"Konami should try harder."

Introduction

Sometime in 2005, Konami announced that Beatmania IIDX (or simply "Beatmania") was going to be released in North America. Fans rejoiced, because it was finally going to get exposure that wasn't an anime convention. What has resulted is probably the most blatant case of laziness and anti-Americanism in a Konami music game since "EXTREME 2".

Beatmania IIDX is a fairly straightforward game. In concept it plays the exact same as DDR, regardless of what limb you are using - a note falls to some point in the screen, and once it reaches that point, you have to press the button. This is done in time with music.

Beatmania plays a bit different than DDR, however, because it's supposed to be "simulating" a DJ and a "club" atmosphere. This is a marketing gimmick - it's nothing like it. The difference between the two games, as many fans will be quick to point out, is that Beatmania has 7 keys and a turntable, where DDR has 4 arrows. Beatmania is "keysounded" - when you press a key, it plays a sound sample, ultimately "constructing" the song.

The tunes you see here sound more like game music combined with the most prototypical elements of electronic music. You will not find Juno Reactor, Sasha, Infected Mushroom, or any of the other giants of the underground dance scene in here. You will find, however, Vivaldi's Winter, remixed by DJ Taka with some of the most cliche elements of dance music to form a fan-favorite called "V". You will find a chillout-meets-bossanova instrumental where the focal point is acoustic guitar, called "Summer Vacation". The music in this game is like vgm-meets-muzak instead of authentic dance music.

Gameplay 4/10

The gameplay of beatmania, as I explained earlier, is legitimately different from DDR. When you play DDR, you're stepping out dance patterns, but when you play Beatmania, you're "creating" the music, and I say that very loosely. For example, if you aligned all seven keys in a row and ordered them from 1 to 7, a bass drum kick would be on 1, a hi hat would be on 2, a snare would be on 3, and so on. Very often you are not using a turntable like a turntable - instead, it functions as a cymbal. "Fanboys" will often use this as a pro and insult games like O2Jam for their technicalities.. or lack thereof, but their notecharts are technically inaccurate on a number of songs (including a fan favorite - "V"), which makes this "pro" inconsistent at best.

There are a host of different modes of play that you can pick, but all of them are basically variations of the traditional arcade style. "Expert" mode is largely just a prearranged playlist of songs, that is supposedly justified because you have an "internet ranking" code for it. Other games have had internet ranking codes for individual songs, so expert mode is just there to make the game look like it has more content than it actually does. The only redeeming feature of this mode is that you can actually create your own playlist ("course") of songs.

"Free" mode is where you can play each song without the limitation of stages. This doesn't make sense - you're not in an arcade. Some would argue that stages help when you have friends over.. but, unless you're incompetent, you could easily take turns in Free mode. In the Japanese versions, you can jump right in and play nearly every song immediately. In the American version, this is not the case, as you have to play each song before you can play it in Free mode. Thanks, Konami.

"Arcade" mode, like I said, doesn't make sense. You're not in an arcade. There is physically nothing different that separates this from "Free" mode other than "stages", and limiting what songs you can play based on your "stage". A "stage" is just a song. If you've played a song, you're on stage 2, if you've played two songs, you're on stage three, and if you've played 3 songs, your stages are over with and you have to start over on "Arcade" mode. Why does this exist? I have no idea. Most likely to make the game look like it has more content than it actually does, in the same vein as the pre-designed courses on "Expert" mode.

If you're playing in Arcade or Free mode and press start, you're allowed to access a list of gameplay modifiers, or just "mods" for short. These are things like speeding up the scroll rate of songs, so that the notes themselves will be more spaced out, but will subsequently scroll faster. This is used to make songs easier to "read". There's "random", which arranges the notes in the same fashion as its name, and "mirror", which horizontally flips the notes. While this is nice, Konami put zero effort into this. If you've played, for example, the 12th or 13th arcade release, there's a much more functional list of modifiers in the game, such as "3.5x" and a customizable "Sudden". Since Beatmania US is not a part of the traditional IIDX canon, it's inexcusable to have not included those.

You can choose between several key combinations; 5 key, which consists of songs from older Beatmania releases; 7 key, which is the standard mode of play; and 14 key "doubles", which requires two controllers. The latter is talked about more than it is played, and many comparisons made between it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Konami claims that this release was largely for the fans...but they still bothered to include things like "Easy", which complicate many scoreboards and just end up causing arguments and "lifebar elitism", much in the same fashion that having a bar on Pump It Up's arcade machine does, given that the official PIU tournaments disallow it. This is also evident in the online mode of DDR UltraMix. Ignoring standards that have been set by the IIDX community, such as "easy = bad", or "autoscratch = really bad", is insulting.

A typical feature of music games released by Konami is to appeal to a player's ego. This is evident elsewhere, for example, in DDR SuperNOVA - the bar of notechart standards has been raised considerably by their competitors, yet they fail to live up to that standard by making easier "charts". This has been the case in nearly all of their music games, and this is ESPECIALLY the case in IIDX. In the Japanese versions, you can immediately jump in and play songs at the "another" difficulty. In this game, you have to play every song before unlocking it. This is not only unfair but borderline prejudice and/or anti-American.

The gameplay straw that breaks the camel's back is the way songs are scored. This would be a good time to mention that they changed flashing "greats" - a judgement for the most accurate button press you can achieve - to "perfect". This makes it a lot easier to focus, and a lot easier to get good scores. However, the scoring engine was changed dramatically as well. While the Japanese versions of IIDX went by "EX" score (each judgement is worth a set amount, and the % of that is how your score is determined), this goes by "money" score, which is the numbers at the bottom of your screen. If I were to play this in the arcade, the "AAA" rank would be nearly 188,000.. in this version, however, "AAAing" a song requires me to merely reach 170,000 points. This will not cripple online rankings, but it cripples word of mouth.

Sound 6/10

Probably the most important element in a music game, next to gameplay, is sound. Gameplay can make up for horrible sound, but if you have subpar gameplay and horrible sound, forget it. Music can be objective, as proven by John Winsor, but thankfully I am not going to judge the music objectively in this review.

Most of the tunes, as stated earlier, are nothing like what you'd find in a club. There are a single-digit number of licensed tunes. This is insulting - you have to remember that a company like Konami is one of the wealthiest companies in the game industry. Guitar Hero, designed by Harmonix, had a songlist that was composed almost entirely of top-notch licensed music. Beatmania? A few cheesy licensed tracks, a bunch of subpar original tracks, and a few really good original tracks. Keep in mind, however, that none of the "original" tracks are original - they're from other Beatmania releases. So the number of exclusively new songs you're getting is... well, let's just be glad that you can play Beatmania on a US PS2....right?

The genres in this game span from electronic music attempting in very bad taste to incorporate classical music, to electronic remixes of mainstream tunes, although it mainly just ends up falling into the generic "electronic music" label. To be fair, there's more authentic dance music in this game than there is on DDR.. but that's not saying much. Many fans will retort this in fury, saying that IIDX has a colorful assortment of genres that span many types of music... but many fans also don't know anything about electronic music outside of what they've played on the game, so they assume genres like "electroshock" are real.

Graphics 3/10

Beatmania (US)'s graphics indicate Konami's laziness more than any other element of the game. They took a set of graphics from "10th style" for the Japanese PS2, and sprayed purple all over it....it's like the game's entire interface was treated like a SquareEnix pallette change.

The main menu graphics, however, indicate this laziness the most. I have known plenty of graphic designers in my day, and the main menu looks like they took the first ad for a graphic designer in a newspaper that was under $200. There is little to no detail, everything is blunt and minimalistic - even Philip Glass would say that this is too minimalistic.

When you play a song, there is a video that is displayed on the right side. This is toted as IIDX's biggest advantage by fans, even though, most of the time, you won't be watching them. If you have friends or family around you regularly, though, they serve as a pleasant break from simply watching notes being hit.

Summary

While this is Konami's first attempt at bringing IIDX to the states, this is a very weak first effort. This would have been acceptable if 8th style were new, but 8th style isn't new, it's really old. I am sure that obsessive fans will ignore every word of criticism that I have said simply to oppose the concept that I am critiquing and not praising the game, but that's why they're obsessive fans, also known as "fanboys".

Maybe Konami will learn from this and blow the socks off of Harmonix for their next release, but given their track record with American DDR and IIDX releases, this is unlikely. I hope so, but then again, I consider myself an optimist.

5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/31/06