REVIEW FROM A GUY WHO ISN'T IN TO MUSIC OR MUSICALS:
If you are holding off as someone who is an avid JRPG fan but not into musicals, hopefully this review is helpful. At 5 hours in the game is extremely enjoyable and what you'd expect for a smaller scale 20ish hour JRPG. Standard tactical combat with enough nuance to make it feel challenging and fun. The main thing is the story isn't in your face and preachy about the musical aspect. It's in fact very well written and fun. I'm enjoying the characters and am even getting some of the references to 90/20's era bands. As someone taking a break from 140 hours of Crimson Desert, this game is an amazing palate cleanser. Also, if you're worried about the "Musical" aspect, the cut scenes in regard to that are in fact fairly brief, and in my opinion very well done.

DISCLAIMER: I was VERY much looking forward to this game releasing and had high hopes with every music video that came out.
P.S. This started out as neutral but over the course of the game up till Lassos blue boss battle changed into negative, as much as it disheartened myself.
TLDR at the bottom

This is one of those games steam DESPERATELY needs to add a neutral option for.
The game advertises itself as a musical "rpg", which i consider only a half truth.

Lets start with the positives:
1. The style and art of the characters themselves is immaculate, cute and pleasing to look at.
2. Voice acting is pretty decent to listen to.
3. Cadence has the cutest design i have seen this year so far.
4. All the music, whether you like the genre or not is pretty high quality in the genre its in.

The neutral:
1. You have to like the genres of music the game uses or a massive portion of the game simply wont be for you, the 4 main character use these styles of music: pop, rock, edm, rap, if you dont like any of those, major parts of the game are not for you.
2. There is no connectivity between regions and their themes, you exit and enter from the same path despite the overworld map indicating otherwise.
3. If you saw the trailers and music videos so saw a majority of animated cutscenes already.
4. the style of the portraits does not translate well into 3d, the proportions of characters look elongated or too short depending on which character we talk about
5. the mashup meter (special combo attack) always being drained at a boss fight starts seems to be of the same cadence as certain jrpg not letting you use status effects, while you CAN charge them in the fight again, forcing you to start at zero seems like a half measure to balance combat
6. I recall myself using rest 5 times through the entire game and one of them was to test it out, take that for what you will.
7. Shops are effectively useless, you never once need to buy anything from them, the few and far between chests in the corridors give you all you'll ever need.
8. Either the jokes land or the fall so flat it makes your face cave in, example: a late game story important boss is a very on the nose dragonball reference that might almost make you quit on the spot.

The bad:

1. Any and all conflict between characters is solved in a matter of minutes.
2. The way they handled some characters, especially Synths and their addiction, id call it ugly even, "oh the drug addict is fine after a couple minutes/days and a little pat on their head"

ITS NOT AN RPG:
1. Calling it an RPG is pretty far fetched, technically you level, but you have no stats to allocate
2. Technically you get equipment but its so far and few between you can count it on one hand for each member of the group, same goes for the two only other types of equipment
3. Technically there is a world, but there is no connection between regions, ZERO exploration, no secrets or secret paths to find between hours of gameplay, you might be lucky to find the occasional sparkling bird on the corridors you run through.
4. technically it has a story but there is no meaningful flavor text from the few npcs that talk and there are no worthwhile side quests, the biggest "quest" youll find it in the third regions and a fetch "quest" that last about 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on how bad you are at finding objects, maybe youll even find the occasional wallet.
5. The 3d artstyle of the environment looks less unique the more regions you run through the limited amount of regions, the artstyle started blending together at some point to the point the colors are the only thing that made me remember what region is which.
6. The rhythm element in combat is so trivial it might as well not exist.
7. Blue lassos blue special attack that happens seemingly randomly so you cant really stock up on points or specials and autokills your party if you dont do enough damage, terrible design


TLDR: a tiny small but shiny puddle of a game, all game elements are surface level at best, but it does look mostly nice.

As a two-bit DJ at some bar in the middle of nowhere this game really speaks to me. All the music references are great. The music numbers are very "disney". I like that though. There is something about this rpg that just makes you feel good.