LogFAQs > #951277079

#10. Beatmania IIDX (series) (Arcade, 1999)





This writeup pretty much needs to pick up at the end of my Dance Dance Revolution writeup. DDR was so influential for me, both as a competitive game, and in leading me to a group of new friends. As I also mentioned before, I would get together with that group of friends to play a whole bunch of other video games beyond DDR. One of these friends owned a game called Beatmania IIDX 6th Style. It was one of those oh we've heard of this game but never seen it things. One evening of trying the game, and I was hooked.

Beatmania IIDX is another music game series from Konami. It's supposed to be a DJ simulation game, with 7 keys arranged with slightly inconvenient positioning and a turntable. It simulates DJing as much any other music game simulates its instrument, but you get the idea. Each note is keysounded, meaning pushing the buttons plays the song.

IIDX is a notoriously difficult game. The buttons are arranged in a way that at least one of them will always be awkward for your fingers to hit, and the turntable needs to be scratched both up and down, meaning there is a whole learning curve just to get used to the controller. The timing window for the most accurate judgment on a note is just 2 frames, I believe, in a 60 fps game. Easy songs will still have hundreds of notes, hard songs can get up around 1,500 to 2,000 notes in a 2 minute period. You can get goods with a much more generous window, but it won't count towards your score for your grade, just merely keep you alive for passing. The game designers recognized how narrow the timing window was, because you can get a AAA, the highest grade, with just 88.89% of the max score (8/9ths). And yet still, it is very common for people to be getting C's and D's on songs when they first start (4/9ths and 3/9ths of the max score, respectively). As for clearing songs, there is a bar that fills as you hit notes and depletes as you miss, and it needs to be 80% full at the end of the song. It definitely fills up slower than it clears out, and a handful of missed notes in the final stretch of a song can lead to a failure. Hitting extra buttons can also be penalized, depleting your bar more, meaning mashing in a panic can go terribly wrong. Konami has a good laugh sometimes, as they often fill songs with the most dense bullshit at the very end of songs. It's common for high level players to earn a AAA, but still fail a song. It sounds like IIDX can be a very masochistic game, and it kind of is at times, but it can also be very rewarding when things go well. Hitting a long string of notes gives a big rush of adrenaline.

There is a fair amount of crossover between IIDX music and DDR. A lot of popular Konami songs in DDR actually originated in IIDX, mostly instrumental/electronic stuff. Songs like Holic, V, Sync, Absolute, Burning Heat, Spin the Disc, A, Sakura, and a lot more all originated in IIDX. When I first saw these songs in IIDX, I was really excited, because many of them were among my favorites in DDR. There is a bunch of original music too, and the more I heard, the more I loved IIDX's soundtracks.

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