Hands-On: Major Minor’s Majestic March

by Emily Balistrieri on July 18, 2008 at 1:20 pm

I led a parade of animals through E3 yesterday, but it was pretty unobtrusive since all I had to do was wave a Wiimote at NanOnSha’s station in the Majesco booth.

Major Minor’s Majestic March (from Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Alan Greenblat, the designer and artist of PaRappa the Rappa) is a music game where you set your own tempo as the conductor of a marching band. Through the colorful, cartoon levels you recruit new animal musicians to flesh out your band and collect helpful items, all while keeping a good stepping pace.

Each of the seven stages start with a tempo setting period. You raise and lower the baton (Wiimote) as fast as you want to go, but can always make gradual adjustments later if you find you’re going too slow to keep the interest of your band members, or too fast for you to hit the beats.

Once you’re off and marching you’ll come across animals and items on the side of the path. By flicking the remote left or right on the indicated beat you can recruit characters to follow you. Keeping good time can be tricky with all of this flicking, but if you collect jelly beans your band will be able to continue keeping time even while you’re busy doing something else. If you lose the beat, there’s a metronome showing the up and down swings on the left hand side of the screen.

Besides jelly beans, there are other items such as sunshine, which improves morale (three Xs and they walk), rain that lowers morale, and whistles that halt the band so your can rest your arm. The chili pepper will make members of your band run off, and the aubergine character will steal them away, too.

Major Minor’s Majestic March ships holiday 2008, so they still have some time to iron out the sometimes awkward controls. Frankly, it’s adorable and a great way to use the Wii’s motion control, so I’m hoping there will be a little tightening here and there and some tweaking of the graphics– it’s another one of those games, like No More Heroes, where imagining it on the Xbox 360 or PS3 – just visually – makes you shed a tiny tear.)

Major Minor’s Majestic March will be a good present for the nephews, nieces, and band geeks in your holiday circle.

Share This: