“Nodame Cantabile” is a comedy Manga aimed towards a female audience, revolving around the life of a man named Chiaki who aims to become a music conductor. As he fails time and time again to be recognised by others, his confidence in his abilities begins to drop until he meets a girl named “Nodame” who has a personality completely opposite to his. As he works to bring out the musical talent in her, Chiaki and Nodame both begin to learn from each other and mature as musicians. Now here’s Bandai-Namco’s rhythm game set in the very same world.

Arriving at the orchestral campus of Momogaoka College of Music, you don’t play as any of the characters from the story. Instead, you play as a new journalist for the music magazine “Classic Life” who is at the academy to gather material for publishing a feature about orchestras.


The familiar adventure game way of navigating between locations.

Similar to most Japanese adventure games, you move around locations by tapping spots on a map. Key events takes place where there’s a Mongoose mark and then the real gameplay begins. For the most part, Nodame is a rhythm game and if you’ve seen the show or read the Manga you’ll know it’s all about classical music and not the sort of music you would expect in Ouendan. As these songs play, circles slide across the screen from the right hand side of the touch screen while music notes fall from the top. You have to time your taps so that these falling notes reach the centre of the circles.

For the first few stages of the game, songs start out very easy with giant gaps between notes. Those who are used to Ouendan’s furious tapping patterns will probably abandon the game because it’s so slow and easy! However, give it an hour or two and things really begin to ramp up with quick tempo songs such as “Rossini: William Tell” or “J. Brahm’s Hungarian Dance No. 5”. A new sliding note is also introduced and you have to be very quick to trace out the dotted lines before they slide off the screen. Yet, it’s still not hard to beat the songs because the penalties for missing notes are very small.


The classical songs are all very easy to beat.

Just like other rhythm games, there is a big health bar on the top screen, dropping with any notes you miss and filling up when you time well. Playing as a conductor, you won’t hear any sound effects as you hit notes successfully. You’ll just see bright ripples of colour. On the other hand if you miss, you’ll hear the music become distorted. Oddly enough, there’s no score keeping, ranking or combos. Beating a song simply means filling up the gauge to a certain level and then you’re free to move on. Obviously this means there’s little incentive to go back and replay songs.