I Finally Got Into Rhythm Games!

And vivid/stasis is to blame.

By Lyn, January 10th, 2025

I’d been visiting Round 1s to play DDR and assorted other games for a little while before this year, but my local arcade is far enough away that it was a biweekly trip at most - hardly enough to really improve. I, like, had DJMax in my steam library but without the novelty of the two washing machine games I loved (Wacca and Chrono Circle) it didn’t really hold that much appeal.

I have vivid/stasis to thank for turning me around on these. Besides having a kickass aesthetic, being illustrated by 57 who I’ve followed for years, and costing literally zero united states dollars, vivid/stasis is also the first rhythm game I played where I loved the vast majority of its soundtrack.

Usually when I played rhythm games at Round 1 I’d give up finding tracks I liked in favor of seeing which Touhou remixes were on any given machine, but in vivid/stasis I kind of just played all the tracks. By the time I’d reached the end of chapter 1, I think I’d played more tracks in just vivid/stasis than in every other rhythm game I’d played combined.

The chapter 1 finale is what I really have to thank vivid/stasis for, though. Until reaching it, the highest difficulty I’d finished a track on was 6, and I only really felt comfortable with 4s or 5s. But to continue with the (really good!) story, I’d have to beat a track that was difficulty 8! I think I grinded this track for a week - it helps that Pyromania is a banger. I think the journey to finish the finale was when rhythm games finally sunk their teeth all the way into me - or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, the excitement I felt when I finally beat, and then later mastered, Pyromania’s easiest difficulty, was something I’d only ever felt after being fromsoft bosses.

In fact, the more I played vivid/stasis - as well as DJMax, which I picked back up - the more I realized that rhythm games and action games have a surprising amount in common in terms of emotional beats. This might be more obvious looking at Sekiro, an action game that’s been often joked about being a rhythm game. Learning the ins-and-outs of a track, or boss, and using that knowledge to overcome it, as well as using the patterns you learned from that boss, or track, in the future to raise your abilities as a player is intoxicating - it’s the reason I play both genres. Besides the fact that I like cool fights and sick tunes, anyway.

This is an excerpt from a scrapped video essay. I figured this website was a good place to give these a good home.