YMMV / beatmania

• Accidental Innuendo: beatmania IIDX 23 copula is meant to refer to the Latin word "copula", meaning "bond" or "connection" (think "couple"), which is also the root for "copulate". English-speaking fans got a kick out of that one.
• Breather Level:
  • Elisha on SP Hyper is level 10, but is laughably easy for one; it's an easy 9 or a difficult 8 at worst. While this could be excused as the development team overestimating how difficult Charge Notes would be at the time, the song debuted in SIRIUS, which released in 2010, and much more difficult Charge Note charts rated level 10 have since been released, yet this particular chart has never been re-rated.
  • TOKAGUSHI's SP Another chart, a 12, is also not as difficult as other boss charts, for mostly the same reason as Elisha. Considering how Echidna's SP Another chart is a 12, debuted in the same game and also uses quite a few hold notes, it becomes more noticeable.
  • Dan courses rarely have these (they're mostly filled with That One Level material), but there are some examples.
    • 3rd Dan, overall, is currently nowhere near as much of a jump from the last course as the others. The two "hard" level 7s (Kagenui and BRIDAL FESTIVAL), in addition, are much easier than the entry level 8s included.
    • 5th Dan is a very odd case, being started by two Breather Levels (Follow Tomorrow and Mermaid girl, both entry level 8s that could easily fit in 3rd Dan) and finished off by That One Boss (below).
• Broken Base:
  • INFINITAS. Some dislike the very limited songlist (so far, it mostly just consists of songs from beatmania IIDX 17 SIRIUS) especially in conjunction with the subscription fee of 1598 yen per month. Others are just glad that Konami finally put out a new consumer version of IIDX after six years—on a platform that's very easy to port IIDX to^note Arcade IIDX games from 9th Style onwards run on PC-based hardware, to boot—and are hopeful that they will eventually expand the songlist to make it worth the cost.
  • The songs removed from one style to another tend to upset fans, since instead of focusing on songs that fans don't like, Konami focuses on songs by artists that no longer work for them. Music by Slake, Naoki and Akira Yamaoka are few and far between.^note Akira Yamaoka now works for Suda 51 while Slake and Naoki left Konami to contribute to CROSS×BEATS. This has led to Konami scrubbing their songs from BEMANI games and face in the case of Naoki.
  • Is Single Play 8th Dan really easier than 7th Dan? Or are players just not practicing properly?
  • DJ Sharpnel's contributions to the series tend to be extremely polarizing, a far cry from the duo's usual works.
  • The Random modifier. If you're not using it, you're apparently a Scrub who's preventing themselves from practicing optimally. If you're using it, you're apparently a cheater for trying to make charts easier (especially charts with scale patterns) and relying on luck to get easy patterns. Unlike other old rhythm game arguments such as using speed modifiers (Guitar Hero, DanceDanceRevolution) or using the bar (DDR), this has not died out and people still argue about using Random to this day.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In Japan, very few players at the highest levels will actually use the normal Groove Gauge, as many players, if not focusing on score, focus more on getting Hard and EX Hard clear as well as a Full Combo than on basic clears. In fact, it's more common for players to use Easy and even Assisted Easy gauges than the normal gauge.
  • From roughly 8-dan onwards, most Single Play players always use the Random modifier, as it forces them to learn new types of patterns and also makes some charts easier to play depending on how the RNG feels.
• Covered Up: "Sunshine Dance (LATINO-YOKAN Mix)", first appearing in the 5-key Append game Going Global, is much more well-known than the original "Sunshine Dance", the theme song of fellow (albeit discontinued) Bemani game DANCE 86.4 FUNKY RADIO STATION.
• Cult Classic: IIDX, while not a commercial success outside of Japan due to its lack of exports, is one of the most talked-about games in English-speaking BEMANI communities due to its long 29-game history, high skill ceiling, and focus on Simple, yet Awesome controls and interface.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • Many players feel this way about some of the boss songs, feeling that they were designed more to fit their respective charts with less regard for track quality. Thor's Hammer, DIAVOLO=], and Elemental Creation are a few such examples.
  • The final unlock of tricoro's "Our War of the Worlds" event, which appears to be the game's final unlock event, runs on a lifebar that is damaged every time the player plays through the game. Fortunately, the lifebar was shared by all players on the network. Unfortunately, not only was the unlock tedious, taking many days to unlock even just the Normal chart, but the unlock song itself, キャトられ♥恋はモ～モク, is a cartoony "denpa" song that many players consider to be highly annoying, or at the least, not fitting as the Final Boss song of tricoro.
• Discredited Meme: Due to abuse, the "Himiko? FUCK THAT SHIT!" meme (see Memes.BEMANI) is largely seen as this today.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • SigSig and the "smooooch・∀ ・" princesses.
  • Rche, who many fans find to be exceptionally cute and feminine for (a character commonly perceived to be) a boy.
• Even Better Sequel: While new installments are generally well-received, tricoro is seen as a brilliant overhaul of the game interface.
• Fandom Rivalry: Many players of IIDX tend to look down upon many other rhythm games for having lower skill ceilings. Conversely, players of more casual rhythm games decry it for its high barrier to entry.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Amongst Japanese-speaking players, the game is also known as "nidera" (弐寺). Ni is one pronunciation for the number 2, and dera is short for "deluxe" / "derakkusu" (デラックス).
  • Amongst less-wholesome English-speaking players, the game is known as "Two Dicks".
  • Players who can complete the single-play 8th Dan course but not 7th Dan are known as Safari nanmin (サファリ難民), or "Safari Refugees".
  • Another difficulty is sometimes known simply as ana (穴). It happens to be a Double Entendre, as the character is sometimes used to mean "butt".
  • Rche is known amogst Japanese fans as 傲慢ちゃん (gouman-chan, or "Pride-chan"), after his status as Lincle Kingdom's representative of Pride.
  • Anmitsu (あんみつ) is used to refer to the technique of treating 1/16th-note rolls as 1/8th-note chords, sacrificing accuracy for lower likelihood to miss notes.
• Game-Breaker: On a song with scale notes, using the Random modifier to rearrange the notes tends to make the chart easier.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • SLAKE's minimalist, atmospheric and traditionally occidental output specifically endeared him to western audiences during his time as a BEMANI composer.
  • The game has a higher proportion of fans amongst BEMANI fans in the West, partly due to IIDX being one of the first arcade rhythm games other than DDR to be (unofficially) exported across the Pacific. In Japan, it has to compete with many other rhythm games that are either infeasible to export to or aren't as high-demand outside of Asia, such as jubeat and CHUNITHM.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The 2009 horror novel Another, which features a protagonist named Mei.
  • "Salamander Beat Crush mix" from beatmania 2ndMIX, which samples Starfield from Salamander / Life Force and then segues into a completely different track, is the original SiIvaGunner high-quality rip.
  • No folks, Wow Wow 70's is not a disco arrange of the 2013 REFLEC BEAT song Wow Wow VENUS.
  • 16 years later, IIDX RED isn't the only rhythm game with a "RED" subtitle anymore, as there is now Sega's O.N.G.E.K.I. R.E.D.
  • Tatsh was one of the sound directors for IIDX up to DistorteD in 2006. Years later, after he left Konami and would only contribute songs as a commission artist going forward, he would contribute songs to Pump It Up and EZ2DJ, two games that Konami filed lawsuits over.
• Growing the Beard: Early Double Play charts were simply not designed for single-player play, often introducing patterns that are meant more for two-player Co-Op Multiplayer instead. It wasn't until the fifteenth main installment of IIDX, DJ TROOPERS, that the dev team really started making charts that are much better-quality for Double Play.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Not the game itself, but some players of this who are very high-tier find it difficult to play other rhythm games due to their comparatively low skill ceilings.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Half of why this game is largely inaccessible to rhythm game newbies is the harsh learning curve and the intimidating high-end charts that can scare players away from trying the game. (The other half is that the game has next to no licensed tracks.)
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The kaiden courses for PENDUAL are exactly the same as SPADA's, much to the disappointment of many players.
• Memetic Badass: IIDX player DOLCE. has become something of an idol amongst many players.
• Memetic Mutation: The IIDX fan community has its fair share of memes, from worshipping a song to "TWO DEE ECKS GOOOOOOOLD", and then some.)
  • Himiko? FUCK THAT SHIT! PABST BLUE RIBBON!
  • GET IT!?
  • "Is 69 easier with Hard on?"^Explanation A VJ Army user asked whether measure 69 in Innocent Walls would be easier to get past under the Hard mode modifier. Someone clearly noticed the innuendo.
  • There's actually a bit of a running joke amongst certain IIDX communities in both Japan and the west that Bemani and Pepsi (and occasionally other soft drink manufacturers) conspire to create new color-coded flavors for each installment. Every subtitled style has a flavor of Pepsi (or Mountain Dew in some cases) that seems literally made for each other; it has extended to other Bemani franchises on occasion, such as Pop'n Music with Carnival-flavored Pepsi...
  • Red Zone remixes.
  • "SigSig" and smooooch・∀・ have seen many parodies of their iconic videos, especially on Nico Nico Douga
  • GentleMentleMen^Explanation A mashup of AGEHA with Team Fortress 2 voice clips — primarily The Spy's Catchphrase. Has spawned similar remixes.
  • Dai, the male dancer who prominently appears in HHH songs such as So Fabulous !!
  • The "SOMEBODY SCREAM!" and "1-2-3-4-5-6 DO IT" samples became slight catchphrases too.
  • SP 7th Dan and "THE SAFARI" are notorious amongst players trying to go up from 6th Dan, and there are players who can't do 7th Dan but can clear 8th Dan; these players are known as "Safari Refugees".
  • The cameras added on the Cannon Ballers upgrade have frequently been used by players to create various parodies and meme videos.
  • Making Voice Clip Songs of the songs with Jack Black's appearance on Sesame Street, most notably "Bloomin' feeling" as shown here.
• Moment of Awesome: Hoshino Kanako kicking ass in Answer's video.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Of the three series with the beatmania name, only IIDX is still ongoing.
• Narm: Even by the standards of oddball IIDX titles, CANNON BALLERS sticks out like a sore thumb due to just how silly it sounds, not helped by the logo of the game not only lacking any actual cannons or cannon balls but also having a motorsports theme. Fans both in and out of Japan scratch their heads wondering just what the heck cannonballs and auto racing have to do with each other.^note At least the last several installments had names that made some degree of sense: tricoro refers to the IIDX tri-color difficulty labels, SPADA is Italian for "sword" and the game's interface is sword-themed, PENDUAL is "pendulum" + "dual" and the game involves playing in one of two different time phases, copula refers to connections and links such as the couplers on trains and the game is train-themed, SINOBUZ is a corruption of "shinobi" and may refer to Shinobazu Pond which was a major point of interest in Feudal Japan.
  • It might be referring to Cannonball Run.
• Narm Charm: A couple songs are liked by the Western fandom for their So Bad, It's Good Gratuitous English:
  • DJ Yoshitaka's remix of Ghostbusters retains the original English lyrics, but with hilariously bad pronunciation. Foo you gone car?
  • Poodle due to its lyrics, which are in hilariously broken English and are displayed karaoke-style in the video. A sample:
  Walking with you on a happy sunny day
  you know me clever more than retriever
  Washing me everyday tidy neat
  you know me precious dog as a dynamite
  Believe in me
  If it's rainy again
  Nobody wanna cry
  Nice cow bone you are my lover
  • BroGamer is practically built around this. It is littered with cheesy gamer lingo, and the genre is "Super Ultimate Hyper Core". It is also a very kickass song.
  I like dubstep!
• Newer Than They Think: A number of songs, most famously A, AA, Scorpion Fire and any of Osamu Kubota's songs, despite sounding classical, were composed specifically for the series.
• Nightmare Fuel: Like other BEMANI games, it has a decent share of it.
• Nintendo Hard: IIDX has an extremely high ceiling of challenge, with players taking many, many years to reach the game's highest achievements. If you were to think of rhythm games as track sports, then the average rhythm game is local middle school competition and IIDX is the Olympic Games. The only other game that touches it in terms of sheer demand for skills and dedication is Popn Music, also a BEMANI game. Many factors contribute to the game's intense challenge:
  • For players trying to just clear songs, you need to finish with an 80% Groove Gauge. A few slipups at the end is all it takes to go from a full gauge to stage failure.
  • In many easier rhythm games, the notes usually just follow one part of the chart (e.g. vocals, melody), but IIDX at its higher levels tosses out polyrhythmic patterns that expect you to be able to follow two or more elements of the song at once.
  • One aspect to the note chart that stands out from other rhythm games is just how dense it is. Once you hit difficulty 6-7 (out of 12) songs, you can expect to hit somewhere between 500-700 notes in a two minute window. In most other rhythm games, this note count starts creeping into their highest difficulty levels. Each level increase in difficulty adds another, give or take 200-400 notes, with the Black Another difficulty of MENDES topping out at 2626 notes in 110 seconds, or pressing 23 notes per second.
  • Unlike the other Bemani games, beatmania's timing is actually based on the amount of frames the button was pressed before or after the note passes the marker. By default, the Just Great timing happens on the frame or the one before on a 60FPS cabinet, meaning a player has about a 25ms window of time to hit a note "perfectly". While a perfect run is quite possible on many other rhythm games such as jubeat and SOUND VOLTEX, it is extremely rare to hear of an all-Just Great run on even level 8 and 9 songs, and almost humanly impossible on level 12 songs. The strict timing window means a lot of newer players may find that they get more regular Greats or even Goods than P-Greats.
    • To make things worse, the game's timing, which includes the pacing the music in how its played, heavily depends on both the frame rate the system is getting and the target frame rate. If this is off by even 1-2 FPS, the game de-syncs horribly and/or you'll be scoring terribly because the timing is not lined up just right.
    • The aforementioned GAMBOL glitch? That's what happened when the "Great" and "Just Great" timings basically merged and shrunk to "you have to be on the exact frame to count".
  • The Simple, yet Awesome design of IIDX controllers means that chart makers can crank out some truly ridiculous patterns that will make the average person go "how the hell is this humanly possible?!"
  • Many players report that if you so much as go a week or two without playing, your skill level decays pretty badly, and as such you have to play consistently and frequently to keep progressing; while most skill-focused video games are prone to this, IIDX is one of the worst offenders. If you don't have access to the game at home, or have the steady income necessary to play the arcade version on a regular basis, it becomes very difficult to improve.
  • Scoring in IIDX is especially strict. You have to hit notes with a Great or P-Great to earn points (1 and 2 points, respectively); a Good will earn as many points as a Bad or a Poor, which is to say no points.^note It is theoretically possible to even full combo clear a song with 0 points, by hitting nothing but Goods. The grading system at least has large, evenly-distributed spreads (88.88...% of maximum score for a AAA, 77.77...% for a AA, etc.), but it's still quite difficult to get a score that is considered acceptable, even if you full combo the song.
• Older Than They Think: For all the accusations EZ2DJ gets of copying beatmania, a few features in IIDX actually existed in the former game first. Changing speed multiplier mid-song was in EZ2DJ 2ndTRAX in 2000, six years before it would be introduced to the IIDX series in DistorteD. EZ2DJ also had "continuously spin the turntable" notes well before they were added the IIDX series in SIRIUS, though unlike IIDX Backspin Scratch notes, EZ2DJ's turntable long notes don't require spinning the turntable in the opposite direction at the end.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Starting in tricoro, cutscenes accompany the unlock events. Most players skip them, especially outside of Japan as the cutscene dialogue is not translated. Taking your time to read the dialogue will likely prompt other players to press Start for you to skip the cutscene.
• Polished Port:
  • 9th Style on PS2, which not only looks prettier than its predecessors and runs at a higher resolution, but also doesn't suffer from the same timing problems that its arcade counterpart is infamous for.
  • Starting with IIDX RED, the game features social features such as assigning up to five other players as your "rivals" and using one of their scores as a "ghost score" to compare your score to in real-time when playing a song. While the PS2 port of RED also has this feature, you have to get player data directly from other players onto your memory card, which can be a problem if you don't live anywhere near another player you know or use third-party tools to share rival data on the internet. For the PS2 ports from HAPPY SKY onwards, each game has the pre-compiled score data of thousands of IIDX players (collected from the arcade version via the eAmusement network) on the disc that you can assign for your rivals, without having to exchange player data in person or use the aforementioned third-party utilities.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Like with many other BEMANI games, a stage failure in Standard mode ends your credit immediately afterwards unless it's a level 6 song or lower or you use a DJ VIP PASS, which either requires farming V-Discs by playing or using PASELI, neither of which are available if you are playing the game in the US. As a result, you're forced to play easier songs for your first two stages (three if Extra Stage is enabled) just to get your money's worth, only going for songs you're not sure that you'll clear on the last stage.
    
    There are modes that guarantee you get all of your stages without having to use Asia-exclusive features but they all come with catches: Free mode guarantees all stages but only two are given to you, Free+ mode guarantees 3 stages but is only available in a 2-player game (which additionally means it's unavailable for Double Play), Step Up mode guarantees 3 stages but limits what songs you can play, with none of the songs available being songs that debuted in the current version, and Hazard mode guarantees 4 stages but instantly ends the current stage on a combo break.
    
    As a result, IIDX is one of the few Rhythm Games with a top-end playerbase that actually uses "easy mode" options (specifically the Easy and Assist Easy gauges) with some degree of regularlity, because they'd rather endure a bit of Easy-Mode Mockery that doesn't influence their scores anyway than blow an entire credit on stage 1 or pay extra just to ensure they get what they paid for. That's right, IIDX is so Nintendo Hard that serious players are willing to turn the life difficulty down!
  • IIDX is played on an elevated bass stage, which certainly helps with the audio experience, but it's designed specifically for players in the low 5-foot range. For players in the United States and other places with height averages nearing 6 feet or more, it can easily make for an uncomfortable experience. It's not uncommon to see American players having to spread their legs widely to play, and possibly getting pains in their arches as a result. Some people who own private IIDX cabs will remove the bass stage precisely for this reason.
  • The first Chinese release of IIDX is not well-liked amongst Double players and left-side players, since it makes the player 1 side a turntable-on-right side. Most if not all Double charts (at least ones that are indeed designed around Double Play and not 2-player non-Battle play) rely on the player 1 turntable being on the left, and since there's no Center mode like in 5-key beatmania, left-side players are forced to relearn how to play or use Auto-Scratch with the Assist Clear status and scoring penalty that follows.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Playing with one hand on the keys and the other on the turntable was a well-known challenge in the early 2000s, having been inspired by videos on the PS2 version of 6th Style of then-prominent player LISU. Nowadays it's not really common to see people doing this.
• Sequel Displacement: IIDX is so widely popular among BEMANI fans that it's not surprising to see IIDX players who have never played the original 5-key beatmania.
• Sequelitis: 9th Style, the first IIDX game to use Windows-based hardware, is riddled with timing problems, as well as a Game-Breaking Bug in which attempting to play the song "quasar" will sometimes crash the game. However, these issues appear to have been ironed out in 10th Style. Additionally, 9th Style is notorious for charts with song-ending Difficulty Spikes. While this sort of gimmick is common throughout the serious, it's very much pronounced in 9th Style charts, to the point where some players use Hard Gauge to circumvent the 80% Grooge Gauge requirement.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: beatmania has a relatively modest difficulty curve, but IIDX is famous for having one of the highest, if not the highest, difficulty ceilings in the entire commercial Rhythm Game industry.
• Signature Song:
  • Mei and Nageki no Ki, simply for being two of the hardest charts in the series (not counting Black Another or ✝LEGGENDARIA charts).
  • For players between 6th Dan and 8th Dan on Single Play, THE SAFARI simply for being the reason most players can't upgrade from 6th Dan to 7th...or pursue the Safari Refugee life and skip straight to 8th Dan because they find it easier.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • Don't you dare admit that you use the Random modifier on scale-heavy charts. Strangely enough, the opposite applies for all other charts once you're at the level 10-and-up range: Don't you dare admit that you don't use Random.
  • Using Assist modifiers and even just having the purple Assist Clear lamps on charts tends to draw mockery from some players.
  • Averted with regards to the Easy and Assist Easy modifier amongst Japanese players, the rationale being that when you're practicing charts you don't want to throw away an entire credit from failing one, and there's more emphasis on score than non-Hard and EX Hard clears anyway. While DJ VIP Passes exist so you can be guaranteed three stages, they do cost extra PASELI on top of what you pay for one credit.
• Surprise Difficulty: Before "5.1.1." got its new Hyper charts in HAPPY SKY (until then, the Normal and Hyper charts were near-identical except for the piano roll at the start having less notes on Normal), many players would try its Another charts and promptly crapped their pants at seeing a surprisingly complex chart given that the Normal and Hyper charts were beginner-class charts.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • FIRE FIRE appears to be a Jimmy Hart Version of "Russian Roulette" by Bazooka, and it's easy to tell.
  • Round and Round shares a lot (almost the same song, in fact) with composer Masayoshi Minoshima's earlier work, the more famous Bad Apple!!
  • "THE SAFARI" has a main melody that has a striking resemblence to this part of "Silence".
• That One Attack:
  • CONTRACT's SP Normal stage is generally around the difficulty of a level 7 chart...right until the very end which throws a series of mini-scales combined with scratches. It's rather telling that the difficulty of this chart has been raised twice, to level 8 in GOLD and finally to 9 in Lincle, simply because of this section.
  • The end of The Dirty of Loudness' SP Another forces you to hit all 8 notes at the same time several times. It also makes a return in reunion.
  • R5's Another charts are infamous for extending the piano roll section for about 7 more seconds.
• That One Boss / That One Level:
  • Even as early as 3rd Kyu, the course closer, REINCARNATION, is seriously tricky when put against the 5s that player has faced up to that point.
  • Lion Suki for 2nd Kyu. All of the song's charts are clearly rated too low, so the song on its own is an example too.
    • 1st Dan has I Was The One (80's Eurobeat Style), featuring parts that would be annoying in some hard 7s, let alone a supposed 6.
  • If you struggle with chords and/or fast streams, Abyss at the end of 2nd Dan is a nightmare.
  • 5th Dan, in contrast with the Breather Level beginning, has NEW GENERATION at the end, featuring difficult patterns that are easy to miss on rather than actually hard, as well as chord/scratches, 24ths, and basically no rest.
  • THE SAFARI, notorious for dashing the hopes of those trying to achieve 7th Dan and having been the final song of the 7th Dan course for many versions now. It has only 900 notes, pretty low for a level 10 chart even considering the song's relatively short length of 90 seconds, but those 900 notes are arranged in very difficult "mash" patterns that will chip away at your Groove Gauge until you likely die, even if you enter the chart with 100%. It's to the point where some players will just skip straight to 8th Dan, finding even "gigadelic" on Hyper (which by the way is rated a 12^note more due to the ending than anything else) to be easier than THE SAFARI.
  • gigadelic is a pain in the ass no matter what chart you play. Even on Normal, the chart has a few annoying drumroll sections, and an ending with repeated uses of the 7 key and the turntable, and of course a Last Note Difficulty Spike. It's also rated a 9, making it one of the hardest Normal charts in the entire series. Its Hyper chart is rated a 12 simply because of the ridiculous ending, and has killed many potential 8th Dan players, being the final stage of the 8th Dan course in every arcade IIDX version since RED. Rootage, however, is a different story, substituting it for the first time with S!ck.
  • 10th Style's 8th Dan course is That One Dan Rank due to the tracks using the Another charts instead of the Hyper charts by mistake.
  • For those clearing out level 9 songs, Watch Out and Watch Out Pt. 2 are particularly frustrating, thanks in no small part to the abundance of scratches.
  • G2 on Normal is no slouch for a level 8 due to the masses of drumrolls near the end of the chart; there are plenty of level 9 songs that are easier to clear. Did we mention this is a level 8 Normal chart? Normal charts typically peak at level 7.
  • CONTRACT on Normal is rated a 9. For the first 97% of the song, the chart doesn't seem to warrant its level-9 designation, with its eighth-note scales posing next to no threat for players who can clear 8's and 9's, save for a suspicious-looking pattern at measures 48 and 49, roughly 2/3 into the song. But then comes the very last two measures, which suddenly throw sixteenth-note scales and drumrolls combined with scratches. As a fine example of the pass/fail-score dissonance, there are players who have achieved an A or even AA grade on this chart and STILL fail it.
  • Most of DJ Mass MAD Izm*'s songs, which are notorious for having extremely high scratch counts, making them extremely difficult to time, especially if mixed in with key notes as well. In SPADA, Shakunetsu Beach Side Bunny's Single Another chart, well-known for a record-breaking scratch count of 667, was introduced into the Kaiden course, to the agony of many top-tier players.
  • Most songs ported from DanceDanceRevolution keep the BPM changes, with the stops being a quarter of the BPM instead of stop since IIDX can't handle stops. As such, you have to memorize the BPM shifts all over again. This makes Fascination MAXX an OMES difficult song despite its low note count and simple patterns, while POSSESSION becomes even more harder to time right than in DDR thanks to weird slowdowns. New Decade IIDX Edition fortunately doesn't feature its signature tempo changes, running at a constant 200 BPM, but that just means you'll be getting genuine difficulty instead of Fake Difficulty.
  • A word of advice to those playing on Double: Avoid most Double charts produced before GOLD. Many early Double charts were designed with 2-player non-Battle play in mind, resulting in charts that are extremely awkward to play for one player, including patterns like forcing the player to hit the turntable and multiple keys on both sides, which is humanly impossible. The charts being designed for non-Battle 2P also means that the Light14/DPN and 14Keys/DPH difficulty ratings ^note until HAPPY SKY, Another charts did not have their own ratings will not necessarily reflect their actual difficulty for DP. Some specific examples of problematic DP charts:
    • A sterling example of this is Cheer Train (DPA); the song itself is light and cheerful, but the chart is rated a 12 because the chart expects you to be able to frequently hit notes and scratches at once on the same side. Unless you use the Random modifier and are particularly lucky, this chart is humanly Unintentionally Unwinnable.
    • GOBBLE has a ridiculously difficult DPH chart, with patterns that just don't make sense for a single player. Despite this, it was rated a five on the old rating scale^note 1 to 7. It say something when, upon its arcade debut in copula 14 years later, GOBBLE received a DPA chart with the same number of notes but in far more reasonable arrangements and a lower difficulty rating than the DPH chart. In addition, the song has a non-standard time signature of 4+3/4.
  • Almost nobody plays "MAX 300" because it starts off at 50 BPM before shooting up to its actual BPM of 300, causing problems for players who use the "green number" (a number showing how long notes are visible for, influenced by the Hi-Speed and Sudden+ settings) feature since they have to mess around with modifiers just for this track. This track was removed after Rootage, but brought back in RESIDENT with the 50 BPM gimmick removed so that the chart starts at 300 BPM.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some complaints came about when SIRIUS introduced Charge Notes and Backspin Scratches, with common concerns being that the game was "turning into" O2Jam (itself notorious for Fake Difficulty-laden charts, with hold notes being a common source of that difficulty), though complaints about these note types have mostly faded since then.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The 5 Keys modifier/mode, which omits rightmost two key lanes, or leftmost two if the "5 Keys+" modifier is used. It's meant to simulate classic 5-key beatmania but because charts simply have two lanes removed rather than having the charts organically adjusted, it doesn't feel quite like that. Several PS2 versions additionally do have 5-key charts for the songs ported from beatmania that can be accessed by plaing them with the 5 Keys+ mod, but because these 5-key charts don't have their own score table entry, scores are not saved for these charts. As a result, very few players use this mod, to the point where it was removed after beatmania IIDX 26 Rootage.
  • PENDUAL introduced the Expand-Judge modifier, which increases the timing windows, for players who don't like IIDX's famously-strict timing windows. However, as scores achieved with it are not saved at all, not even as separate score records (in a manner similar to how pop'n music up to the 19th main installment have separate scores for COOL-on and COOL-off), it begs the question of why the mod even exists in the first place. It was eventually removed in beatmania IIDX 31 EPOLIS.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Rche. Konami knows this and deliberately keeps Rche's gender obscure, going as far as to censor references to it in supplemental material.
• Vindicated by History: Charge Notes and Backspin Scratches were reviled at first due to complaints that the developers would employ them en masse as a form of Fake Difficulty. Fortunately, this fear has since been proven wrong, with only a select few charts revolving heavily around these notes, and both note types have since become an accepted part of the game.
• Win Back the Crowd: For years, American IIDX players had been growing increasingly pessimistic about playing in the United States due to the rather complicated regional settings locking them out of a number of features that other regions have...until January 2020, when Konami brought over Lightning Model cabinets with US-specific builds.
• Woolseyism: beatmania USA renamed the flashing "Great" mark to "Perfect", as in DanceDanceRevolution. This makes it stand out better than simply "GREAT" flashing in multiple colors, especially when this judgement is worth twice as many points as a regular "GREAT". This has never been adapted back into the arcade releases, with the closest it's gotten being to name the flashing "GREAT" judgement as "PGREAT" or "PERFECT GREAT", and even then only in statistics and not on the gameplay interface itself.