I really going to miss the DJMAX series and partial rant of today’s music games

You know lately I wanted to come say this despite being old news but DJMAX is basically dead and it went out with a whimper not a bang. Alot of of people that worked on the series like PlanetBoom, Electronic Boutique and Kimys has left and created Nurijoy which made a new music game called “Beatcraft Cyclon”.

This is due to Pentavision merging with NeoWiz and not really doing anything to meaningful with Pentavision and DJMAX. The last DJMAX game relased is DJMAX Technika Q a iOS/Android game based on DJMAX Technika with a free to play system (Requires Kakao in South Korea, pnet account for international release). I would’ve almost play this game alot but there were several put offs like being online only which sucks since 3G is not cheap in my country of Canada and the fact that the game is basically going to be unplayable if Neowiz shuts down the servers. There were very few new songs in Technika Q due to people like Croove, Cuve and Forte Escape moving on other companies. Forte Escape was reported to be very mad at Pentavision for not supporting his DJMAX Trilogy project well as there were going to be bunch of things like song expansion that never really happened (There were updates with songs from the Metro project but that’s not exactly the same thing as FE would’ve wanted). Items like noteskins being limited uses and limited fever did not help what so ever. This has prevented me from actually supporting the game and buying song packs like I did for DJMAX Ray.

I was a very big supporter of DJMAX releases in North America as I brought DJMAX Fever, DJMAX Portable 3 (which I found disappointing  for things like mediocre songlist and grinding), DJMAX Technika Tune, brought song packs for DJMAX Ray, and played DJMAX Technika 2/3 in the arcades. Now Neowiz just given up on DJMAX Ray, with no signs of the remaining members the development team which is called “PLANET TEAM” except maybe XeoN. Neowiz didn’t even attempt to get other music artists like kinato, memme or Warak to create more songs (At least Andamiro got a bunch of new people to work on Pump It Up PRIME). The last new song is Paul Bazooka’s “Deborah” which was an song that could’ve been okay except for that last part when there’s some lousy complextro sounds near at the end of the song that I didn’t like (Is Paul Bazooka really only doing Complextro nowadays?).

I first experienced DJMAX with Portable 1 with had great music but was lacking in features and had notecharts not suited for the PSP (Notecharts got better on Portable 2) and now DJMAX finished off with a disappointing mobile that was quickly forgotten about. It has been a depressing time to be a music game fan since BEMANI games are mostly arcade only except for Reflec Beat and jubeat which are on iOS as well (and chances of seeing anything other than DDR Extreme in Canada is not common and I probably have to go Japan or something to play them), DJMAX is gone, O2Jam is still alive (but O2Jam is a game I only play to record new songs since it is online only which sucks especially when servers go down/overloaded), Groove Coaster is not getting enough songs for its home version (and there’s no easy password reset option), Pump It Up is arcade only nowadays meaning chances to play any Pump It Up is hard for my area (except for Pump It Up Pro at Playdium and Fiesta 2 at Dave and Buster’s in Buffalo, NY) and most of the music games I either don’t care like Just Dance and Guitar Hero, or dead, or I’ve forgot to mention. At least there’s still Cytus which is not too bad but some of the recent songs I didn’t like too much because there are mostly leaning Brostep/Dubstep and Electro House (there’s only few Electro House songs that I like/tolerate), Musync which needs to have more songs but at least is still being developed (like creating PS4/iOS versions), CROSSxBEATS would have been decent (but it is a free to play game with a energy system and terrible unlocking system), Tone Sphere (has a mostly uninteresting/boring songlist), there’s Taiko no Tatsujin (Japan only, new game on system with region lock like 3DS and needs some knowledge of Japanese to even choose a song but is one of the few music games still with home versions still being released) and there’s Dynamix which is decent but I’m waiting for that iOS version since it runs like crap on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet if effects are on. It seems music games nowadays are arcade or mobile only which I found semi-disappointing. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to focus on other games for now.