So, the big question here of course is: is it better than Respect V?
After ~200h of Respect, I am hooked, and I find it more and more hard to come back to DJMax.
First things first: I don't know if the game is good for a complete beginner. I see pretty big jumps in difficulty from easy to normal and normal to hard (some songs are easy 4 and like 12 normal), BUT all songs have 16 charts (4 for each key style), and this is a pretty nice improvement over DJMax, it literally translates to more time playing your favourite songs.
I started playing EZ2ON when I feel like it's the best time to come in: when you're just about stating to learn the first SC charts in DJMax. This is because DJMax has a huge, and pretty badly thought out, difficulty wall moving from "regular" charts to SC: SC are made for keyboards, regular ones for controller. Suddenly you have to master triples, fast sweeping 16th note scales and sequences with weird patterns that you never saw before in 100+ hours of playtime, all the while the general speed and difficulty of the charts increases by a great margin.
In EZ2ON, all charts are made with keyboards in mind from the start. This means that in easier than SC-like difficulties you still have interesting, "weird" patterns that you can understand better, given the lower difficulty. The wall is not a wall anymore, you start to improve again and feel the joy of progressing through the difficulty.
In a more general sense, I feel like I prefer the UI and feel of EZ2ON more, it's faster to start and load, it has a nicer recap at the and of a song, (again, way faster to transition into it and to the next song compared to DJMax, when I usually just pause into "back to menu" if I don't do a PB, because it's quicker than to wait for the end of song animation), I REALLY like that it has a little judgement recap on the bottom left of the screen when you're selecting a song, so you can quickly see if you're 1 good away from an "All Cool" rating, and finally, I feel like the screen space is used better during a song, with the game overlay being more horizontally compressed compared to DJMax, resulting in a perceived higher height.
I know it sounds stupid, but trust me, it feels almost 2x higher than DJMax, and as a result, you can up the speed a lot and the patterns are still clear and you can still predict incoming notes. Every time I go back to DJMax, I can't help but feel "caged" by the UI.
Music is entirely subjective. DJMax has more modern, and way more "Weeaboo-bait" songs, and EZ2ON has more '90-'2000 inspired songs, with lots and lots of trance and techno. I like both, and usually jump between the two games depending on mood.
TL;DR: I like the charts better than DJMax, it plays better than DJMax, but I don't know if the difficulty spikes too hard too fast for a complete newbie. For an experienced player, 100% buy it without a second thought.
