Friday Night Funkin

The early 2000s were awash with rhythm-based video games. You couldn’t enter an arcade (when those existed) without hearing the loud, invigorating music or feeling the thump of the players stomping on the floor buttons that corresponded with the icons on the screen. This infatuation for the gaming populace at large would slowly wane, but there was always a smaller group of people that held the love for rhythm games in their very bones, and would go on to make many iterations of the genre using different styles and formulas. As the physical peripheral-based rhythm game died out and started disappearing from arcades, a new haven for the genre would pop up: the internet. This is where Friday Night Funkin’ was born. The newest rhythm game currently available, and one that has exploded in popularity in a very short amount of time. Before you dive into this toe-tapping extravaganza, here is everything you need to know about this future classic rhythm game. Let’s get funkin’!

Greatness In The Making

The origins of Friday Night Funkin’ are fairly humble and subdued. It was created in the October 2020 Ludum Dare Game Jam 47 by a collection of faithful Newgrounds users: Cameron "Ninjamuffin99" Taylor, David "PhantomArcade" Brown, Isaac "Kawai Sprite" Garcia, and evilsk8r. For those of us who didn’t exist in the early 2000’s, Newgrounds is a website that specialized in all kinds of flash-based games.

These users grew up loving the site, and rhythm games, and with those passions, they set out to create a game that would go on to become a phenomenon. As a result of their affinity for Newgrounds, the art in their game heavily resembled those early 2000’s flash games that inspired it, with flat, 2D characters and backgrounds with interesting designs. As a matter of fact, many characters that are known as being residents of Newgrounds are present here! Among those included are: Meat Boy, Zone Tan, and even Hellbender. You can’t have a rhythm game without music, and the soundtrack created by Kawai Sprite is suitably energetic and motivating.

Classic Rhythm Game(play)

The gameplay of Friday Night Funkin’ will be familiar to you in the (unlikely) event that you have ever played Parappa the Rapper. Two characters appear on opposite sides of the screen, facing each other, and when one begins to rap, icons move from the bottom of the screen to the top, and you have to match those icons with the corresponding buttons as they cross the threshold at the top of the screen.

You play as “Boyfriend”, who must defeat foe after foe in rap battles in order to keep dating “Girlfriend”, with the looming threat of “Daddy Dearest”, who is “Girlfriend’s” father. Each level is presented as a “week”, which consists of three songs, meaning three opponents. Before each song, you will be presented with difficulty options of easy, normal, and hard. Your choice will determine the speed of the icons moving on the screen, as well as their complexity.

Pros

• Great art
• Lots of cool music
• Diverse cast of characters

Cons

• Only a few stages at the moment
• Rhythm games aren’t for everybody