Vib Ribbon

A little over 5 years ago, I saw some random Vib Ribbon videos on YouTube, and since then it’s always been in the back of my head as a charming and aesthetically pleasing little rhythm game that I’d probably enjoy. Unfortunately, given its age and my lack of a PlayStation, I never looked into trying to play it… until now!

I’ve been getting into emulation recently, so now I can play any old game I want! Anyway, I’ve been playing Vib Ribbon for the last couple of hours, and it may have just become one of my favorite rhythm games, simply because of its unique gimmick: infinite levels!

At first glace, the game doesn’t seem terribly unique: As Vibri (the player character) walks down a line, there are 4 types of obstacles, and each can be overcome by pressing the button corresponding to that obstacle at the right time. Simple enough. The game cleverly expands on this idea in harder stages by combining two obstacle types together, which require the corresponding two buttons to be pressed at the same time.

The game only has 6 playable tracks + the tutorial track, which stuck me as odd at first… shouldn’t there be more than like 30 minutes of gameplay? That was until I discovered the main feature of Vib Ribbon: You can play any song you want. Due to its miniscule size, the entire game can fit onto the 2MB of RAM on the PS1, allowing the original disc to be ejected and a new CD to be loaded. Vib Ribbon will automatically generate levels for your favorite songs and allow you to play to your heart’s content! Obviously this isn’t revolutionary by today’s standards, but considering the hardware the developers had to work with, this is a very impressive workaround!

With some clever programs, I was able to load songs that I have the physical disc for, as well as others that I have stored digitally! If that’s not cool, I’m not sure what is.

After some further research, I also discovered that the game disc itself is also just a CD, with 8 tracks containing the 7 in-game songs and an extra track containing the actual game data. Pretty cool!

I would highly recommend checking out Vib Ribbon, especially if you can get some custom songs playing.