Extraordinarily helpful advice I received when first deciding whether to get into IIDX:
"Okay, when you start out, you're going to struggle, and miss notes, and miss entire stanzas, and get clobbered and reamed and raped and slaughtered and squashed and smashed and smooshed and gooshed and pulverized and pureed and liquefied, and you're going to fail and fail and fail. In fact, when you're starting out, you're going to fail about 200 songs for every clear. But
if you can get past that, you're going to love this game."
"It's not like DDR! Repeat, it's
not like DDR. Let me be clear. It's not. Like. DDR. So you can't approach it like DDR. In fact, get out of that DDR mentality completely. Hey, you're a DDR guy, right? You sure sound like a DDR guy. Well, you'd better forget all that. Because it's not like DDR. At all."
"High speed. High speed. Highspeedhighspeedhighspeedhighspeedhighspeed. (Oh yeah, also pinky scratch.)"
"You gotta LEARN! You gotta DEAL WITH failure!! You gotta get used to the learning curve! No Autoscratch! No 5-Key! Never never never ever! Learn! Be a man! Take the pain! Start hard, move on to really hard! Don't mind failure! No Autoscratch! No 5-Key! Balls! Guts! Learning process!!! Keep at it!!! RRRRAAAAAGH!!!!!"
"Okay, it's like, you're playing something that you thought was completely impossible...and the notes are coming down...and then, it's like...it's like, it just clicks, and your fingers are...they're...well, it just happens, and...you have it. And you don't know...well, you have some idea...well...it'll just happen, when...well, when you...that is...ah...well...it just
happens."
(Yeah. Don't ask. Just don't.)
All right, here's the scoop. IIDX does get insanely, ridiculously difficult. It doesn't happen
right away. In the older styles, in fact, you have to go a fair distance into the Anothers before you encounter anything really murderous. (I've cleared all but one 7 Key chart in 3rd Style and
every 7 Key in 4th.) The later styles are a different story, and DistorteD ratchets it up to a whole new level...
damn, there's some ridiculous crap in there. But insane difficulty isn't the begin- and end-all...far from it, Light 7 is pretty much as reasonable as it always have been. (You get the odd finger-breaker like Spica or In The Sky, but those are few and far between.) In fact, nowadays, chart-for-chart, PoMu is
far worse.
As for the lousy advice, the problem is that a lot of videogamers, even very knowledgable ones, just are incredibly lousy at exposition. A belief strongly reinforced by my experiences with GameFAQs.
The point is, you're having fun and you're discovering what you're capable of. That's firmly in the "all good" category in my book.
And as always, just so you know where I'm coming from:
VJ Army >> User Data View >> DKW / dj DKW
I've started to play Beatmania 
