Múseca

Múseca’s initial launch, with its shop-based progression system that required grinding the game’s story mode, inevitably doomed the game to obscurity. Beyond hastily released updates that unlocked all of the charts and removed the influence from the unlockable “grafica” characters on score, support for the game tapered off only a couple of years after release, leaving fans to add standard features like leaderboard widgets, hard mode, and end-of-play continue settings. It’s a shame that the botched concept mulched one of Bemani’s best concepts: think Beatmania if every button was a turntable.¹ Each button is spaced such that your pinky-to-thumb handspan will only reach two at any given time, with three on top and two on the bottom. This should theoretically make only the top middle button a shared point between the two hands, but the higher difficulty charts quickly strain that.

The capability to rotate every single button instantly changes the calculus on how to approach hitting each. You can tap a button with virtually any part of your hand without having to commit, but spinning requires setting up the motion by either torquing your hand or moving it tangential to the outside of the disc surface. Chords begin testing this quite a bit when one part of the hand has to spin, potentially ruining the other part of the hand’s input. Applying force into the cabinet for one note while applying torque for the other causes a conflict potentially severe enough that you’ll need to move a hand over to help out, which gives the game a great avenue for getting your hands away from the home position and leaving one side of the board uncovered. The designers have plenty of other tricks up their sleeve as well: locking your hand in place for a charge note can put the onus on the other to cover most of the rest of the board if you aren’t comfortable with using all your fingers or your palms to handle nearby buttons, and mandating certain spins be clockwise or counter-clockwise limits your options for chords as well. Many charts throw a double-spin chord on the left-most or right-most buttons, which can be handled by swiping one’s hand through the middle of both and spinning them in opposite directions; if both spins have to be the same direction, you’ll need a much more precise input (or two hands) to handle it. The only aspect where the designers don’t have a good idea on how to build the challenge is with the foot pedal, which rarely escalates beyond tapping it on beat or with major accents.

These kinds of chords in JOMANDA illustrate adaptations you’ll have to do between hands to manage spins. Pressing one note with your finger while spinning another with your thumb (or vice-versa) is doable but tricky to get consistently, so for these patterns it’s best to give a dichord with the two normal notes to one hand and the spin to the other, switching responsibilities between each chord.² [src]

The sleek, angular design of the UI and its runic text suggest the skittering rhythms of doujin electronica, which dominated the soundtrack until the game’s waning days threw in the usual crossovers. Still, it feels like an actual inheritor to the sounds of IIDX, with melodic, condensed takes on house, techno, and trance between 猫叉Master-style genre potpourri injected with synth. You’ll see less of modern hardstyle, riddim, or dubstep, although there’s plenty of generic anime OP rock tunes in the mix to take their place. For me, with the Plus additions that round out the roster with the cream of the crop from other rhythm games, the smaller scale gives it a better average quality than some other games that draw heavily from the online community churn.