LogFAQs > #951277094

Anyways, after playing the game with friends a couple times, I decided to take the deep plunge. I imported a Japanese PS2 and a copy of Beatmania IIDX 7th Style, which was the newest game in the series at the time. I started playing it almost daily, or at least a couple times a week. I also ended up getting as many of the home versions as I could. I don't have the most recent couple that came out, but as of today, my set of IIDX games looks like the below picture:



I talked about the extreme difficulty of IIDX earlier. Songs were originally rated on a 1-7 scale (and then a 1-8 scale), with harder songs that were unrated. It eventually became 1-12, with the previously unrated songs now included on that scale too. Over time, I was able to clear 6's, 7's, 8's, but it was over quite a long time. The jump to each level is actually pretty large, so there can be a lot of progress in skill without much to show. It really helped to own all the different games, because I could play through all the 8's in one game, then swap to another game and play those, and so on, to keep from ever feeling stuck or stale. Eventually, I was able to clear some 12's. It wasn't a ton, and there are some that to this day are still way beyond me, but I at least know I could hit that level.

Because I took so long to clear the harder songs, I began to realize that my strength was in timing the game. On easier songs, I could hit the notes very accurately. Once the charts got harder, I fell apart and struggled to read them, but what I could hit was still pretty spot on. There's a big online score tracking site that anyone in the english-speaking IIDX community who is even halfway serious about the game used for home versions. As I put more of my scores on there, I decided to focus on getting high scores on easier songs, since that was my strength, and the nature of the game still means there will always be room for improvement at any difficulty of song. I ended up getting some of the community kind of mad at me because of this. Top players who could pass anything and get top scores on the hard songs were getting beaten by me on the easy songs, when I couldn't even clear the hard songs. It's kind of funny to look now at 3rd Style, the oldest (and easiest) game in the series, and see the overall rankings on the right side of the below picture. dj DAN is me, and I haven't even touched this version of the game in years. I really did put so much work into the easy songs lol



My top achievement in IIDX involved the song GAMBOL.

Gambol is a super special song, in that the chart is kind of easy, and should be no problem at all. It was one of the earliest songs made for IIDX though, and somehow, due to weird programming mistakes, Konami made the timing windows for this one song obscenely small, down to 1 frame, with the other timings tightened as well. You can feel like you hit a note spot on, and still come away with a good.

Anyways, I worked on this song for a bit to get the timing down. I know I wasn't the first person in the world to do this, but I was the first person on the site to have a recorded AAA on Gambol, which felt like kind of a big deal to get. Yeah, it was the stupid joke easy song with impossible timing, but that was my main skillset at IIDX, and I pulled it off. I also inspired a handful of other people to put in work and get their own AAAs on it, which was pretty cool to see.

After several years, I really toned down how much I played IIDX. Konami stopped releasing home versions, so the excitement for new ones kind of faded away. I also got into some other games competitively, which took away from my time here. I do still play the arcade version every now and then, like if I go to a Round 1 arcade, or if I go to anime cons/fighting game events that happen to have a IIDX cabinet set up. I've also met a handful of people from the IIDX community playing on these arcade cabinets, which is cool. The arcade versions of IIDX are up to the 28th version by now (Beatmania IIDX BISTROVER; they started giving them all goofy names instead of numbers after a point) so there has been an insane number of songs across all the games to where I can pretty much always play something new in the arcades.

A couple years ago, some musicians who worked on IIDX music came to the US to do shows over 2 days. The show was in Michigan, due to whatever wild circumstances, so I made it out to see them perform. I ended up getting a picture with Kors K, who has made a ton of great IIDX music, and also a picture with Slake, who is my favorite musician from IIDX. Slake is the wonderful musician who created the song Gambol, for the record, so it seemed very fitting to meet him in person. In addition to making music for IIDX games, Slake also served as sound director for IIDX 9th Style and 10th Style, and that weekend I got his autograph on my copies of those two games.

IIDX is a series where I feel like I could play it forever and there will always be room to improvement and discover new things. It's possible I've played IIDX more than any other game? (there are a couple things that come close, we may get into those later) But it still feels just as fun to play IIDX now. If for whatever I hit a point where I don't play IIDX anymore, I think I'm at a point where I can say I got enough out of the game to be completely satisfied with the journey, the results, and the memories.

Here's some good songs that I like!

Slake Gambol (Beatmania IIDX)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYbFNBeHHcM

DJ Setup Nemesis (Beatmania IIDX 6th Style)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-t6v7TDB_M

Sampling Masters AYA one or eight (Beatmania IIDX 9th Style)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFmbml3ACLg

---

ONLY FIVE CAN LADDER.
Sushi, kamikaze, fujiyama, nippon-ichi...