Jubeat (iOS) review

[importaku]

This was the latest creation from Konami's Bemani series of music rhythm games, it has been in the arcades for quite a bit. But due to the special way that you play it was impossible to release on home consoles due to the controller as to replicate it as a home controller would be crazy expensive as each button is a lcd screen.

Also been out quite a bit on ipad/phone but thought i'd give it a first play thread.

The arcade version looks like this


Now the ipad is the perfect device for such a game as it has a very responsive multi touch screen, the layout is pretty much like the arcade version, you have a grid of 16 buttons that you have to touch when the prompts appear. All you have to do is touch them as they appear in order & in time to the music track, the tricky part is that during a song it's quite frequent to be required to press more than one button at once in some songs upto 6 buttons need to be pressed in one go. On the higher difficultys it becomes extremely hard as the notes blaze by on the screen, but as you play you learn the pattern & where the notes will appear & then it becomes really satisfying to play. I can do advanced now on the songs i have but extreme is still crazy hard. Theres 3 difficulty levels for each song & theres a single or multiplayer mode where you can go head to head. Also the usual leaderboard rankings & thats pretty much all the options you get besides been able to change the skin of the game from the original jubeat to jubeat ripple.

The IOS version looks like this


When you download it you get the grand total of 3 songs which isn't much but enough to give you a taste of what to expect, the good bit is the music store where you can buy new song packs. Theres currently 92 song packs to choose from & each one has 4 songs in a pack for 450Y. You can preview each song in the pack so you know what it sounds like which is really good so you don't end up buying duff songs, from the stuff i have listened to if you like j-pop then your going to be in heaven as theres so much quality music in there as a lot of the packs are actually from real bands not just made up stuff for the game. Some music is licensed & some is covers, then theres various tracks from past bemani games & even stuff from anime, theres literally something in there for everyone. If you downloaded everything you would have 368 tracks to choose from & it would have cost you 41,400 yen i think i'll be just picking a small selection lol.

So far im really enjoying it, it's a solid music game & one that has flawless controls, the only thing i recommend is you turn off gesture support as it can cause the screen to pause as you accidentally swipe to another app. It's available on the Japanese app store & im pretty sure the US & UK ones too under the name jukebeat but im not sure of the song pack selections on the western versions.

Heres a vid of how you play

[fuse]

This was pretty much my #1 reason for buying an iPad also. When I think about how much money I've spent on DLC it's a little scary, but when I just think about it as another bemani game but with a really expansive songlist it's actually pretty good value. I need to grab me another 10,000 yen iTunes card soon!

The one warning I would give is that playing on an iPad can teach you some bad play habits that don't translate well onto a full-size machine (like stretching one hand from 1 to 13, or 4 to 16), but at the same time the machine is generally a lot more responsive, and the tactile response really does help.

My biggest complaint though is the scoreboard integration - rounding up all of your totals (across all difficulties) into one big score. In a dream world I'd be able to have per-chart scoreboards with decent friend-tracking, but this is just not looking like it's going to happen ever.

[Golgo]

I tried this (or, 'Jukebeat' rather) on iPhone a while back. Doesn't really work on the small screen (obvious to say!), and the £2.49 for each 4-song songpack was a real put off, especially as you can't see what's in 'em until you purchase.

[Mr Ono]

Any of the song packs have smile.dk and Butterfly?

[Nisa]

I got this for my iPod Touch a while back and although I'm sure it plays better on the iPad, it's still quite fun on the Touch. It gets a big thumbs up from me just for having You wa Shock alone. Sadly I can't afford to buy an iPad to play this or Reflec Beat which I've become more fond of now I've got to grips with the arcade version.

[fuse]

No Smile.dk, I'm afraid.

I don't really get on with Reflec Beat, but then again I'm still only on the default 3 songs for that. I have tried the western 'JukeBeat', but much prefer the music on the J-version...

Now seems like a good time to remind people to share Gamecentre logins - mine is 'fuse2dx'

[Nisa]

I wasn't that keen on Reflec Beat the first couple of times I played it but then Konami started a cross promotion where you can unlock IIDX Lincle songs in Reflec Beat & vice versa so that kind of forced me to go back and play it. Would really like to try the iPad version as it seems a better fit for the device than Jubeat.

[importaku]

I tried this (or, 'Jukebeat' rather) on iPhone a while back. Doesn't really work on the small screen (obvious to say!), and the £2.49 for each 4-song songpack was a real put off, especially as you can't see what's in 'em until you purchase.

Hmm must be a uk thing as the japanese one when you go into the jubeat misic store via the game you just tap on a song pack & it brings up all 4 songs you then just tap on the little headphone icon & it lets you listen to each of the 4 tracks.

[k0pp0]

Just to confirm that you can listen to snippets on the songs as importaku mentions above in the UK Version. And very much fun it is too.

[Golgo]

Silly me, sorry for misinformation!