Pop'n Music

Apparently I get more people interacting with my posts if I make them a bit more accessible by explaining what the hell I'm talking about, so let's try that.

Pop'n Music is a Japanese arcade rhythm game in Konami's "Bemani" series, which you may know from other titles, specifically Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania IIDX, Para Para Paradise, etc.

Pop'n is one of the older Bemani games -- first released in 1998 (same time as DDR), and it's rarely seen in the wild here in the US (at least where I live), though it shows up sometimes in places like Japantown or anime cons.  Nowadays you're probably way more likely to see the more recent music games like Dancerush, Sound Voltex, Jubeat, etc......none of which I've played.  To the mainstream audience, titles like drummania, guitarfreaks, pop'n music, and even IIDX are probably virtually unknown next to DDR, but among Bemani enthusiasts pop'n is probably pretty well known.

To absolutely nobody's surprise, I'm interested in older Bemani series over newer ones, and in particular I've always had a love-at-a-distance crush on Pop'n Music.

Unfortunately, the sheer impracticality of playing Pop'n Music regularly (and particularly, at home) meant that I would never really play it, and instead got myself into IIDX with a clunky-yet-functional konami official IIDX controller at home (after some years of playing with my computer keyboard).  IIDX hit all the right notes for me (pardon the pun) and I had quite a lot of fun with it, but I rarely touch it nowadays.

I guess this all started with a video that an acquaintance of mine posted about on twitter.  Specifically, this video of the fun song Ronron e Rairairai!, played by expert pop'n player TATSU, with some really flashy freestyle adlibbing and handcrossing in the middle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJuBpLZ-MDs

This video still makes me happy watching it.  The song isn't particularly hard compared to whatever monster charts that exist in the upper echelons of Pop'n, but watching this video, I really can't help but want to play this game, it just looks SO FUN!

That was a while back (3-4 years ago?), but I recently remembered the video again and wondered if playing Pop'n music was actually feasible for me now.  Getting the games was a little tricky, but ended up not being a problem in the end, so that was half the equation.

The other half was the tricky part -- getting a Pop'n music controller that I could play with at home.  For those who aren't familiar, Pop'n music controllers don't exactly look like normal gamepads.  They're huge rectangular things that look like this:

Unfortunately, everything I found was sort of out of my price range, especially considering the quality that you ended up getting.  This arcade-style controller from DJDao seemed to be the main option, but that's $239 plus a hefty shipping cost (these things...aren't exactly easy to ship).  Based on hearsay the controller seemed to be "decent", with people recommending swapping out the buttons for a different brand if possible (more money....).

The other option was the upcoming "premium edition controller", purportedly being produced currently and slated to release later this year in summer (in Japan...).  Based on videos of the prototype it seemed like a superior product to anything else that was out there -- good feel, reliable, and importantly, did well at not being super loud, as these controllers tend to be (you are "smacking plastic hamburgers" after all, as one person put it).

I resolved that if I was going to shell out a bunch of money on something, it may as well be something good, so I decided to just wait and see whether I could get my hands on one of these new controllers.  The other option (also common with DDR pads) would be to build a controller yourself, but that wasn't really in the cards for me (and if it was, I probably would have already built myself a DDR pad...).

Fastforward to April and providence smiled upon me as an acquaintance coincidentally happened to have an arcade-style controller (much like the one pictured above) sitting around collecting dust and needed a home.  So now I find myself the happy owner of a fully functional hand-me-down that seems to be working just great so far!  As expected, the controller is a noisy one, though I did a small hack mod, adding some cotton cutouts inside the buttons to make them a little less clackety, which seems to have helped.

And so, I've been enjoying pop'n music now!  It's been great fun so far, even more fun than IIDX, honestly.  IIDX appeals to me as more of a "finger-based" game rather than moving your arms and hands around all the time, but I've never been good at pinky scratching (having practiced on a keyboard controller), and something about moving your hands around to hit all the buttons is really satisfying.

The other significant thing I will mention is that Pop'n music not only looks super cute and fun in terms of aesthetic but also has a way better music selection than both DDR and IIDX (at least, of the mixes I've played).  There's trance, there's metal, there's ska, there's jpop, there's anime songs, touhou music, interesting instrumental fusion genres, etc etc etc.  It's a breath of fresh air compared to some of the IIDX/DDR mixes I've grown used to.

I'm currently hovering around the ~32 difficulty range (difficulty goes from 1-50, though is probably not really linear), and expect that I'll climb up to somewhat higher difficulties as I get used to reading and hitting notes more and more.  I'm looking forward to it!

I guess this whole post boils down to "yeah, I had an older game on the mind and decided to go and play it".  We've certainly heard this story before, lol.