The Nature of Japanese Rhythm Games
Japanese rhythm gaming was and is competitive and fiercely challenging, with fast-paced music and small hit-windows for notes.
Its appeal generally has little to do with the actual songs, and everything to do with the primal twitch-gaming rush of matching impossibly fast patterns, and the pleasing tricks that light and sound play your brain chemistry.
In those terms, Bemani’s early output and its hundreds of updates, expansions and home-console versions are perfectly beautiful videogames.
As your mastery grows, the note charts come to be more instinctual than language or thought – and you’re able to reproduce the patterns with ever-increasing fluidity and precision. It’s a pure chemical thrill.
Saturation
But as Konami filled arcades with second, third, fifth and ninth mixes into the early 2000s, the games themselves remained largely unchanged.
A rapidly expanding song selection and ever-increasing difficulty levels kept the genre popular among the rhythm-action hardcore, providing more and more opportunity for showy feats of dexterity, but the Bemani division’s talents were devoted to rapid expansion rather than further innovation.
Previous: The Origin of Rhythm Games
Glossary
Hit-windows: The amount of time a player has to hit the note accurately in a rhythm game. The longer the hit-window, the less precise the player has to be, making the game easier.
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