Platform: PlayStation 4

Price: $14.99

Format: Physical and Digital
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: NanaOn-Sha and epics

Release Date: April 4th, 2017

Age Rating: E

PlayStation 4 Pro Support: Yes, Native 4K

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PaRappa the Rapper is a rhythm based game following a dog rapping his way to this girl he loves Sunny Funny’s heart. The original is now over 20 years old with the last in the series being PaRappa the Rapper 2 way back in 2002. Since the second title, we’ve only had a #PS2PS4 port of the second game and him being a playable character in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royal way back in 2012. PaRappa has slowly over time became a PlayStation legend and will continue to be one. While I’m crazy in love with these games, I’m here to report some bad news.

Each of the six levels features PaRappa’s journey doing various activities. He tries to bake a cake, get his licenses, learn karate, and more on his adventure.

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You have to press Cross, Triangle, Square, or Circle for a majority of the time to get PaRappa to rap anything. Eventually, L1/R1 get put into place and that’s when things start ramping up. When pressing buttons to make an action, half of the time it’s delayed. This is a massive issue because half the time I usually have to press a button either half a second faster or maybe even twice just to pass the round. Hopefully, Japan Studio can fix this issue, but it drove me absolutely INSANE. I must’ve rage quit maybe 3-4 times because of how difficult this title is.

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Each level has 4-5 “lessons”, each comprising of four ranks for your rapping; Cool, Good, Bad, and Awful. Getting Cool is virtually impossible from my experience. If you have Awful or even Bad for a while, your rap will be cut short and you’ll have to restart. Given the game is only about an hour to an hour and a half at most, getting Bad or Awful only makes the game not short in my playthrough.

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PaRappa the Rapper is a heavily stylized game, even for the PS1. It sadly doesn’t stack up, the games aren’t up to bar with anything today and it really is a lazy remaster. While the gameplay is Native 4K, the cutscenes is a horrifying 480p. Watching cutscenes wasn’t really a fun experience. In fact, I ended up skipping some of them at times due to the fact I just can’t look at that low of a resolution on such a high-resolution screen.

Now this game is about sound, right. Well, you’d think that Sony would’ve made this sound amazing. Unfortunately, the sound just doesn’t seem anything special. Watching cutscenes sound very fuzzy and like someone is talking into an Xbox 360 mic (which the low-end ones are probably still better). When playing, the sound is clear. It’s clear but very…. tin like. There’s some kind of echo and distortion that makes it sound extremely strange. It would be best to have everything remixed and have new voice actors redo the voices but that might’ve been too much work for Sony. I will say even with the audio issues, they’re still earworms and I couldn’t help but dance to them. PaRappa’s bars are just infectious to listen to. The PaRappa series will always have bops.

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Where does Sony take the series from here? Well, judging from the reception PaRappa the Rapper Remastered went, I guess the next step would to be to either make PaRappa the Rapper 3 or remaster UmJammy Lammy and take everyone’s advice from this port and put it in that port. Sony is very strange when it comes to their classic IPs and hopefully PaRappa is one that stays now that Sony knows what sticks with this remaster and what doesn’t.