It’s the difficult second album, as LOUD: My Road to Fame brings in some paid, day-one DLC in the form of LOUD: My Trip to Japan.
‘Paid, day-one DLC’ is bound to give grumbly gamers an eye-twitch or two. There is an excuse, if you’re interested, because LOUD: My Road to Fame launched in February 2023 on other systems, and the DLC dropped slightly later. Since Xbox is getting a belated release, the two have launched as one. Now, we could get sniffy and say that a combined release would have been nice, but we’ll take the impartial route and point to the combined £11.68 price tag, which feels about right.
LOUD: My Trip to Japan takes place after the events of LOUD: My Road to Fame. The main character has had a taste of success, which means a tour to Japan. It gives her multiple opportunities: the chance for a holiday, the ability to satisfy some weeb urges, and, of course, a furthering of her career, as she creates new fans and potentially signs a local contract for her album. Things are on the up, even if her album got a poor review from Gitaroo magazine (we got that reference, cheers Hyperstrange).
This is all an excuse for seven extra songs, courtesy of Re:NO, Mutant Monster, Babybeard and Doll Parts. Now, you will have to excuse us for not having heard of them, but going by their various Wiki pages, they are all J-Rock and J-Pop bands who are popular enough to have, well, Wiki pages. What we can say with confidence is that they produce the best songs in the LOUD series by a distance.
Part of that is down to – finally – introducing LOUD to some vocals. Road to Fame had a couple, mostly squirrelled away in the bonus songs, but the songs here are all sung. Lyrics don’t automatically make a good song (Mogwai be praised), but here they add some much-needed personality and individuality. Suddenly songs are hummable, and we even added a couple to Spotify playlists, something we didn’t do with the original game. There is no doubt in our mind that LOUD: My Trip to Japan represents a musical step up.
It’s also a step up in terms of difficulty. For the first time in our career on the ‘Chilled’ difficulty, we failed a song. We’re well used to failing on the higher difficulties, but this one ‘chilled’ us in a very different manner. The reason for our incompetence is largely down to the frequency that notes appear on both sides of the screen. Often, the game will swing from one side to the other in quick succession. Slightly less often, they will arrive both at once. It plays to one of LOUD’s faults – that it’s hard to see both sides of the screen at the same time with the naked eye – but it also makes a lot of sense. If you’ve bought LOUD: My Trip to Japan, you’ve likely done so because you kicked the original’s ass.
The step up in musical quality and challenge should make LOUD: My Trip to Japan something of a victory lap, but the presentation is something of a step down. In LOUD: My Road to Fame, it took three songs before the story developed and more cutscenes and dialogue were airlifted in. Even then, three songs felt too long. We were eager for stuff to happen, the backdrop to change perhaps, and for those three songs everything was static. Nothing changed, not even a hair shifted on the main character’s head.
Here, the six songs are bookended by some fluff about coming to Japan and what it means to the main character, but there is nothing else besides. It’s the same backdrop across all six songs, without a mumble from the main character as commentary. If you were hoping for a neat coda to find out more about the main character’s successes after her first album, you will be sorely disappointed. This is purely a musical booster to the first game, some bonus tracks with a different genre bent.
But for all the safeness of the presentation, which is admittedly lazy, the songs slap. And that’s ninety percent of what we wanted from LOUD: My Trip to Japan. We wanted songs from Japanese artists that were a step or two beyond the ones in the main game, and we got what we wished for.
Yeah yeah, it should have been baked into the main game, but as an EP of extra songs go, LOUD: My Trip to Japan is a rather welcome improvement on the LP.
