Until that godawful Love Live SIF port came out on PS4, this held the dubious honor of the worst rhythm game UI I've ever seen, even ahead of shit like the Persona Dancing fish eye UI (admittedly mostly saved by that series having surprisingly smart and sane charting; it would likely edge out in hindsight otherwise) or the Senran Kagura Bon Appetit two lines that can each hold all 8 of that game's note types with no rhyme or reason. Imagine the DJMax Technika UI as made by people who have never played Technika in their lives and you have a slight idea of how this game's UI operates.

To give a rundown, the note track is represented by an endless upward-scrolling list of 4-lane sets and the hit line scrolls across the bottom-most lane as it makes its way to the top, at which point the hit line is at the end of the current lane and moves down to the next lane. Unlike Technika however, the hit line always comes in from the left instead of alternating which, combined with the constant upward motion, means you're effectively having to dart your eyes from one corner to the other every measure, which is needlessly rough to get used to, especially for something as casual as this.

Compounding this is the fact that as with a lot of Vita button-based rhythm games, the control scheme is kinda garbage due to the inherent issue of the Vita having tic-tacs for buttons, which the game does not work around in the slightest. The first warning shot is that the entire d-pad is just one mappable button for whatever reason with no option for separation, making it effectively impossible to have anything more comfortable or sane than the default d-pad, triangle, square, cross config. The second warning shot is that this game pulls a GH/RB and kills your combo for overhits, which is less than pleasant in a button-based game in general, much less one where the buttons are practically kissing each other to make accidental presses that much more likely.

Songs in this game also have a whopping 7 difficulties associated with them, which seems quite generous at first until you realize that this game tops out at moderate difficulty overall, so for the most part, the charts kinda just end up stepping over each other and/or going to the most boring extremes with how little they get to work with to differentiate themselves 7 times per song. This also ends up making 100% in this game a slog since for every "almost fun in a kusoge way" Pro chart, there are 6 different charts before it that are all vying to have some natural progression to each other while still being significantly easier than the Pro chart, meaning you get a whole lot of basic rhythm playing to an even more absurd degree than most rhythm games.

For what it's worth, as mentioned before, it is more or less moderate difficulty at most. In my grind for the platinum (which required a Pro FC as it stood; Independence is still stuck in my head four years later from going for that), I ended up going above and beyond by just going through and S Ranking the entire game, which was frankly not that difficult for the most part, with mostly a few songs the fucking high-BPM ones giving me some trouble. Doesn't stop the issues above from making the whole process more annoying than it oughta be, though.

If nothing else, the soundtrack is frankly pretty good and while admittedly Independence is the only one that's still stuck in my head after all these years due to PTSD from all the FCs lost to a single overhit, I do remember the game having more than a few bangers. Should arguably go without saying given the genre, but it's certainly worth mentioning (glares menacingly at Bon Appetit again).