YMMV / BEMANI

• Accidental Innuendo: "Wow Wow VENUS", aka "Wow Wow PENIS". The album art doesn't help; it looks like Yoshitaka is staring at Sota's crotch.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • Prim (the alias used for collaborations between L.E.D. and Mayumi Morinaga) has proven to be quite polarizing amongst Western fans due to MM's squeaky high-pitched vocals.
  • DJ YOSHITAKA's songs are rather popular amongst Japanese players, but are ill-received by Westerners.
  • Following the Konami scandals of the mid-2010s, the series has started to draw the ire of Western Konami fans who partly blame it for the demise of their console/PC game IPs like Silent Hill and Metal Gear, although due to general Western non-knowledge of Japanese arcade games, the hatred isn't as strong as it is for Konami's pachinko products. In short, "Quit making DDR games and give us a new AAA-grade title for consoles."
• Broken Base:
  • There is a split between classic BEMANI (mostly stuff made before the mid-2000's) and current BEMANI, with reasons such as differing tastes in music, older games not requiring network infrastructure and thus being easier for arcades outside of Asia to import, newer games having better quality-of-life features, etc.
  • candii, from jubeat copious. People either are upset because there is a Vocaloid song, or really don't care.
    • Speaking of Vocaloid, GUMI appearing in Popn Music proper, rather than just being a vocals source.
  • SOUND VOLTEX. Touhou Project arranges. Considering that Touhou is already notorious in video game and anime subculture, this is hardly surprising.
  • "FLOWER", due to being crossed over to nearly every single BEMANI series.
  • Prim is either Sweet Dreams Fuel and a nice change of pace from the usual "grimdark" level 12 IIDX songs, or unfitting-for-12s ear-splitting cacaphony.
  • The termination of Programmed World in 2015, amongst the Western BEMANI community. While most can agree that this greatly cripples players who live outside of Asia, some feel that Konami is a bunch of awful bastards for doing this and is doing a disservice to people who don't live in eA-served countries, while other fans, despite being aware of the benefits that PW provided, point out that Konami's simply protecting their copyrights and that this was to expected sooner or later due to the pirate status of the network and most if not all cabinets connected to it, especially since running pirated arcade games in a revenue-earning setting is a huge grey area.
  • dj TAKA's updated look in 2017 is either badass, So Bad, It's Good, or "what happened to you?"
• Cult Classic: Although the games are quite obscure outside of Asia to the point where most Konami fans in the West don't even know that BEMANI besides DDR even exists, they do have their share of dedicated fans who won't stop until they've aced the hardest songs in the BEMANI series they play. Plus, the characters, especially those from pop'n music, are fanart fuel for many artists. It helps that it's one of the few Konami properties not to be screwed over by Konami's rather...controversial practices of 2015 and 2016, most likely because Konami has a large focus on the arcade/amusement industry; most players haven't noticed any major objective dips in game quality even with current games in the series.
• Fandom Rivalry: A slight one exists with Western fans of Konami's other franchises, due to Konami's controversial practices of 2015 and 2016 having dramatic effects on their major console-based intellectual properties such as Metal Gear and Silent Hill, but for the most part little to no drastic effect on their music games. This can leave players a little annoyed every time they have to hear "Konami doesn't make games anymore!" Fans of those other franchises, on the other hand, don't even acknowledge that Konami's rhythm games exist.
• Fan Nickname:
  • 185 BPM is known by some as the "Yoshitaka constant" or variants thereof, due to DJ YOSHITAKA's strong tendency to use this speed in a large number of his songs. In fact, it's such a prominent constant in his songs that people initially thought that Rche was DJ YOSHITAKA's alias simply because of the use of repetitive chords and its bpm.
  • "Soflan", a term used for sudden and dramatic BPM changes. The term originates from "SOFT LANDING ON THE BODY" from beatmania IIDX 2nd Style, which shuffles between 79, 159, and 318 BPM. Bonus points if the song itself does not actually change BPM but the scroll BPM does. This later became Ascended Fanon, with some games officially using the term; two tracks' titles reference the term, and one of the axes on beatmania IIDX 27 HEROIC VERSE's chart graph is "SOF-LAN", used to indicate how inconsistent the chart BPM is.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • In the West, there are a lot of players who are also part of the Furry Fandom. In fact, one clone of DDR, Mungyodance, features a lot of furry art.
  • In the 2000s you could expect to find people who enjoy both BEMANI and Initial D, due to both having eurobeat music, and some songs being shared between both franchises (such as "Night of Fire" and "Remember Me").
• Harsher in Hindsight: The "GOLD RUSH" line "Make it! Make money!" has become this due to Konami nixing several Cash Cow Franchises in 2015, such as Silent Hill and Metal Gear.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Tatsh was an in-house musician and the sound director for beatmania IIDX until leaving Konami in 2007 before returning as a commission artist. He would later contribute songs to non-BEMANI rhythm games, most notably Pump It Up and EZ2DJ, games that Konami has infamously filed patent lawsuits over.
• Ho Yay:
  • Sota Fujimori and DJ YOSHITAKA occasionally collaborate to produce songs under the alias "VENUS". The album art for their debut song, "Survival Games", featuring DJ YOSHITAKA and Sota Fujimori together. Topless. Then there's VENUS in pop'n music, whose sprite shows them with their arms linked together◊, and their defeat animation consists of◊ Yoshitaka holding a fallen Sota in his arms. Finally, the album art for "Wow Wow VENUS" features Yoshitaka looking down. Think about the implications.
  • Then there's "Juicy", with the artist credited as "kors k Lovers DJ YOSHITAKA". This is without getting into the lyrics, which are sung as a duet between Yoshitaka and kors k.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: A lot of players of IIDX, pop'n, drummania, and DDR refuse to accept other rhythm games, including other BEMANI games, due to their lower difficulty ceilings.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page
• Narm: Ever since 2017 or so, songs by Konami's in-house musicians are credited as "BEMANI Sound Team '(musician name)'". This gets particularly strange in the case of "ピアノ独奏無言歌 "灰燼"", which is credited to "BEMANI Sound Team 'Virkato Wakhmaninov'". Virkato is a Kayfabe Music act by Jun Wakita, whose background story is that he was a pianist who died in 1974, so making him part of BEMANI Sound Team stretches the Willing Suspension of Disbelief because this would mean Virkato was somehow making music specifically for BEMANI 23 years before the series even existed and 43 years before the "BEMANI Sound Team" label. This isn't the first time the notion of Virkato somehow taking part in present-day productions has been brought up, as in the video production notes of his previous song "ピアノ協奏曲第1番"蠍火" that debuted in 2004, VJ GYO brings up that he somehow got consent from Virkato to make a music video for the track: "Born in 1873 and died in 1974!? Huh, was he a ghost?... Oh well..." But that alleged "ghost" encounter was Played for Laughs rather than being the result of Konami's infamous Executive Meddling.
• Older Than They Think: The BEMANI Sound Team scandal isn't the first time Konami has anonymized musician output; Konami also has the Konami Kukeiha Club label for many of their non-BEMANI soundtracks, something they had been doing for years prior.
• Pop-Culture Isolation: BEMANI games are still top-grossers in arcades in Japan and with several games in the series still being actively maintained, such as IIDX, DanceDanceRevolution, Sound Voltex, and GITADORA. In just about any rhythm game community you can expect to find many people who are familiar with at least one of their games. BEMANI is notable for being one of the least-affected Konami video game properties in the wake of the scandals that rocked Konami in the mid-2010s (although this is because BEMANI is a Konami Amusement brand, which wasn't as affected as Konami Digital Entertainment, their console/PC/mobile game branch). However, outside of the rhythm game fanbase, nobody seems to be aware of the BEMANI series except maybe for old versions of DDR, i.e. good luck trying to prove that yes, Konami still makes video games (even a lot of major video game journalists get this part wrong).
• Scrappy Mechanic: Many of the PS1 and Dreamcast games, most prominently the 5-key beatmania games, have a system of Key Discs and Append Discs; Key Discs are games that can be run by simply putting the disc into the console, while Append Discs require you to insert the Key Disc first and then use the Disc Change feature to switch to the Append Disc. The idea behind this was to allow the sale of new BEMANI games at lower prices, but for consumers it means having to buy extra software just to be able to one run particular game, as well as a time-consuming process needed to run it. All BEMANI games on later console platforms would thankfully drop this mechanic, being standalone discs instead.
• Signature Song: "FLOWER" is practically the theme song of the BEMANI series due to its excessive crossovers, whether fans like it or not.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Nostalgia is a great piano-based spinoff of CHUNITHM.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • All of the new games after Sound Voltex haven't had much success, with three of them having gotten their network support cut off while SDVX and many games before it continue to be updated today.
  • Old-school fans feel that the last great BEMANI game is IIDX, which was released 13 years before Sound Voltex and is lauded as the gold standard of rhythm games due to its Simple, yet Awesome gameplay and astronomical skill ceiling, with later BEMANI games being written off as gimmicky and not having a hard enough endgame.