[Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] hey guys before we get started today i just wanted to take a second and thank what is basically my main and only source of information and without which this series literally wouldn't exist remy wiki is a huge bomani rhythm game wiki containing information about currently active and dead bomani rhythm games it doesn't have as detailed information for non-bomani rhythm games but it does have a wealth of information for the money games and i reference it very frequently without it as well as some random other sources of information like the occasional wikipedia article and tv tropes for some reason this series literally would not exist so huge shout out to remywiki and thanks a ton for all the hard work over there you guys do anyways on to the video rhythm games have almost always gone hand in hand with fads or gimmicks whether it's the silly plastic controllers shaped like instruments games based on weird concepts or set in absurd settings or the actual rhythm games themselves being fads the concepts go together well and sometimes we see weird gimmicky rhythm games made to capture trends or follow up on other aspects of pop culture that brings us to today's game para para paradise released on september 21st 2000 para para paradise was created to capture the parapara dance trend of the early 2000's if you've never heard of peripera like i hadn't it's a dance trend heavily based around eurobeat similar to line dancing songs have specified peripera routines and involve a lot of arm movement this was a very popular trend in japan in the early 2000s so konami decided to make a game that captured the dance trend to try and capitalize on the potential market and thus para para paradise was born the parent paraparadise machine is quite exotic having a large platform with five hand sensors set up to detect hand motions from there the rhythm gameplay is pretty standard with single notes and hold notes coming from the bottom of the screen to the top allowing you to swipe your hands through the air between the sensors to hit the notes this results in fluid arm movements designed to mimic peripera routines the music of peripera is basically all eurobeat as eurobeat is heavily tied to peripera dancing it also has two different types of charts those being parapara charts which were designed to mimic real peripera routines and freestyle charts which were a bit harder and designed to be less accurate basically regular rhythm game type charts for the music instead of dance routine accurate ones it was also apparently the first bomani game ever with holds i was having a bit of a tough time fact checking that but that would be pretty interesting if so there's a mixed history of peripera's versions so let's take a look through some of the features that the different versions introduced peripera first mix is a bit tricky to discuss feature-wise aside from the fact that the game is quite old and not a lot of footage of the game exists first mix was also updated a few times and got some ui changes everything i mentioned before basically came in first mix and then some changes were made from there early on in the game's life about a month after release first mix v 1.1 was released and as far as i can tell the only thing they did was remove a mode called enjoy mode there's very little info on this mode but i believe it was the tutorial mode where you couldn't fail interesting that they would remove that if anyone knows about enjoy mode please leave a comment down below that would be much appreciated after v 1.1 first mix plus was later released even though it's still classified as first mix they did add a ton of songs and they did make some other pretty major changes the ui of the game was reworked all the title cards were simplified to be uniform eight songs were giving me another difficulty and there was a mix of other difficulty revisions and new charts this mix also got a cs release on ps2 that's right they somehow actually put together a home version of the game that required hand sensors in the form of a controller you spread out on the floor and wave your hands over this actually worked pretty well by the sound of it and the rest of the game was basically just a straight port of the arcade version so while there's not much else to say here i'd say it sounds like this was a decently competent home port for a game with such a weird control scheme after that came second mix which was the final version already released march 15 2001. that's around 6 months for this game to basically go straight out of production it's something to be expected for a game that was chasing a trend so hard but for a game with such a large and exotic machine it's really weird to see it die so quickly but you could probably also argue that that contributed to its death so who knows actually on that subject the hardware needed for this version of parapara was only ever used for this game and was known as the viper hardware the game's ost was never released after the game came out on my first mix and the expert and another difficulty names were removed all being consolidated in too hard for the returning songs it also uses cg background dancers a la ddr rather than the videos of peripera dancing seen in the original game other than that though that was it a six month run with two arcade versions and a console release before the game went straight in the dumpster pretty crazy to see how fast the game can go in and out when it's based on a fad one final quick footnote is that the korean version of the game actually has an exclusive cabinet design that means including all the different hardware for the jp release and the korean version that was three cabinet revisions for a game that was in production for six months with that para para paradise slipped out of the spotlight out of all the games we've covered so far i'd argue that para para paradise might be one of the easiest games to deduce the reason for its death for starters it was based on a fad this basically guaranteed the game a short life unless peripera dancing was somehow making it to the mainstream which it did not apparently even when the game was out during the fad it was never very popular and didn't perform well that plus expensive cabinet hardware and most likely expensive licensing costs for the eurobeat music this almost in a way seems like a complete failure on the business front for konami even if the game was decently playable and fun what might surprise you is that peripera paradise has actually become a cult classic rhythm game for its uniqueness and essence of the time it was created there's a few ways that peripera paradise is being preserved believe it or not stepmania actually has support for the peripera controller as well as charts for it there were never too many but it was a way for people with the ps2 controller to place some charts at home and sort of persevere over time more recently there is a dedicated clone of peripera called peristar that is based in the statmania engine and is being made to replicate more of the original para para paradise experience that's in active development again after recently being revived those developing meme are also working on adding support for para para paradise to the emulator having spent time working on emulating the hardware that the first version of peripera runs on there's been a surprising amount of the rhythmian community rallying around peripera to preserve it in interesting ways even more so than some other games that were more popular at the time that they died while peripera was an interesting experiment from konami to see if they could capitalize on a dance trend i think they kind of learned the hard way that they really can't do that effectively without spending a bunch of money on cabinets and games that in the end are just going to get scrapped even though the rhythm game community has been rallying around paraparaparadise in recent years it joins our list of dead rhythm games thanks for watching check out my twitter and my twitch links are in the description below feel free to join my discord if you want to chat about the videos or say hi you can also check out my patreon if you want to support my content if you like this video don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you guys next [Music] [Music] time you