HEY!!! IS THIS REALLY YOUR BEST?
I won't sugarcoat it, these new songs suck horse's balls. I really regret having bought those Rise Vol.2 and Phoenix 2024 DLCs. 90% of those songs sound the same. Either happy hardcore, high-speed techno, or EDM.
The quality of the song list in PIU has been taking a nosedive ever since XX, with the influx of BMS songs and composers.
Adrenaline Blaster, Lepton Strike, 4NT, Burn Out, E.O.N, Highway Chaser, Lohxia, Megaheartz, Sonic Boom, Sudden Appearance Image, Ultimate Eyes, MYTH Re:Lease, Crash-Landing Rendezvous, Behind the Scenes, The Last Stand, The Deconstruction, Yellow Dot, Lethal Spade, Kraken.
They're nearly indistinguishable from each other. Not only that, but nearly identical BGAs to boot. We are seeing here a case of songs which their sole purpose is to provide challenging charts, and nothing else. The same problem that EZ2ON Reboot and Sixtar Gate show in spades.
All of them are variations of "How to make Otoge music" without the self-awareness. Songs that are produced with charts in mind, instead of the other way around. They all feel disposable. And judging by the AM 2026 Music Contest, where all the 20 chosen songs are otogecore, this trend is still gonna last for a good while.
That interface and song selection screen, good lord, is so damn ugly. It's arranged similarly to DJMAX Respect and EZ2ON : Reboot, but much more amateurish, like a cheap mobile game.
The overall visual presentation is a far cry from what you used to see in the Legacy days. You know, back when AM was committed to wow the player with the visuals and set themselves apart from its competitors.
Long gone are the days when every song had its own unique background animation. Nowadays, they settle for simply panning static images—moving them side-to-side, up, and down—and try to pass them as BGAs. For someone who has followed this franchise since 2002, seeing such a lack of care is disheartening.
The game doesn't have mouse support, making the navigation much clunkier than it has any right to be.
PIU RISE lacks so much when it comes to user agency, not only when compared to other VSRGs on Steam, but even to the arcade version of PIU itself.
Freedom, Vanish, Sudden, Accel, Deccel, Earthworm, X Mode, Rebirth Skin, NX/NX2/NXA Skin, Soccer Ball/Slime/Dignity Sheep Skin, Rush 80/90/110/120, instant restart button, HD/Extra Judgement, increase/decrease of speed during gameplay, Early/Late indicator, Auto Play, the game gives you NOTHING.
The August update introduced the Arcade Mode, which brings this awkward situation where you can't turn Stage Break On on Warm Up, and you can't turn Stage Break Off on Arcade.
World Max is full of frustrating missions; around half of them involve invisible mines and last-note nukes that are impossible to react to. And luck-based missions. Seriously. Russian Roulette Hard. 1 in 216 chances of clearing it.
All the frustration and trial-and-error gameplay of the NX2/NXA era, with none of the rewards (new songs/mods/skins. Not even new icons/banners/emoticons or something), I hope you like pain.
And the timing window for the items overrides the one of the arrows, so if you find a note sandwiched between two mines, you WILL hit a mine.
The worst aspect of this game is: PIU RISE has no vision. Features are added and have their function changed left and right, haphazardly.
- Warm Up Mode being turned into the main mode of the game
- the unlock system from Early Access being completely removed, making the Player Level feature pointless
- Challenge Mode having its difficulty artificially increased - Division Mode being revamped into a Leaderboard
- the addition of a Highlight system that works like a Practice Mode, but only for a selected number of charts, while a proper Practice Mode would be much more welcome. It's not impossible, 5-key Beatmania games for PSX had proper Practice Modes in 1999.
- the implementation of an in-game currency that is totally useless if the player has all the DLCs. You'll see yourself getting thousands of coins, while having nothing worth spending them on.
Let's talk a little about the charts now. If you come to this game with low expectations, you might find them okay. They do their job of flowing relatively well both on keyboard and when played on foot, but the more you play, the more you see the same stair patterns over and over (you know, the signature pattern of Dignity S20), and it gets really boring sooner or later.
Not to mention, none of the skills you acquire in the game will transfer to other games like Sixtar Gate, Platina Lab, Musynx, or EZ2ON, since keyboard-focused charts can offer so much more complexity and density than ones made for footpad.
You know what a duck is like. It swims, talks, and flies, and doesn't know how to do any of the three things properly.
PIU RISE feels like a duck. And I can't even say that it feels like a Chiduck, because BS Power Explosion isn't in the game. It tries to work on keyboard, on dance pads, on Steam Deck, and on the PIU finger controller that they're yet to release. Guess what, it falls flat.
Get a simulator like StepPrime or XSanity instead. You're guaranteed to have a much better experience. Please don't fall for the nostalgia trap, I say this as somebody who has been playing PIU since 2002. You won't see Funky Tonight, We Are, Com'Back, Don't Bother Me, Dignity, Cho Ryun, Run to You, I'll Give You All My Love, SLAM, Superman, or CrashDay here anyway.
If you're like me and you have fond memories of the times when presentation and variety mattered in PIU, I recommend you to stay away from this Temu DJMAX. Classic Pump is Canon-D, modern Pump is La Cinquantaine.
