LogFAQs > #950513125

21. Reflec Beat [series] (Arcade, 2010-present?)

Reflec Beat is a rhythm game with a particularly interesting and troubled history. Back upon its launch in 2010, touch-screen rhythm games were en vogue, following the success of DJ Max Technica, and it received immediate success in Japanese arcades. After a few years and several versions with beefed up song lists and improved player options, it had become one of the most popular and successful games of the BEMANI series. Additionally, (along with jubeat) it had a home version app for iPad, at the time when tablets were also at their peak. Of course, as touch-screen functionally became less novel, its popularity waned, and after several attempts to inject some life into the series, Konami rebooted the whole franchise with its final game - a bizarre, RPG/fantasy-themed version titled with the long-winded Reflesia of Eternity. Inexplicably, this version had removed all previous content aside from a handful of licensed J-Pop and Anime theme songs. Despite a really good initial songlist, some great menu themes (Thanks, DJ Totto!), and slowly drip-feeding the old songs back into the game, the bungled launch basically killed the game right from the release. Technically, the series is still alive, somewhat (I guess Reflesia of "Eternity" was somewhat prophetic) - at least, before the pandemic, they were still popping out bundles of 10 old/returning songs every other month or so - but it's essentially dead now, despite only making it about 7 years or so between launch of its first and final game, and actually being rather successful (and not just a general failure like Museca or Beat Stream).
With the history lesson out of the way, the era where it was a basically-dead game is actually where I come in. I had touched the iPad version once or twice and maybe played a round at a convention, but had no real interest or experience with the game until about...2017? A close friend of mine bought the game at a pretty solid discount and I decided to try to get into it, and despite my reservations, I quickly got hooked. The game's concept is a sort of rhythm game ping-pong where you're knocking notes back and forth between yourself and the other player. By the most recent version, you can turn off seeing opponent targets and have a healthy set of speed mods to avoid cluttering the screen. In that state it's a lot more straightforward - you're trying to hit the notes as they approach the target line. The gimmicks here are that because of the game's structure, where they'll land on the line is somewhat randomized, and sometimes they get sent to you at tricky angles that can be tough to read on the fly. Additionally, there's a higher row of green targets - these are always fixed in position, but are difficult to manage (and read) along with the notes flying toward the bottom row. In practice, you can learn to read everything fairly reasonably, but it takes a decent bit of getting used to.

The game is full of BEMANI polish, though; the game's sound design is really good and surprisingly important - without physical sensations, like the click of a button, touch-screen games can suffer from a lot of design problems, and the series cleverly bakes all that into the design. The ping-pongy nature of the "theme" makes its loud clacking sounds when you touch or hold a note feel perfectly smooth, and also gives you audio feedback to your hands. It's great! The series' mascot, Pastel-kun, a purple mouse, is arguably its most lasting legacy (maybe the mountain of songs it's since ported to other games), and he's great and I'm very sad that his game is dead.

It's also, like DDR, a game where getting an 100% score is absolutely achievable, and even beyond that, getting near-perfect scores and max combos feels like a solid milestone. Because "clearing" a song only means to achieve over a certain score percentage, you're really trying to optimize your play of a single song rather than just beat the hardest level. Again, it takes a potential foible of touch-screen play (mashing on the touch screen might be a bit too effective at cobbling together a clearing score) and turns it into a strength. It's also got a very good soundtrack - at its peak, there were a lot of fun events bringing in bespoke content, and the game's nature as a genreless structure lends itself to a ton of varied and interesting styles of songs. Hell, even the last-gasp final version still got a bunch of really outstanding unique songs.
In 2018 and 2019, I probably put hundreds of hours into Reflec Beat, solely on my friend's cabinet. I have a ridiculous spreadsheet tabulating my high scores for all of the game's 500+ songs on all of their difficulties; I've successfully cleared the whole game (not particularly impressive) and gotten the max rank (S - >98% score) on all the 11-difficulty songs (difficulty scales from 1 to 15). I'm pretty good, but there are definitely some better players than me; of course, the nature of it being a dead game means that there's not an extensive level of competition. But it's a good enough time for me that just finding stuff to improve on is enjoyable enough - pre-pandemic, I was always looking to tackle a handful of score thresholds on different difficulties at any point visiting my friend's place.
Rhythm games are probably my favorite game genre; there's still a couple of big ones left on this countdown, and I have the tendency to get addicted to them pretty much instantly if they speak to me in any capacity. But to round out the "first 80" of my list, I really wanted to show some love to a gem of a game that's sadly been lost to the machine of the industry - a black sheep of a game that gets blamed for problems it didn't start, and for faults that weren't its own. Sorry, Reflec Beat, you were too good for this world.

Here's a quick endcap list of some personal Reflec Beat favorites:
City Never Sleeps - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XpZbWF4MUY
Proluvies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27dq4x246bs
Eira - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcZbfzMD5yU
Towards the Horizon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMEG65kBDDk
Anemoitierai - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlBtqDUCi5k

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