History VideoGame / RhythmHeaven

* CatSmile: Marshal's default expression.

** Munchy Monk appears as the employee in "Packing Pests".

* LegacyCharacter: The Munchy Monk in ''Fever'' seems to be a different person from the one in ''Heaven'', who appears in the former game's Packing Pests instead.

** At a certain point in the game Packing Pests, the camera moves, revealing that the employee is Munchy Monk.

* NintendoHard:
** The series is known for being rhythmically strict. There's no "Marvelous", "Great", or "Good" for each beat, either you hit it or you didn't. It becomes even more suffocating when you have to go for a "Perfect". ''Megamix'' is a little different; the main timing window a little looser, making medals and Perfects a bit easier to obtain. However, a tighter "Ace" window exists, making it extremely difficult to get maximum points.
** The way the games grade your performance flies directly in the face of common rhythm game logic. Whereas almost every other rhythm game in existence scores you note-for-note, this series instead grades two or three specific areas and bases your score based on how well you did in each of those. A perfect example comes in ''Heaven'''s Built to Scale: You can play the entire rest of the level flawlessly, but if you mess up on the very last note, you'll still only get an OK rating because ''that last note is graded all by itself''. ''Megamix'' at least attempts to steer away from this by giving you a numeric score at the end that tells you how close you are to the next rating, so you can at least gauge your progress instead of doing your best and praying the game liked it enough.
** ''Tengoku'' has an arcade port where you play one block of six stages. The catch? Getting less than a Superb costs you one life, and you only get three lives.[[note]]Okay, so technically, you use up one life when you enter a stage, and get it back on a Superb. Still the same end result.[[/note]] Yes, that means getting an OK instead of Try Again will still cost you one life! Worse, the cabinet buttons are somewhat poorly constructed, resulting in buttons getting stuck frequently--pray it doesn't go off on a platform edge in Night Walk!
** ''Megamix'' has challenge courses that require you to play several games in a row under a "three strikes" system. Many of them increase the tempo of the games, and require nailing a lot of Aces, finishing the game with less than three misses, or getting scores well above the medal threshold.

** ''Tengoku'' features The Bon * Odori, which is not only one of the few games in the entire franchise to have the cues be based explicitly on the song's lyrics but also requires much more prediction from the player than previous games.[[note]]You need to clap just as the "pan" is reached, instead of waiting for the cue to become fully audible.[[/note]]

Tsunku♂ has expressed an interest in making a fifth entry for the UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, but only time will tell if that actually happens.

* PressureSensitiveInterface: The UsefulNotes/NintendoDS' touchscreen can tell between a light and a hard press. In the game, it's programmed in a way that you can hold the stylus on the screen and flick. It also tells the difference between light and hard taps. ''VideoGame/MoaiDooWop'', in particular, requires the player to use both light and hard taps within the same game.

** ''Fever'' has a UsefulNotes/GameAndWatch character cameo in Working Dough (the reading material refers to him as [[VideoGame/SuperSmashBros Mr. Game & Watch]]), and one of the baseball players in Exhibition Match looks remarkably like something Creator/ShigeruMiyamoto had drawn in the '80s.

* GameplayAndStorySegregation: ''Megamix'' might have a story, but it makes no attempt whatsoever to tie the stages themselves into the story, only that they need to be cleared in order to progress. Considering that the stages can be about anything and can have you playing as anyone and anything, there isn't really a way to tie any of these together anyway.

** ''Air Rally'' in Fever has clouds that will occasionally cover what's going on. This is {{Downplayed|Trope}} in ''Megamix'', likely due to hardware limitations.

* MeaningfulName: Tram and Poline, Baxter and Forthington, See and Saw, Bossa and Nova...

[[quoteright:340:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rhythm-heaven-01_9050.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:340: ♫ ''Hey baby, how's it going?\\
This beat is non-stop (oh yeah).\\
Hey baby, listen to my phrase.\\
I can give you a sense of rhythm.'' ♫]]

Tsunku♂ has expressed an interest in a fifth entry for the UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, but only time will tell if that actually happens.

''Rhythm Heaven/Paradise [[MegamixGame Megamix]]'', known as ''Rhythm Tengoku: The Best+'' in Japanese, is the fourth installment in the series, released in June 2015 in Japan, June 2016 in North America, and October 2016 in Europe. It contains 108 games -- 30 new and [[NostalgiaLevel 78 returning from the previous three,]] some with [[RemixedLevel new variations.]] It has no physical release in North America, though, only digital.