A frustratingly difficult game with no rewards to show for gaining skill and songs so uninteresting you won't want to.
I got this game for $20, which partially has an effect on the score on. If I had payed $50 or more for this game the score would probably be lower, though I can't say for sure.
I knew this game got some not-so-great scores on Gamespot, IGN and pretty much everywhere else but I still wanted to try it. I'd never played a BM/IIDX game before and the idea of a rhythm game that was essentially just about pushing large buttons seemed appealing in its simplicity. It proved to be anything but.
The first of the games hurdles is just trying to decipher the interface. like most rhythm games, it has "notes" that fall from the top of the screen and correspond to different buttons on the controller, depending on which vertical column the "note" is in on the screen. You must press the correct button the same time that the falling note reaches hit line at the bottom of the screen.
The game interface shows all seven button columns side-by-side on the screen but this isn't the case on the controller, which arranges the seven buttons in piano-like fashion, in two rows: four white buttons below, and three black buttons above. The three black buttons are aligned with the three spaces between the white buttons, creating a some-what pyramidal shape.
Because the buttons are shown side-by-side on the screen, but are separated into two rows on the controller, it gets super confusing trying to get your fingers to hit the right button.
Oh yeah, maybe I should have said that the game has eight buttons, because the controller also has a turntable on the side that corresponds to the left-most note column on screen. This seemingly-interesting concept is actually pretty useless and boring. Whenever a note falls on the turntable column, you just have to move it. At all. In either direction. It's supposed to feel like you're scratching a record like a real DJ. It doesn't. It reeeeaaally doesn't.
It's also very difficult to even figure out just when you're supposed to be hitting the notes as they fall and the judging system in Beatmania is extremely unforgiving. The notes are in the form of bars that must be played when the match up with a line. Yeah, a line. Pretty hard to get more vague than that. words appear on screen every time you press a button to judge how well you timed it - "perfect", "great", "good", "bad", and "poor", which is basically a miss. Do you get "perfect" by hitting the button when the line is on the center of the note bar? Or should you press it as soon as the bar touches line? I don't know! After playing for hours, I'm beginning to think that the game doesn't either.
Of course, it wouldn't necessarily be a problem that Beatmania requires you to work hard at learning how to play the game well, but the real problem is that there's just no incentive there. As far as i can tell, all songs are unlocked when you start up the game, so there's no progression, and what's there in terms of songs is just totally boring and bland that the idea of playing them for fun is kind of a joke. I can really tell how much the game would have benefited from songs that are enjoyable when I could feel myself trying a lot harder to play the few good tunes on the list such as "First Day" or "Lift Me Up".
The menus in Beatmania are just all around bad. It's hard to navigate with the turntable and the whole thing basically looks like a shinier version of the menu of a forgettable PS1 game.
Worst of all in regards to the menus is there's no way to hear a preview of the songs before you play them. Yes, I wrote that correctly. You have pretty much no idea what you're going to be playing when you choose a song. I can't really understand this. How am I supposed to pick what song I want to play if we don't know what it sounds like?
The lack of song previews would be a forgivable flaw if this were, i don't know, like, the first music game ever, but there's almost a billion Beatmania games, and a trillion more rhythm games that were inspired by it. There's just no excuse for a music game released in 2006 (2006, for God's sake!!) to not include such a basic and ubiquitous concept.
Despite all this, there are a few sort of redeeming qualities in Beatmania. For one, unlike rhythm games like DDR, where what you do has no effect on the music, or even Guitar Hero (or Guitar Freaks) where really all you're doing is just turning a guitar audio track on and off, Beatmania will assign sounds from the current section of whatever song you're playing to the buttons on the controller so that those sounds will be heard whenever you push those buttons, whether there's a game note to hit or not, so if you hit the buttons off-time, the music you're creating will be off-time as well.
Because of this, when you're hitting all the notes in-time perfectly, there's a great sense of satisfaction to be had from knowing that the song sounds perfect because you're playing absolutely perfect.
However, this creates a double-edged sword effect because every button you hit creates music, not just when you're hitting the right notes, so it can be very difficult to know where you're going wrong when you're struggling to correctly play a difficult song.
It's not impossible to have fun with Beatmania, just very hard to have more than a little. If you're interested in playing the game series that, for all intents and purposes, invented the rhythm game genre, and you know a friend who already has the game, by all means, borrow it for a few days, but don't pay any money for it. You'll just be disappointed in a day or two.