Friday Night Funkin': Rhythm Gaming Excellence
By: William Coffey
A boyfriend, a girlfriend, her family, a giant boom box, challenging gameplay, flash, style, and most importantly, sick beats. What do these all have in common? They’re all traits gamers can come to expect when diving head first into this most recent rhythm gaming phenomenon: Friday Night Funkin’.
Friday Night Funkin’, created by Cameron “ninjamuffin99” Taylor, David “PhantomArcade” Brown, Isaac “Kawai Sprite” Garcia, and “evilsk8r”, is a rhythm game that blew up overnight when it first came out. Released back in 2020, Friday Night Funkin’ was originally a flash game published to the site Newgrounds where it would quickly grow more and more in popularity as time went on.
The general plot of the game is that Boyfriend is in love with Girlfriend (yes, those are their real names), but Girlfriend’s father does not approve of their relationship. He doesn’t see Boyfriend as worthy enough to date his daughter, thus as a way to prove his worth, he has a beatboxing rap battle with the man to prove that he has what it takes to date Girlfriend.
The layout of the game is simple: each level is called a ‘Week’, each ‘Week’ presents a total of three songs for the player to perform, and each ‘Week’ will see Boyfriend going against a different opponent. Some characters are made by the developers like Girlfriend’s mom, a lemon monster, and an 8-bit character from a dating simulator. However, what the developers also did was have week’s starring different characters from the Newgrounds website like Skid and Pump the spooky kids, Pico, and Tankman, the mascot for the site.​
To play the game, the player must use the arrow keys, or the W,A,S, and D keys, on their keyboard to hit notes in the form of arrows at the right time while the song is playing. Most notes will just be repeated from the opponent, as the main gimmick of each rap battle is a back and forth of exchanging different sounds as lyrics, but sometimes Boyfriend will change things up by performing his own solo beat. At the bottom of the screen, there will be a bar that represents Boyfriend’s health. If too many notes are missed, the bar will turn red, the opponent will win, and it’s game over for Boyfriend.
Two aspects of this game that really makes it stand out from others is both its art style and music. The art is very 90s, mainly taking inspiration from old PlayStation games like PaRappa the Rapper, another rhythm game. The motion of the characters after they hit a note is also very smooth moving at a satisfying 60 frames per second. The music is very unique as well since instead of having actual lyrics, they have beeps, bops, and other noises backed by amazingly composed instrumentals by Kawai Sprite, the game’s composer.
Another great aspect of this game is the support it gets from the community. For starters, Friday Night Funkin’ has given rise to many popular modded versions of the game that created fanmade story lines, new characters, stellar music, and even touches that weren’t in the original game yet like animated cutscenes and different gameplay mechanics. A lot of these mods are quite impressive, and the development team have even gone on to praise these mods for how well put together they are. They were actually so impressed that they even hired mod music composers like Saruky and Saster to work with them on game development. However, the best support that they’ve received was the financial support of their fans.
After the overnight success of Friday Night Funkin’, the team eventually launched a Kickstarter campaign to turn Friday Night Funkin’ from a web browser game that would occasionally get updates to a full fledged high quality rhythm gaming experience that could even live up to the quality of some of the mods made for the game. The Kickstarter originally promised content like more weeks, new playable characters, polished visuals, and more. However, if more money was made than expected, they would implement content from their stretch goals like a character creator, online multiplayer, and even a harder difficulty that would remix other songs from the game. The Kickstarter managed to reach many of their goals quickly, and by the end of it, the team raised exactly $2,247,641 to get the game funded.
Overall, Friday Night Funkin’ is an amazing rhythm game that shines above all others, and deserves a solid 10/10. It’s fun yet challenging, its art and music are terrific, and it’s definitely an experience deserving of the support, and money, it received from gamers everywhere.