Post Your Controversial Bemani Opinions

I had a flashback to a joke image I made a couple of years ago.

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In regards to all this over-analyzation of stepcharts in DDR, ITG and PIU, I have a serious question...who here has any actual dancing experience?

I don't because I didn't play those games with the goal of pretending I could dance because if I wanted to dance I'd just go and dance


This. The "but new players don't know that difficulty names don't matter and it feels good to pass Expert charts!" argument is just... like, well, get good enough to pass the Expert chart then. If you're not, play Difficult instead of whining that the difficulty scale doesn't stop at 13.

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And from what I've seen of it, so is Friday Night Funkin.

Well, ITG, DDR and Stepmania are all actually playable. I was... underwhelmed with my experience with FNF, to put it politely as possible. (it's a terrible game hiding behind a good artstyle is putting it less politely)

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Exactly my opinion (the sync on that game is also HORRIBLE).

Also, as someone who finally got a chance to play StepmaniaX yesterday, I stand by my opinion that the Hard charts in that game do not prepare you for the Wild Charts at all, and the difference between a Hard 17 and a Wild 19 is like jumping to a hard 13 in DDR after playing an easy 10.

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I’m a Zumba instructor and I choreograph a lot of dance routines. I’m not the best at DDR though usually play 10-13s.

Doing those things doesn’t make them the same game any more than running left to right and shooting makes Contra and Mega Man the same game. Zelda isn’t the same game as Darksiders. Gran Turismo isn’t the same game as Forza. Casuals lumping them in together doesn’t mean they’re the same game otherwise all of your video games are Nintendo. And my statement has nothing to do with factions. As I’ve pointed out a few times, very few people actually care about and play ITG songs. They’re playing customs on ITG which at that point is just Stepmania. People basically turned their ITG cabs into Stepmania machines years ago and most don’t even run the ITG theme anymore, and since we wouldn’t say someone who turns an Extreme cab into a Stepmania cab is still playing DDR and that all their scores are still legit I’m not seeing why it’s allowed in the ITG community.

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Yeah, that's sort of a side effect of how they seem to be wanting to avoid difficulty overlap (you won't find 21s in Hard just because the Wild is like a 25, and you won't find a Wild chart easier than most Hard ones like DDR).


The ITG community just collectively disagrees with you, sorry. People who think only official songs from ITG 1 and ITG 2 count are usually mocked because it's such an out-of-touch concept. It's a community driven game now, which allows for more variety than any other rhythm game I've ever seen, from modcharts to stamina charts to technical charts.

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It depends on how bullshitty the unlock conditions are.

If it's something like "clear the song in extra stage", that's fine.

If it's like Dancerush and you need to literally play 10-15 whole credits just to unlock one song, that's not fine.

If it's like GFDM and you can only unlock certain songs if you're in Asia and have access to Deluxe Mode which requires PASELI, that is fucking dumb.

Oh, very nice! I’ve been on a long hiatus from it but I’m also a Zumba instructor and have choreographed my own routines as well. Once I get back into it (primarily in a virtual sense), I wanna implement more BEMANI music for my routines. Hormiga obrera and Beach Side Bunny are two that I’ve used in the past.

Anyway, the reason why I asked that question is because things that receive complaints a lot, like BPM gimmicks, double stepping, being forced to face a particular side for a certain amount of time, etc., just emulate standard elements of dance in general. Some of y’all might think double stepping is a travesty, but try Chicago footwork. Try tap. Having to step on two or more consecutive arrows with the same foot is nothing compared to those dance styles. Just like how there are a myriad of ways to choreograph a song, there are a myriad of ways to make a stepchart to a song. Sure, a stepchart that doesn’t follow the music well at all is not gonna be great to play. But these various elements that I’ve talked about here are just as valid to implement into a chart as the other charts that don’t have them, and allow for many possibilities to keep things interesting. Just like actual choreography. And remember, if those types of charts are not what you like to deal with, there’s always the option of just not playing it, or you can make your own chart to your liking in Stepmania and be satisfied that way.

Turn mods are a crutch used by people that refuse to get better at turns and crossovers but then go on about how much they love tech because the tech doesn't make them turn.

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The top 1% of DDR players just got called the fuck out, damn

I hate turn mods, personally. Can't use 'em. I only ever really see high level players use them on a select few songs that are nightmares to play without them. There's also my belief that if a chart isn't worth playing the default way it's clearly a shitty chart, but high level players are expected to play pretty much every song.

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Okay but the Simply Love theme on Stepmania is not ITG. I also never said only official songs count, I asked why official songs played outside of ITG count. I don’t even see how that’s a debate. Their game is Stepmania, they just call it ITG. And since Stepmania is community driven yeah of course their game is community driven and since they’re all playing the same packs they’re competing on the same songs. That all makes sense. Please explain to me how a Vertex^2 quad on Stepmania is as legit as doing it on ITG2 but a Max300 MFC on Stepmania is not just as legit as doing it on DDRA. You can alter your Stepmania timing windows to match both ITG2 or DDRA, so don’t even try to throw timing windows at me. Like I PFC’d Your Rain Expert this weekend and even though I’d done that like 20 times on Stepmania before I was really happy because it was my first one since I started playing again two weeks ago. That’s not legit though because I didn’t do it on an actual DDR arcade release, right? But playing ITG officials in Stepmania is just fine? The only way that makes sense is because they are all agreeing they aren’t playing ITG, they’re playing Stepmania. Hell you can even see some people have mounted 16:9 LCD monitors on their ITG cabs, they aren’t even just running a theme on ITG they’re full on running SM5.

And that all goes to my other point that Stepmania, DDR, and ITG aren’t the same game. DDR has one set of rules, Stepmania has another. My Your Rain PFC doesn’t count. Doing it on Extreme US or Festival wouldn’t count either. Only arcade DDR counts. ITG doesn’t seem to have that rule. Why? Because it’s a different game with it’s own set of rules.

Does this apply to official charts that are just other charts with a turn mod on? Paranoia Survivor and Paranoia Survivor Max Expert are the same charts but mirrored, up until the final slowdown and after which aren’t in Paranoia Survivor.

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I won't try, I will successfully throw timing windows at you. Both Stepmania and ITG handle timing by milliseconds. DDR does it by frames and samples. You can alter Stepmania's timing windows to resemble DDR's, but you can never fully emulate the discrepancies that come with how DDR handles timing. That's why scores for DDR official songs on ITG or Stepmania don't count. Not to mention people can't even agree on definite "DDR-based" timing windows since it depends on which theory you're looking at. Also, some of the timing windows are wider or stricter depending on whether you stepped before or after the receptor.

The legitimacy of scores ITG officials can potentially be debated though, since nowadays people play around with things like song offsets and metrics like TimingWindowAdd, PadStickSeconds and InputDebounceTime, changing them from whatever official ITG used. ITG cabs themselves can vary because of the IO board's polling rate or something like that. Either way the "ITG" community is on a whole different meta right now, adding things like white Fantastics and the new Masterful/Awesome/etc timing (which is pretty similar to DDR's timing).

DDR having frame-based timing instead of millisecond-based timing is also a bit of an issue, but I'm not sure if any people working on DDR would ever bother to update that.

And... yeah, scores on ITG officials done on stuff like SM5 and NotITG do kinda count to me, as long as you can verify your timing windows. If we didn't count them pretty much no quads on ITG1 or 2 songs would have ever happened after, like, the mid 2010s, because ITG dedis hardly exist anymore.

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The thing is, your entire second paragraph negates your first sentence. Once those things start getting changed, then it’s not the same. This isn’t like debating if PFCing D2R on Supernova is the same as PFCing it on Extreme, or NGO on DDRA instead of Supernova 2, those are official changes. Once the fans go in and start making unofficial changes they’re unofficial. Hell, PFCing the 5th Mix Paranoia Eternal steps on a memory card enabled Extreme machine doesn’t count as an official chart AAA, but changing the sync and global offset of ITG counts? Nah, I don’t buy it. Even some prominent ITG community members say if you stream to tag your streams as Stepmania and not ITG. That’s the game now, it’s Stepmania. There’s an argument to be made for r21 and even adding songs to ITG2 all still being ITG2 and I fully agree that those are, but once you start making unofficial timing changes and switch to SM5 with the Simplylove theme you’re playing Stepmania. Look at how the Guitar Hero community handles it. Hacked GH3 PC was still GH3 but no one tries to claim Clone Hero is Guitar Hero. It’s very similar as a community driven game and officials are often played in Clone Hero today, it’s what pretty much the entire community plays now. But it’s not Guitar Hero and SM5 isn’t ITG2.

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"Step" by Mio Honda would be a good license for DDR. Seeing the other "meme songs" that have been added to the game, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they do end up adding it.

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I think DDRA20plus is the worst mix since DDRX. I know it's very difficult to release a mix in the middle of a pandemic but this would have been the perfect opportunity to just rehash a bunch of older stuff.

How is new content worse than rehashing older stuff? Even bad new content is at worst equal to rehashing.

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