But a little thing, but a little thing…

So after a nearly-four-week wait, DJMAX Portable Clazziquai Edition arrives at my doorstep.

Right away I get into the “campaign” mode of the game, Club Tour mode. Okay, tutorial thing, skip. Proceeded to go into music clubs to unlock songs, while dealing with mission clubs that have Thunder Force III-easy missions and repetitive repertory clubs that just aren’t fun.

The mission clubs made me lol. Nearly all of them were percent missions, with maybe a scoring mission or combo mission here and there. But the game wasn’t about to let me steamroll through the missions. No sir, there’s a hidden requirement to challenge each opponent: the difference between my rank and the opponent’s rank must be less than 30. So while I didn’t need to defeat every opponent in a mission club to move on to the next club or area, I more or less had to eventually, unless I wanted to bore myself so hard from grinding 1 rank at a time on already-beaten opponents (vs. beating new opponents for 2-5 rank) that I wanted to kill myself. This is particularly bad in the last mission club, the Maximum Club: 21 opponents, 11 of which must be defeated, but due to the <30-rank-difference requirement it took me a long time (must’ve been 2-3 hours total) to eventually go through enough opponents to make it to the next area (which thankfully is just one club: a music club consisting solely of songs by Clazziquai).

Well I suppose grinding is better than missions that are stupidly hard and throw all notions of game pacing out the window.

The songlist is pretty nice I guess, a good intro to Clazziquai; I may use whatever Christmas money I get to get one of their albums. Charts are very easy but then again this is a game geared towards beginners, not assholes like me who want songs in the level 9-13 range, though the Extended patch fixes this by giving songs some more difficult charts. However, a major reason I came to buy this game was it’s the last DJMAX game with no autocorrect! I don’t need an un-disableable feature that hits the right notes for me; even non-beginner modes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band don’t do that! Pentavision just keeps making stupider game design decisions with each new DJMAX game, from autocorrect in Black Square to DJMAX Trilogy‘s new Fever system and timing window-changing equipment.

Speaking of Christmas money, I might get pop’n 11 and hold out onRaiden IV since PS2 Pop’n versions are becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive to purchase; I just went on Play-Asia and YesAsia and neither of those sites have copies of any PS2 Pop’n in stock. Plus I’ve neglected my Desktop Arcade controller for a while and hopefully a new Pop’n game will breathe some life back into it. Pop’n 13′s unlock method is silly; I don’t want to complete some irrelevant minigames to unlock new songs and harder charts. Raiden IV‘s US version is still relatively new, so I’ll be able to find new copies for a while. Or I’ll wait for someone who bought it and got fed up with it because “durrr it’s only 30 minutes this game is ghey” to trade it in at a GameStop so I can get it for reduced price and show that idiot the meaning of replay value.

admittedly, i’m getting pop’n 11 because it has alphonse michel in it