As of right now, it has been one month, thirteen days, and twenty hours since I first opened my Beatmania IIDX controller and IIDX 6th. I remember seeing the box, being amazed at just how large the controller was. "It had better be worth the $100 I dropped for it," I thought to myself. Over the time that has passed, this game has more than proven to be worth it's price; in about one month, I've probably put more time into this game than any other PS2 game that I own, and I've found that this is, without a doubt, the greatest music game that I've had the privilege of playing. Now, I'm left with a single question... How has the Beatmania series been going on for over four years without me knowing about it?
I plugged the controller in, placed it on the trunk in front of my couch, and flipped on my PS2. The first thing that I noticed was just how slick the interface is. Talk about style. Not only did it look good, but the sheer amount of options was daunting. This game has a lot of content. More on that later. The first thing that I did was jump right into arcade mode, selected "7Key", and played "Doigts de Fatima".
Anyone who has played DDR (or pretty much any music game, for that matter) will get the concept of IIDX pretty quickly. You have seven keys and a turntable on that exquisite controller in front of you. On the screen, "notes" fall in the shape of blocks, and once they reach the bottom, you need to press the respective key or spin the turntable. It's the typical "simon-says" gameplay that music games have had since the beginning. One thing that I found cool was that you don't just press keys to the music; each key actually plays a sample, so the music only sounds as good as you can play. Unlike DDR, you pass by having an 80% or higher on your "groove gauge", and you do not fail when the gauge is empty. These particular falling blocks, as I would soon find out, are the most addicting falling blocks since Tetris.
By the time Doigts de Fatima had completely destroyed me and my frantic key-mashing, I realized that this game wasn't going to be too easy. What next, then? Why, the Drill Mode, of course! As one could assume, the Drill Mode is a massive series of lessons that will ease you into Beatmania. There are well over two hundred lessons in here, and surprisingly enough, the game keeps score for all of them. The learning curve is excellent, too, and you'll slowly start to get the hang of the game within the first twenty or so lessons. After some time in Drill Mode, I moved on to Beginner Mode. Beginner Mode is an excellent idea; reduce the difficulty of every song to a two or three star difficulty (out of a total of eight). Within a week, I had Beginner Mode down, and I was able to move on to Light7.
The Arcade Mode of the game is pretty robust. Not only do you have the standard 7Keys mode for every song, but there's also a Light7 mode for those new to the series. Currently, I can pass about 90% of the songs in Light7, and only a handful in 7Keys. Some songs even have an "Another" difficulty, which is generally ridiculously difficult, and every once in a while, it manages to change how the song sounds. If you ever manage to want more than that, the game offer 14Key, Light14, and Another (14). Yes, you guessed it; two controllers can be used, and much like DDR's Doubles mode, the songs have separate note layouts when using two controllers. Combine all of the above with the staggering amount of songs in the game (roughly 70) as well as the sheer difficulty, and you have a hefty amount of gameplay.
Arcade Mode also is home to an "Expert Mode", which is a series of non-stop courses. Unlike normal play, you can fail in Expert Mode by losing all of your gauge, and raising the gauge isn't exactly a simple task. The game contains over twenty expert courses, including courses that you can only play on certain days of the week. If you wish, you can even make your own courses. Also worth noting is a "Ranking Mode", which is a series of Expert courses generated from the most often-played songs.
Audio is, obviously, a vastly important part in any music game. Thankfully, IIDX 6th has an excellent soundtrack. The genres range from Euro beat to bossa nova, and nearly everywhere in between. While it's mostly a matter of personal taste, I only managed to find two songs out of the set of 70 that I disliked. Not bad.
Visually, the game isn't much to look at. There are some nice FMVs that are played in the background, but the only time you'll see them is when you aren't playing. That said, some of the videos are pretty well done, but a lot of them recycle generic clips and rely on a small handful of sprites placed on top of the FMV. On a whole, it works for a music game, but the videos are a bit disappointing.
So, there you have it. Beatmania IIDX 6th Style is probably the greatest game on the Playstation 2, and easily the most impressive music game that I've played. Seventy songs, tons of difficulty levels, and I didn't even get into the song modifiers or the insane "Master Videos" that you can unlock. If there's one reason to own a Japanese Playstation 2, this is it.
I went to a con recently and seen this game in action with someone who knew what they were doing playing it. It was insane, the guy had the chain counter flashing almost to the point where I couldn't see the numbers.
I have found that everyday in school, Geometry I try to play a song from memory. OF course I'm completely off, but the tapping of my fingers is to the Rhythm, I think, most the time.
No, but if I were to go out of my way to buy specialized controllers to play something I'd definitely like more than two titles to use them (ie Samba).
How different can Beatmania IIDX get? What is it supposed to do that it's not doing now?
It's not technically the case, there's more modes and extras and frilly junk in this title compared to IIDX3 (the first PS2 release of the series), not to mention that the game gets an interface overhaul each release.
But most people that don't play the titles want something RADICALLY different with each release, and that's just not the case. Besides, Konami is being tight lipped about any future releases for this entire series so it's not like non-fans will have to "endure" this much longer.
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