This Turn-Based RPG Musical Is Fun But Drags A Bit In Act 3 | People Of Note Review

People of Note was clearly made with lots of love, but it is also a deeply silly game. Conflicts are resolved between musicians flinging music at each other, a simple country-wide road trip transforms into a battle to save all of reality, and somehow everyone is convinced that the power of friendship will somehow overcome an ancient eldritch-like power. If I didn't know any better, I'd think this game was an old-school role-playing game. And, to be fair, People of Note shares a lot of parallels with those games. While that means the strengths of those types of games are present in People of Note--notably the music and world design in its case--it also means that some of the shortcomings that can be found in the weaker installments of the genre are present in Iridium Studios' turn-based RPG too.

People of Note sees would-be pop star Cadence striving to fulfill her dream of winning a singing competition and getting propelled into fame. Worried that the pop song she's prepared isn't strong enough to sway the judges, she sets out through the land of Note in search of people who can add to her song. Her journey takes her to a desert where everyone is all about different kinds of rock music, a futuristic metropolis blanketed in perpetual night and inhabited by EDM-obsessed disc jockeys, a block-shaped party city that's all about rap and hip hop, and so much more. And all the while, repeated references to an event known as the Harmonic Convergence steel you for what will eventually be a sharp tonal shift away from road-trip comedy to dramatic high fantasy.

Your enjoyment of this story is really going to come down to how much you like puns and pop culture references--People of Note's humor is not unlike Borderlands 2 or Saints Row IV. The game rides the line between funny and corny well enough for me, save for one moment in the third act that made me cringe so hard, I contemplated simply not playing any more of the game that day. But I also enjoy games like Borderlands and Saints Row. If you're not a fan of the idea of a story that takes every single conceivable musical term and crafts a whole high-fantasy society and plotline with said terms, People of Note is probably going to grate.

Its humor aside, however, People of Note tells a solid story. Protagonist Cadence goes through an incredible arc, with the most prominent moments of transformation brought to life with animated musical performances that feel like they'd be right at home in a Broadway musical. The story's third and final act feels a tad too busy, with Cadence and her band contending with every villain in back-to-back conflicts--having a few of those storylines wrap up in Act 1 or 2 might have helped keep Act 3 from feeling so bloated and difficult to follow.

The final member of Cadence's party, rapper Vox, also feels like a notably weaker and less fleshed-out character in comparison to his peers, being introduced in Act 3 and not having the same level of characterization as rocker Fret or DJ Synthia. Having to share the limelight with half a dozen villains who all need closure on their own narrative arcs means Vox is left in this unsatisfying limbo of not really having much focus in the story.

Beyond the characters, and in terms of visuals and audio, the world of People of Note is incredibly well-realized, and uncovering the map and discovering which genre of music you're going to explore next is regularly entertaining. Each distinct area has its own musical theme, which transforms and evolves whenever combat kicks off. The music in battles that are set in rock-centric Durandis takes on a more country vibe when fighting members of the country-obsessed Homestead, for example.

Each turn of combat--referred to as stanzas--will also sometimes be affected by Cadence and her allies, creating turns where pop, rock, or another genre of music takes center stage. During these moments, the background music changes to incorporate that genre, and the member of Cadence's party that corresponds to that particular genre of music grows stronger.

The crux of People of Note is these turn-based battles. While Cadence and her allies automatically come equipped with a basic attack they can perform for free, they also have powerful abilities that require the use of a resource called Beat Points that slowly charge with every turn. These actions each have their own quick-time prompt--messing it up decreases the power of the move, while perfectly timing your inputs amplifies the ability's power. Have you played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? If so, you have an idea as to how this works already.

It's a serviceable system, but it never feels all that natural, especially later on in the game when you unlock the most powerful abilities that require multiple quick-time inputs. That's because each ability has its own unique pattern that never changes, despite the music of each fight evolving turn to turn.

While this isn't game-breaking, it does lead to player mistakes throughout the game's entire story, as your muscle memory of how the quick-time pattern is supposed to go clashes with how good it feels to press buttons in response to the beat of music. Unfortunately for me, my beat perception won out more often than not, leading me to frustratingly mess up the quick-time inputs over and over in the latter half of the story. It eventually got bad enough that I just turned off the quick-time mechanic in the settings entirely.

I largely enjoyed the combat outside of those quick-time inputs. There's quite a bit of strategy to it, rewarding your commitment to creating builds and thinking ahead. Each character in Cadence's party takes on a specific role--Cadence is an all-rounder, for instance, while Fret is geared more toward healing and support. Each character can be customized with different stones that each grant a different ability, allowing you to curate each. You can double down on Fret's role and load him up with multiple abilities devoted to healing, buffing, curing debuffs, and reviving downed allies, for example, or make him a tough tank that endures multiple hits before unleashing a powerful headbang attack.

In addition, the flow of battle needs to be taken into consideration. Enemies can place modifiers on the turn order so that the first person to act on your turn always deals less damage, for example, or stun a member of Cadence's party so that they can't act for an entire turn. Early on, these considerations are just speed bumps that you have to work around, but unlocking Synthia and Vox are game-changers. Synthia can remix the turn order to delete modifiers, and Vox can hit enemies hard with his own collection of modifiers and debuffs. At that point in the game, People of Note becomes this deadly ballet of two groups of musicians battling it out, and all tricks are equal on each side. And while losing this battle of wits can be frustrating, successfully outmaneuvering your opponent is deeply rewarding.

People of Note's "dungeons" (for lack of a better word to describe the areas devoted to combat and puzzles and not talking to NPCs), also do away with random encounters and fully heal all party members after every fight. This keeps combat from overstepping everything else and ensures that each fight is solely a battle of wits, not an irritating gauntlet of survival.

Combat grows increasingly less enjoyable further into the story though, especially once you unlock Vox in Act 3. From that point onwards, People of Note primarily makes fights harder by giving enemies and bosses larger health bars, not a wider variety of actions or smarter strategies. For the last six hours or so of People of Note, combat just plateaus. The fights are no longer getting more difficult, but just becoming longer. It feels a lot like old-school Final Fantasy in that respect, and it's similarly quite dull. It's repeatedly annoying to figure out what a boss is all about, come up with a surefire strategy for beating them, feel the high of seeing your tactics work as intended, and then come to the realization that you've only been fighting the boss for 10 minutes or so and they still have over three-quarters of their health bar so you now just have to keep doing what you've already been doing for another 30-odd minutes.

In the same way People of Note has a setting that allows you to turn off the quick-time inputs, it also has one that lets you just automatically win the fight you're going up against. And as People of Note continued, I found myself using that feature more and more. Could I have just stuck with it and grinded through every boss as intended? Probably. But I really didn't want to, and I don't think I would have wanted to beat the game without that feature because grinding the same boss for almost an hour is tiresome.

The game does have a "crescendo" mechanic, where bosses and certain enemies grow stronger over time, but rarely did that transform the fight in a meaningful way that kept the battle exciting. More often than not, it just gave the enemy a stronger attack that they'd use every once in a while. But the extent to which that would change the flow of a fight was limited to me reminding myself to heal every once in a while during combat. And that's also just making the fight longer--I'm pausing my strategy to heal before going right back to what I've discovered works best. Prior to my decision to outright skip the latter half of most fights, People of Note's combat was beginning to make the game grind to a halt in Act 3, frustratingly stalling progress right when the story was getting really exciting.

Much of this is alleviated by People of Note's soundtrack, which is stellar. While the soundtrack primarily focuses on catchy pop music, it does dip its toes into other genres--rock, rap, boy band, and opera most successfully. These songs are brought to life with colorful and fully-animated cutscenes, each punctuating a major point in the story--a hero's motivations finally being revealed, for example, or a dramatic turning point that unveils the previously hidden machinations of a villain who has been scheming in the shadows. It aligns with the game's messaging that music is a powerful means by which to express oneself or pass along practices and traditions.

Most of the songs are also just catchy, the kind with a chorus that's designed to earworm into your brain and stick around for a while. The same can be said for the individual tracks that play in hub areas and during battles, all of which provide a tonal identity for the location and the specific enemy types that inhabit it.

Oddly, while these background tracks provide several examples, the People of Note's songs that get the full cutscene treatment don't have much in terms of genre mixing beyond Act 1. Cadence's story is literally about her trying to add new sounds to her pop song, and this is tackled fantastically upon her meeting Fret and getting a song that combines pop and rock music. We only really see that again one other time in what's my favorite song of the entire game--one that blends pop with classical. This lack of genre mashups doesn't ruin the game, but upon finishing it, I did feel disappointment that the game about blending different musical genres together doesn't have more examples of the characters bonding by blending their different sounds together.

Between fights, each dungeon will offer puzzles for Cadence to solve. Over the course of the game, she unlocks musical powers that can only be used outside of combat, like Forte, which can be used to push heavy objects, or Harmonize, which links two objects together so whatever Cadence does to one is also done to the other. Early on, these are primarily used for simple puzzles, like using Forte to slowly blast pieces of a gigantic recorder together. But as the game continues, the puzzles grow increasingly complex, relying on knowledge you've gained from the earlier puzzles to create these intense gauntlets that rely on using all four of Cadence's powers in tandem to inch forward. Save for a few that stalled progress on the cusp of climactic moments near the end of the game--irritatingly keeping me from the drama I so desperately wanted to watch unfold--these puzzles were always delightful brain teasers that kept each dungeon from being a long slog of only combat.

People of Note has fun logic problems, too. While my favorite were the Weird Owl puzzles--all of which are multiple choice quizzes that test you on your knowledge of the in-game world of Note, like storefront locations or enemy attack names--there are a few other standouts. A whodunit mystery near the end of the game that sees Cadence grilling multiple suspects and tests you on your ability to pay attention to details and correctly object to falsehoods and deduce criminal intent is very fun, and I'm so bummed that the game only lets Cadence play detective that one time. There are a ton of delightful side activities and quests like this in the game. Between them and the incredible format for the credits that shout out individual members of the team in song, it feels like there was a lot of love poured into this game.

All said, even if we're not seeing the members of Cadence band blend their sounds together much in the story, we at least can see it happen during combat. And while that combat drags a bit in the last act of the game and messes with your mind by not matching the tempo of the quick-time inputs to the background battle music, the turn-based system that's there rewards creativity and strategic thinking. Plus, this game has awesome music and fun puzzle-filled dungeons. If you're down to immerse yourself in puns galore and tons of pop-culture references, People of Note is a delightful musical treat.