For YMMV tropes about other D4DJ media or the franchise as a whole, go here.
- Annoying Video Game Helper: If roughly 5 seconds pass without any changes in who's in a Multi-Live lobby (someone entering or leaving) besides "all four player slots have been filled", the game will fill in the empty slots with NPCs so that a round can start right away. (Hence why in Multi-Live lobbies, you'll often see players briefly leave and re-enter to reset the "fill empty slots with NPCs" timer.) The problem is, despite having max-level 4-star cards (i.e. level 80), these NPCs don't score very well, and high scores are necessary to get more rewards, meet the one-time score missions, and earn event points. While getting a Multi-Live SS rank is doable with three players even in a Veteran Room, fewer than that basically guarantees the group will not be getting a SS (except maybe a 2-player party where each player has four 4-star cards with maxed-out Extra Training), so in that case most players will just outright disconnect and try again, or switch over to Free Live (single-player mode) because while it offers fewer rewards, at least that doesn't depend on filling at least three player slots and repeatedly leaving and re-entering to prevent the dreaded two- or three-NPC party. Barring the practical disadvantages of having NPCs in your team, they take away from the social aspect of Multi-Lives.
- Best Known for the Fanservice: Merm4id is already the token "sexy" unit, but then they took it up a notch for the Summer Festival 2022 event, where the featured card shows Saori and Rika dressed in bikinis and with the game's title written on their chests, in each other's image colors.
- Breather Level:
- Groovy Mix Tours feature relatively low-level songs with extremely lenient objectives, sometimes made even easier by automating one or more components of the chart and the fact that half-length cuts of songs are used. Depending on one's skill level, these are basically free items (with the main Tour in particular featuring two 10-draw Gacha Tickets). These also count towards "Clear x Lives' objectives in DJ Road, so you only need to play one other song to fulfill the daily "Clear 2 lives" objective. The only catch is that in each Tour, you can only play one free stage per day; subsequent runs will cost 150 Diamonds each.
- "Floor Killer (After Party Remix)" Expert, despite being rated the same (level 13) as the original song on the same difficulty and having a faster tempo, is less technical, with the only real trip-up being the fake-out ending. The refrain of the song has zigzagging slider notes that can be hit by not touching the slider, since they go back and forth between two adjacent columns and the game has a bit of leniency with slider notes.
- Broken Base:
- For the English-speaking fandom in particular: Japanese version or English version? Japanese version has more up-to-date content and exclusive songs, but there are also those who consciously stick to English due to not knowing Japanese and wanting to follow the story without having a translation guide beside them at all times or want easier tiering. The choice to pick either version or both is usually respected, but it does happen from time to time that playing on English illicits "Stop Having Fun" Guys remarks from Japanese version players.
- On the topic of the English version, it is notably closer to the Japanese version in updates than most other localized Japanese gacha games, with new songs, events, and features often being introduced to the English version only one to two months after the Japanese release (one notable case is the Merm4id 2023 New Year's event, which was added to the English version while the Japanese version of the event was still running); most localizations usually trail the Japanese version by 1-2 years. There are those who appreciate this because it means they don't have to wait long for much of the content to hit the English version. Others note that this often comes at the cost of collaboration events that end up never leaving Japan and that having such a fast turnaround nullifies the traditional advantage of being able to prepare for a particualr gacha banner or event well in advance.
- Live Pass is a monthly subscription service that unlocks all songs not locked behind story requirements, adds a practice mode, adds real-time fast/slow note hit indicators, adds the Just Perfect note judgement, and implements a "Technical Scoring" system that is based strictly on note accuracy (i.e. no bonuses for combo and no influence from card parameters and skills). You have people who think charging for such features is a terrible practice and not worth the cost, and others who are fine with it and argue that the cost of it is no worse than, say, regularly playing arcade rhythm games on a regular basis (anyone who does so often ends up paying well over 5 USD per month). There's quite a bit of crab mentality at work in the former camp: Posting a screenshot of a score with Just Perfect or fast/slow counts shown, or otherwise admitting to using a Live Pass, often illicits remarks of "why the hell are you paying for this" from non-paying players.
- Casual-Competitive Conflict: A major Broken Base point is song selection in public lobbies for multi-lives, particularly when it comes to the subject of picking "meta" songs ("CAT'S EYE" and "LOVE AND DEVIL" being two infamous examples). Players who aren't concerned with event tiering will just pick whatever songs they want and do not want to hear the same song again and again and that people who want to spam meta songs should stick to private rooms, while tierers will play the same few meta songs ad nauseam to maximize their event point gain, much to the ire of people who want to play other songs, and will often assert that anyone who doesn't like meta songs has no business being in a Multi-Live lobby.
- Catharsis Factor: After the hell that that Sho Mitsuhashi put Neo and the rest of Abyssmare through, seeing him get verbally beaten down by his former L.M.O. unit-mates and Neo in the final chapter of the side:nova arc is immensely satisfying for fans of Abyssmare.
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The Merm4id cover of "CAT'S EYE" is often picked by event tierers in Co-op, because it is the shortest song in the game and earns more event points. While this is still the case to an extent, "LOVE AND DEVIL" has since become the new "meta" song for being more note-dense while being of similar length. Hope you don't mind playing those songs hundreds of times!
- Difficulty Spike: The Stage Qualifier courses for Grades 5 through 1 and Stages 1 through 5 aren't too bad and at least let you recover health. However, Stage 6 onwards has no health recovery, and you lose 10 Tension out of 1000 just from getting a Great (i.e. you cannot get more than 100 non-Perfects on the course), which is part of why there's such a huge jump from Stage 5 to 6 despite the songs being of very similar difficulty, and the courses only get meaner from there.
- Fan Nickname: "CHAOS ~ BOSS SCENE 7" is often shortened to "Choss".
- Goddamned Boss: The hidden full version of "LOVE!HUG!GROOVY!!", by nature of being a 7-minute song, in a game where most songs are about 2 minutes long. It's interesting to play a few times, especially with the background movie, but can get tiring to try to challenge a full combo or high score on. Perhaps for the best, it is only available as a Secret Level by inputting a specific combination of songs in a Medley Live and cannot be played in Multi-Lives; imagine hoping to play a regular song only to get roped into playing a 7-minute song, especially when event-grinding since post-song rewards are not tied to the length of the song meaning that this song would be a huge waste of time. But wait, there's more: There's another version of this song that adds the side:nova units to the mix and is 8 3/4 minutes long!
- Good Bad Bugs:
- Abyssmare songs have the unique property of having drag-hold notes that have to be dragged from one lane to another. However, when judging the tail of the note, the game only checks for three factors: If you hit the head of the note with a Good or higher, if you keep the same finger held down, and if your finger is in the correct lane when you reach the tail of the hold. As long as all three conditions are met, you can be a little slow or fast with the middle of the drag and still get a (Just) Perfect for the tail of the hold. This actually holds true for traditional non-drag hold notes too, but it's easier to see and more practical to exploit on drag-holds.
- One mechanic of RAVE events is trying to create a setlist of songs that fulfill up to three different "Trend" categories every day. However, sometimes songs get marked as trend songs because of improperly-defined criteria:
- One of the more recurring trends is songs with "cat" in the title. This was likely intended to refer to kitty-themed songs like "I Shall Be a Cat" and "CAT'S EYE"...but in a non-obscene and beneficial variation of Scunthorpe Problem, songs where "cat" is part of a longer word count, so you can also fulfill the trend with "JUST COMMUNICATION" or "The Catcher in the Rhyme".
- In the "Return of the RAVE" event in the English-language version, one of the Area 4 trend categories for July 20, 2023 was songs from the D4DJ anime. For some reason, the Princess Letter(s)! From Idol song "Spring Letter(s)!" counted as a song from the D4DJ anime.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: In May 2022, Merm4id debuted their song "LOVE BITE", a song in which the narrator dares the listener to give her hickeys. In October 2023 (November for the global servier), the "Trick or Sexy!" gacha banner features a card where Marika gives several bites to Dalia's shoulder due to Marika being drunk as hell in a manner evocative of vampires, almost as if acting out "LOVE BITE".Marika: Vampires don't let go once they bite~
- Memetic Mutation:
- Illegal NotesExplanation
- White MahoExplanation
- BANGERExplanation
- Memetic Loser: Thanks to Merm4id's drought of events, players are convinced that Bushiroad and/or Donuts Games just straight up hates them or put them in "(event) jail".
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- Like in past Bushiroad rhythm games, if you join a Multi-Live lobby but you don't have a full lobby after a set period of time, the empty slots will be "helpfully" filled in by CPU-controlled NPC players. However, not only are you not told the remaining time before the empty slots are filled in by NPCs, but it happens about five seconds after you join a lobby, meaning that the majority of attempts to do Multi-Lives end up in a solo lobby with three NPCs. Furthermore, the NPCs score quite poorly, meaning having any NPCs present, let alone three of them, can knock you down a whole letter grade or three, which is problematic if you are trying to get Multi-Live score rewards. This means that if players want to do Multi-Lives and not end up in solo lobbies, they have to repeatedly join and leave until they can immediately get matched up with three other players; this has its own problem in that if you happen to leave right as a fourth player joins in, you'll be counted as disconnecting from a full lobby and be timed out accordingly, and if it's a Battle Live, you'll lose the 1 Voltage that is spent when a lobby is formed (as opposed to standard Multi-Lives where Voltage is only spent when the song starts). Lastly, the game being so quick to give the player NPC teammates can give the impression that the game is dead, causing players to swear off Multi-Lives in disgust and just stick to the lower-reward Solo Lives because at least those don't depend on the player getting good human teammates to secure SS Score Ranks. That said, this is only really a problem in Free and Beginner rooms, as there's no shortage of players in Veteran rooms, although just building up the 120,000 Unit power to qualify for Veteran rooms may be a tall order for a new player or those who need to rearrange their team for event-specific buffs or other purposes.
- If you disconnect from a Multi Live lobby and do so repeatedly, your account may be suspended from Multi Lives for a brief period of time. Fair, since this is to discourage ragequitting and poor-connection players, both of which can be detrimental to other players. Previously, you could still be suspended if the room you left had exclusively NPC teammates/opponents (i.e. no other human players), meaning you got suspended for being supposedly disruptive even though there was no one to disrupt in the first place. This was fixed as of version 5.9.10.
- Of the various event formats, Groovy SLOT is perhaps the most annoying one. During Slot events, doing Lives doesn't get you items that you can then exchange for event-exclusive items, you instead get Slot Medals that you use for the slot machine, which of course entails complete luck. In order to gain Slot Cards to exchange for items, you have to get jackpots (three of the same character portrait); getting three of the same item icon won't get you Cards. And last but not least, there are two types of Slot Cards, one for each of the featured characters, and Club decoration items require both types of cards. The only real bones thrown for players are that unlike other events, which have three or four characters as the focus, there's only two characters focused on, so that you don't have to rearrange your team as much to optimize for Slot Medals and event points, and after pulling the slots enough times, you activate Groovy Bonus mode where for the next 50 pulls, you are guaranteed jackpots.
- Another problematic event format is Bingo Battle Live events with SP Cards enabled. Every time you roll the related banner, you gain one SP Card, which features nothing but Event Point rewards. As such, unlike regular Bingo events, where an aspiring high-ranker can just stock up on Volt refill items in advance, here, one also has to whale on the gacha to stand a chance, which many players consider to be an unnecessarily greedy mechanic even by the standards of gacha games.
- Recently, crossover events have begun getting this treatment, mostly due to oversaturation. To give an idea, D4DJ's fellow Bushiroad franchise BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! usually does crossover events (as in a full event with story, relevant cards and new music) a few times a year, and its rival Project SEKAI has only had two such events over the course of it's now 3-year run - meanwhile, D4DJ has begun to have crossover events nearly once a month. The fact that the crossovers tend to be with franchises that few fans were exactly clamoring to have the game collab with (especially in the West) doesn't help matters.
- Shocking Moments:
- An update in December 2022 brings a collaboration with Rhythm Doctor exclusively for the English-language version. Although said version of the game already had some regional exclusives, it was unexpected for Bushiroad to collaborate with a Western-developed game.
- In 2023, "Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?" was added to the game. Many players were surprised that this song's F-bombs were not censored for this game, even in the English version: "Fuck it" near the start of the song as Calli drops her imitation of seiso Japanese idols, and "Murder is so fucking kawaii!" during the chorus. To be fair, this isn't the first time a song in the game has used swear words, as "Smell of the Game" prominently features the line "That is bullshit, blazing!" in the refrain, and which is the first line heard in the preview clip on the song select. But many organizations that determine age-appropriateness of games and other software and entertainment usually put a cap on how many times certain swear words, most notably "fuck", can be used before the work in question is automatically elevated to a "mature audiences"-type rating, and the game is still rated for players 4 years or older on the iOS App Store and "E" for Everyone on Google Play Store.
- Spiritual Successor: Although the two turntable lanes are evocative of beatmania, it plays more like a mobile O.N.G.E.K.I. in practice. It features objects that have to be kept on a track and flick notes that span the entire lane. The fader affecting the sound of the track and sometimes having to be left in one position is additionally evocative of SOUND VOLTEX.
- That One Attack:
- A recurring annoying pattern, particularly for thumb players, is one where there's a hold note in the center lane, then while that hold note is in progress, a tap note on either side pops up. While the notes leading up to this combination tend to infer which hand should hit that note, other times it's not obvious which until it's too late unless you're using a lower speed setting. This game gives no leniency towards releasing a hold note, so unless you do some quick hand gymnastics to avoid missing that second note, Trial-and-Error Gameplay is needed. "Cat's Eye" on Expert features one such instance.
- "Final Take Off" Expert features a slider trail near the start that spans the width of the key lanes and moves very quickly. It starts on the left and ends on the right...immediately before a scratch note on the left. This is problematic for thumb-based players; if you aren't really good at switching fingers on sliders or don't have the foresight to hit the whole trail with your right thumb (assuming you have big enough hands or a small enough phone), you are likely going to miss the scratch note afterwards. It's very reminiscent of "Tear Drops", but at least there's only one instance of it, so it's only really a major issue if you're trying to get a Full Combo or a Technical SS rank.
- In "Princess advent" Expert, right before the chorus is a pattern of slider flicks, turntable flicks, and taps that really feel out of place for a level 13 chart.
- "prayer[s]" Expert near the end features sets of dual-note "jackhammer" patterns (notes falling on the same button in rapid succession), which can ruin the scores and (Perfect/Great) Full Combos of thumb-based players.
- "Bubble Bobble Medley" Expert doesn't seem too bad for a level 14 chart...until the "Flight of the Bumblebee" section at the end which bombards you with 16th note streams.
- That One Level:
- Before the update that overhauled Stage Qualifiers, one of the DJ Road Stage 5 objectives was to clear "CAPTAIN NEO ~ BOSS SCENE 1" on Expert. While there was one other "clear a level 14 chart" objective, this was perhaps the more difficult of the two and will likely be the last Stage 5 objective you complete. This chart features sixteenth-note stair patterns at 160 BPM, a barrage of slide and tap patterns, and multiple jackhammer sections, all of which can be stressful for thumb-based players and can make one feel like they're taking on the Belsar Army themselves. For those planning to do the Advanced Stage Qualifiers (Stages 6-10), it also doubled as a Wake-Up Call Boss.
- "Magical Sound Shower" Expert is chock full of scratches (and the chart graph shows, as the "SCR" (Scratch) parameter goes outside of the visual graph boundaries), and keep in mind that scratch notes move the chart back a few pixels, so even if you're intimately acquainted with the original song (and if you're an OutRun fan, you probably are), a Full Combo or a Technical SS rank will mandate a lot of memorization of the chart. Originally rated a 13, it was later bumped up to a 13+.
- "DX Choseinou Full Metal Shoujo" is rather problematic on both Hard (lv. 13) and Expert (lv. 14). On Hard, the game makes extensive use of trill patterns, which can really test one's timing precision. And the Expert chart features nasty jackhammer streams, practically lifted right out of the song's Arcaea incarnation.
- "Echoing Chaos☆Countdown" on Expert has lots of strange rhythms and trills that are on adjacent lanes that can mess up players on phones (as opposed to tablets), which makes some question its level 13 rating.
- While there are multiple songs rated at level 15 or above on Expert, "Exitum" is particularly notorious within the fandom for the amount of trills and very difficult second half of the chart.
- "Nyochio Is Coming☆Yay☆Yay☆Yay☆" Hard features unusually fast patterns and technical sections for an alleged level 12 chart, even without the April Fools' Day obfuscation of the playfield.
- "White Macaron" Expert features tricky gallop patterns that make it difficult by level 11+ standards to full combo, much less PFC. Older rhythm game players may get horror flashbacks to the likes of "In The Navy" and a different, faster remix of "Rhythm and Police".
- "ENDLESS MEMORIES" Expert features a barrage of hold notes chorded up with fader flick notes that are next to and point towards those hold notes, creating an incredibly unintuitive chart for thumb-based playersnote by level 12+ standards. Depending on one's skillset, it may as well be a 13+ or even a 14.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: An update in mid-2023 for the Japanese version and fall 2023 for the global version changed the song filter UI from a screen with all the filter options to a persistent series of layered menus on the left. Quite a few players dislike this change since they find it much more confusing to navigate and also not being as flexible as the old filter UI. Eventually, the option to revert back to the old-style filter UI was added.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Call of Artemis were introduced in early 2022, complete with their own section of the "Road to D4FES. chapter 2" arc and both two-star "DJ-LIVE!" cards and 4-star SP cards...and were more or less forgotten after that beyond birthday dialogue events and Navigation cards (in particular, there are no event stories centered around them), with even the newer units that make up side:nova getting more development through events. Granted, Call of Artemis are a previous-generation unit and they serve more as story support (for example, Shano is Photon Maiden's producer and Airi works at Cafe Vinyl), but that they have cards and songs makes fans of them wish they would get more fleshed out.
- L.M.O. gets even less representation despite being another unit that is foundational to D4FES., with ex-member Sho's son Ku Mitsuhashi in particular being responsible for the festival's current iteration. Although three of its four ex-members get Live2D portraits, only Ryujin gets voiced lines, and there aren't any L.M.O. songs available for fans to listen to. Furthermore, being the only unit to have male members, much less be an all-male unit, a lot of fans are curious to know what they sound like.
- Values Dissonance: The "Trick or Sexy!" event story is rated over 4.5/5 on the Japanese version, but is one of the lowest-rated stories in the English version at just over 3/5 (while that's an "average" rating, it also means there's a lot number of 1- and 2-star ratings that counteract 4- and 5-star ratings). A lot of this concerns how Maho, a high school student and who is on the banner for the event story, is treated in this story; not only does she wear a particularly revealing mummy costume in which several parts of her are covered in just bandages, but she's goaded into several acts by the other three main characters — Hiiro and Marika in particular, since they are university students and thus have a considerable age gap on her — that can be seen as sexually suggestive, such as stripping down so that the other three can take her measurements, and of course wearing the costume itself. Japanese fans see it as a Character Development arc where she takes a level in self-confidence, but Western fans see this as not only sexualizing what many Western countries would define as a minor (while Japan is known for a relatively low age of sexual consent), but also sexually grooming and gaslighting a child.
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This game is rated 4+ on the iOS App Store and "E" for Everyone on the Google Play Store. While the game's overall themes are not particularly explicit, with half of the featured units being high schoolers who produce cute and cheerful songs that would not sound out of place in the Love Live! franchise, there are several elements that throw those classifications into question (to be fair, mobile app stores are considerably more lax about age-appropriateness than console makers):
- Merm4id cards often have the unit's members wearing skimpy outfits (including their default stage costumes) and having provocative expressions (Rika's "1st Anniversary" card features her on what's obviously a stripper pole, and her "Summer Festival 2022" card shows her and Saori with the game's title written on their breasts) and some of their songs feature unusually naughty lyrics for an "idol" franchise (most notably "LOVE BITE", the title of which is a slang term for a hickey kiss, and the lyrics of which are all about enticing the assumed-male listener into giving one to the narrator to prove themselves as an ideal boyfriend). Even when their songs aren't about partying or being erotic, they still go into relatively mature themes, such as "I will never die"; given the title, one of the lines being "I don't choose 'give up'," and the dreary and hopeless themes of the lyrics in general, it's strongly implied that the narrator is trying to fight off suicidal ideation.
- Even the non-Merm4id units get their fair share of fanservice, most notably the cards from the "Welcome! Peaky's Freedom Summer!!" event, which features all four members in bikinis and in poses that would give M4 a run for their money.
- There are prominent swear words in some songs, most notably "Smell of the Game" ("That is bullshit, blazing!", which is the very first line in the song's preview clip on the song select) and "Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?" ("Fuck it" not even 10 seconds into the song); the player-submitted tags for the latter often consist of questioning the game's age-appropriateness rating.
- Abyssmare's members have some pretty Dark And Troubled Pasts, with Sophia's in particular detailing a suicide attempt. Their overall part of the main story is also Darker and Edgier than that of the other units with more adult-oriented themes than one would expect from an ostensibly child-friendly game such as a greedy producer in the music industry who uses and abuses the talents under his wing for his personal gain.
