Konami gives the US a small slice of the Beatmania IIDX Pie with the US release of BeatMania. While a good deal to have at 30 bucks, do Americans get a decent taste of the goodness?
By MixMasterLar
If you've played any music/rhythm game before, you have probably have heard of a game known as Beatmania. The game was the first Bemani game ever made and while not the first true music game, fully kick-started the genre back around 1997. Its spin-off BeatMania IIDX (pronounced Two DX) upped the ante and added more keys, more songs, more ... everything. Since then, Japan has gotten a new IIDX at least once every two years.
A few years ago, Konami decided to try its luck at bringing this game to the States. While still a fun, little game it's missing a ton of content and charm from the Japanese titles. Regardless, if you have never played the series it may serve up a small helping of fun.
We Crave Gameplay
The game is played a lot like any other music game you can think of with the difference being a keyboard-style controller with a spinning disc that is there to simulate a turntable. There are seven keys on the table as big as a mouse button. The goal of the game is to hit these keys and spin that turntable in time to music by following falling blocks (much like O2Jam or Rock Band). Like Rock Band, failing to hit a note will result in the note not being played in the game's audio, but unlike Rock Band, if you're offbeat here, then the song is played offbeat making it hard to get back on the timing. The game judges you by each note, flashing words like "Great!" or "Poor" to tell you how close you were to hitting a note on time. The "Just Greats" (or a flashing "Great") featured in all the Japanese versions was replaced with the word "Perfect!". The change doesn't directly change the gameplay, however, a more gracious timing window allows new players to better adjust to the game.
What does change the gameplay, though, is the final score at the end of a song. The judgment has been changed to resemble that of DDRMAX, and now you are awarded a grade two times higher then you would have had in the import versions. While this may cause long-time players to shake their fist, it, again, helps new players ease into the series.
We Got Da Beat!
The Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero games are made or broken by the soundtracks and BeatMania is no different. Hardcore fans of DDR will recognize a few songs by the artist Good-Cool and a couple of dj TAKA's fan favorites such as V and Colors. The remainder of the list is mostly either old Beatmania songs (a majority from pre-IIDX) or a brand new licensed song such as Moby's Lift me Higher or Timo's First Day.
The huge letdown is out of only 79 songs, you get 20 that are in 5key format and 50 that are in 7Key format, with only eight that can be played using both. And the sad part is songs on 5Key only have one difficulty. This is completely stupid and just proves Konami makes no effort to revamp the older transplant songs brought in from years of Bemani to the U.S. Furthermore, the majority of the people interested in the game will be long-time players and the lack of difficulty or variety will have experts bored from the get go. In this version, the hardest song is V, which a lot of Beatmania players have already long since mastered, moving on to harder songs by playing imports. Thankfully, for newbs, getting used to the game is very hard, so the challenge is there, but for people who have already played, it's just not enough.
The Good (side) Stuff
So with only 79 songs to unlock and enjoy, you would expect there to be extra modes wouldn't you? The game has the standard 5Key, 7Key, two player, practice mode, double play and course modes you would expect to have in a Konami game but other than that, there isn't that much to enjoy. The course mode is fun since you play a set of five songs back to back and have Internet Rankings but there isn't that much new or challenging content if you played the game before.
It's also worth noting that the Movies that play during a song are, for the most part, just not that great, but you'll probably never notice it while playing.
In the end, it's probably better to pick up Beatmania if you have never played it and are wanting to give it a chance. If you played the imports a lot, you'll probably just want to stick with those, but at 30 dollars it's with buying for the controller, which otherwise would cost you around 70 bucks in itself.
GemuBaka Review Score: 2 out of 5
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