YMMV / SOUND VOLTEX

• Awesome Music: It's a Rhythm Game series, of course it's going to have this.
• Even Better Sequel: SDVX II has proven very popular amongst players due to the significant increase in songlist.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • VALLIS-NERIA's EXH chart is largely hated for this. Putting aside the large amount of notes (2568 in 2 minutes), the chart is criticized because it requires you to hit notes while the lane spins mid-air.
  • With HEAVENLY HAVEN comes the HVN chart for FLOWER, which uses VALLIS-NERIA's gimmick.
  • Omega Dimension Phase 8 arrived with a song titled "*Erm, could it be a Spatiotemporal Shock WAVE Syndrome...?". This track showed ruthless rhythms (but rather fairly simple patterns) in a range of 43-330 that would expect to see in a game like DDR. The harder difficulties can halve or quarter the scroll speed at unexpected moments, but the biggest offender is the MXM chart, known for its absurd amount of stops that can absolutely throw a player off if one doesn't expect them. There's even one section near the end that's full of them, just in case you were close to clearing it. Fortunately, these stops are marked with glowing FX notes, but nonetheless the song is considered relatively easy compared to other Level 20 charts, only having a hint (or well, a huge douse) of unfairness that contributes to its status as a boss song.
• Fan Nickname: Amongst a small subset of English-speaking players, the game is known as "KFC", after its three-letter machine identifier code. Jokes involving Kentucky Fried Chicken are unsurprisingly common.
  • The game is referred to by some players as "Volte" (ボルテ).
  • "Baskin-Robbins" for #fairy_dancing_in_lake, due to the chart's design being similar to the logo. It originated from a tweet by Kaneko Chiharu (the composer of Lachryma and Flugel) posting a photo of Baskin Robbins shop and then saying the song name.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Fanart that ships Series Mascot Rasis and Big Bad Grace together is fairly common on Pixiv.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: No one knows why, but a mass majority of the fandom are Indonesian, outnumbering even the Japanese and Americans combined.
• Growing the Beard: Booth was considered so-so, while infinite infection was where the series really started to pick up in terms of chart and song quality.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The album jacket for "Ray"◊ (2012) has Rasis with her finger on the corner of an analog note. It looks like she's hitting a note from competing rhythm game CROSS×BEATS (2013).
• Memetic Mutation: "Brain Power" by NOMA became spammed across Twitch music playlists everywhere, with its memorable chorus becoming copypasta.
• Narm: The effects can get in the way of the song at times, dampening the overall quality.
  • "True Blue", at least on EXH, is one such example. AiMEE sounds like she's stammering through the lyrics!
    Th-that is how the hea-a-a-a-rt can live, on and o-o-o-o-o-ooo-o-o-o-ooooooo-o-o-oon!
  • Infinite-level charts generally turn the filter effects up to eleven, listenability be damned.
• Narm Charm: Can arguably be described as "Filter Wank: The Game". Nevertheless, it's one of Konami's more successful BEMANI series.
• Nintendo Hard: The buttons are straightforward enough to learn, but the knobs are what give the series its unique flavor of challenge, and often times at the higher levels you'll be constantly juggling knobs and the buttons at the same time, sometimes even having to cross your arms for some patterns.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Gravity Wars has a story mode, but most players skip the dialogue and just focus on story unlocks, especially outside of Japan due to the dialogue not being translated.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: Two US-specific Scrappy Mechanics were resolved with North America-specific builds that began with EXCEED GEAR;
  • Blaster unlocks. You play songs on Excessive Rate to fill 1/15th of the Blaster gauge per song played; when it's full, you get to play one song on Blaster mode so you can unlock its Infinite/Gravity/Heavenly chart. Once. For about 900 of the song's HP a run out of a few thousand. You can pay a surcharge for Blaster Start, which lets you play two songs on Blaster mode...but it's only available on Japan-region cabinets with PASELI enabled and on non-Japan Asia-region cabinets. Since Round 1 USA locations — the only locations outside of Asia to officially carry the game — use Japan-region builds but don't have PASELI, unlocking Blaster charts is an exercise in sheer patience and throwing lots and lots of money at the machine just to unlock ONE chart for Americans. Let's put it this way: There are American players who will pay players in Asia to do the Blaster grinding for them, because it is that bad of a problem for top-end players.^note The way this is done: the player who wants to unlock registers their eAMUSEMENT PASS with an online account if they haven't done so already, then the person they're paying gives the player a fresh card to register to their account, and from there the person doing the unlocking will do what's necessary to unlock the desired content with the newly-registered card. North American builds of the game simply have Blaster Start available as a double-credit mode.
  • Like with many BEMANI games, a TRACK CRASH on Tracks 1 or 2 ends your credit early on Light Start. Standard Start used to only save you from a single failure per credit, but it has since been buffed to guarantee three stages. However, Standard Start was not available in the United States until the North American version of EXCEED GEAR; all Round 1 locations that carry the game simply charge 1 credit for Standard Start, same as Light Start.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • The maximum difficulty level was previously 15. However, during the Sound Voltex II tournament at KAC (Konami Arcade Championships) 2013 in December, two songs with Exhaust charts rated level 16 were introduced to the finalists: "Bangin' Burst" and "For UltraPlayers". Both songs were added for non-tournament play later that month. A third level 16 chart, "Max Burning!!" on Infinite, was added in September 2014.
  • As of June 2015, there are six songs with level 16 difficulty charts in total, specifically "Everlasting Message", "KAC 2012 ULTIMATE MEDLEY -HISTORIA SOUND VOLTEX-" and "大宇宙ステージ"; as well as the aforementioned songs. Two of these songs, "Everlasting Message" and "KAC 2012 ULTIMATE MEDLEY -HISTORIA SOUND VOLTEX-" were introduced in Sound Voltex III, debuting during the final round of the Sound Voltex III tournament at The 4th KAC on February 2015, while "大宇宙ステージ" had been around since the first SDVX game, Sound Voltex Booth, simply receiving a GRV 16 chart in Gravity Wars.
    • "Everlasting Message" was the winner of The 4th KAC Original Song Contest, and therefore was given the honor of being the final track the finalists had to play during the 4th KAC, debuting with a difficulty of GRV 16.
  • As of August 21st, 2015, four new songs with GRV 16s were introduced into the game ("AΩ", "Blastix Riotz", "Preserved Valkyria", and "XyHATTE").
  • On September 17th, 2015, "XROSS INFECTION" (from Sound Voltex II) received a GRV 16 as well, bringing the total number of 16s in SDVX to 11.
  • In SDVX IV, Lachryma《Re:Queen’M》becomes the first chart to be rated 20 in the new scale. Following the trend is the two new KAC songs iLLness LiLin and HE4VEN (the final round songs), also rated a 20. Two new Level 20 songs, namely WHITEOUT and FIN4LE ～終止編の彼方へ～, were added as part of OMEGA DIMENSION EXTRA TRACK phase 1. I, the winning song of the 7th KAC, is the 6th song rated a 20.
• So Bad, It's Good: A number of the remixes fall into this. As this is a game that allows fans to submit their own remixes, this is to be expected.
  • "pandora -Maozon Remix-", a Dubstep arrangement of pandora that takes on a very different mood from the original version. And, on EXHAUST difficulty, has the game interface spinning several times.
  • "Second Heaven Lamaze-REMIX", featuring Lamaze-P (of "PoPiPo" fame) trying to make (the pre-English-capable version) Miku Hatsune sing in English. What's not to love about Miku trying to shout "SOMEBODY SCREEEEAAAAAM!"? (The artist actually apologised for how "bad" it was.)
• Surprise Difficulty: Hey, what's Nyan Cat doing here? Wait, why does it have an Infinite chart? And why is it a 15?!
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The song "Decretum" from SDVX II has been noted for its similarity to the KONAMI Original songs "STULTI" and "Valanga". The composer took to Twitter claiming he hadn't heard the former when producing the song, but players were not convinced.
• That One Boss:
  • Max Burning!!. In a contest designated for the FLOOR musicians to write a boss song for KAC, a total of 12 songs are accepted, but one song, the no.1 winner is kept secret for it to be released at the Konami Arcade Championship tournament for the final stage's final song. In other words, the finalists are made to play a chart completely blind. After the stage was completed, the effector PHQUASE confessed that he created the chart specifically so that anyone playing on sightread it will 'die', 'fail', or any of those variants and that DJ YOSHITAKA at one point attempted to stop him from doing so. The KAC winner scored a AA at 972K on sightread. Presently, the song holds 59% of votes for the Skill Analyzer course lv. 10's final stage.
  • VALLIS-NERIA [EXH] is notorious for its high Max Chain count, as well as spinning several times throughout the song, which players have complained takes Interface Screw too far.
  • Xronièr from Omega Dimension Phase 5, a surprise True Final Boss with insanely technical patterns everywhere. The song opens with a very uncomfortable and seemingly untimeable stream of 24ths, and continues to put out very fast lasers and increasingly difficult chord patterns from there. By the home stretch of the track, the chart suddenly throws a very fast "burger" pattern (a stream alternating between an FX and the two BT buttons above it), which can instantly drain the health of careless players, followed by a very fast and easy-to-miss mess of lasers. And then the same uncomfortable stream from the beginning repeats itself just to finish you off.
  • "Erm" from the Fake Difficulty section above can be this. Part of Omega Dimension 8, where you must clear the song to unlock it in normal play. Some of these patterns are relatively simple for a Level 20 chart. The catch? Constant BPM changes and stops that depend on the difficulty. Who doesn't enjoy not just a gradual speedup, but also a very subtle slowdown that is happening while hitting notes? How about a chain of chord bursts with seemingly random stops in between? Good luck figuring out the rhythms to everything if you haven't listened to the song enough or caught on to the glowing FX notes.
• That One Level: Space Diver Tama's EXH chart is rated a 13, yet there have been many complaints from players who can at least AA 15 songs such as Onigo but have yet to clear this song.
  • Polyrhythmic sections of songs, as well as charts requiring starkly different playing from both hands simultaneously, are infamous among some players. Charts such as the EXH effects of Party Stream!! and #Fairy_dancing_in_lake have staggeringly low clear rates to reflect this.
  • Firestorm [EXH] has loads of difficult knob paths, to the point where it almost entirely consists of them. Not to mention it will try its darnedest to throw you off a couple times.
  • 超☆超☆光☆速☆出☆前☆最☆速!!! スピード★スター★かなで is one of the worst offenders in this trope. The 6th KAC award song has a slow-to-supersonic speed of 30-999 BPM. Good luck tinkering that hi-speed setting or else, you're toast in the 999 BPM section.
    • Fortunately, a long leftward knob path before the 999 BPM section is present to tinker your high-speed setting without breaking your combo.
• Watch It for the Meme: Play it for the WOOSH WOOSH sound effects.