Beatspell provides.

Whether Rhythm Paradise will continue beyond the Switch 1 is unknown but it’s fascinating to see the indie style sensibilities of the original still shining through 20 years later. The Switch is certainly the only format you could imagine such a game existing on, while still being published by a major company, and that fact alone makes it a good point to end on. Although if it later turns out there’s to be an encore, we won’t complain at all.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £33.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Release Date: 2nd July 2026
Age Rating: 7

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.