[Music] [Laughter] the bomani series of games have been around for over 20 years and as such konami has had the chance to try many different styles of gameplay many earlier bomani games were designed to follow a real-life instrument to give the feeling of playing one konami did create guitar freaks after all which arguably directly inspired guitar hero in the future this style of instrument based game around that time led to the creation of keyboard mania originally released in 2000 keyboard mania also shortened to kbm or known as keyboard heaven in korea is a piano style rhythm game released by konami it's a 24 key rhythm game for a single player but can be played by two as well with two 24 key setups side by side on a single machine the game featured a few key modes to try to cater to a wide audience of players on light mode players would be restricted to only 12 of the 24 keys on late plus mode which was the standard mode for the game even though that naming convention is arguably terrible players were given access to the full 24 keys of the machine to play there's also another 24 key mode in the way of real mode which is meant to be harder than light plus mode and was supposedly meant to be slightly closer to real piano play there are standard notes that require a key press and long notes which are holds there are no other mechanics in keyboard mania than that so the game relies on its gameplay style and complexity involved in playing a 24 key keyboard rather than leaning into gimmicks like in some future but money games there are a few other modes that lend some variety to the gameplay for example there was a course mode in the game called pressure mode where players could play preset courses of four songs in an attempt to pass them all in a row and if you were an insane person there's double mode double uses both sides of the machine at once for 48 key gameplay jesus christ i can't imagine you'd be able to play this well unless you were a wizard or could go cross-eyed as there's sort of a gap between the two screens so i'd imagine that would make keeping track of both charts pretty difficult but if you wanted it it was there for the first time in our series here this game actually has a non-trivial amount of releases for keyboard mania there were three arcade releases two playstation 2 releases and a pc release let's take a run through the mixes and see how the series progressed starting with the original keyboard mania also known as keyboard heaven in korea was released on february 6 2000. this was actually the only keyboard mania to release in korea in addition the original keyboard mania had only original songs and none of them were externally licensed tracks though strangely even though the songs were all konami originals four were not included in the korean release this seems weird as i'd imagine there wouldn't be licensing issues in different countries if konami had created all the songs in-house at least not as many as if you were licensing some sort of mainstream pop song the original keyboard mania actually didn't have light mode forcing all players to play with 24 keys in what was called normal mode in addition to the original arcade release keyboard mania cs was also released for those unfamiliar with the terms rhythm games that have both arcade and home releases are differentiated by using the terms ac for arcade and cs for console this is especially useful in a case like this where keyboard mania cs is a direct port of the arcade version of keyboard mania it had a controller bundled with the game and had three exclusive songs for the console release after this came keyboard mania second mix in arcades in this game light mode was added allowing for players to play with less than the full set of keys however they also changed normal mode to light plus mode i have no idea why they would change this naming convention as light light plus real makes so much less sense than light normal real it's like that implies that light plus is slightly harder but in reality doubles the number of keys compared to light mode i'd imagine there were a ton of players that played light mode and thought oh i can play this this seems easy let's go up to light plus mode and immediately got destroyed by doubling the key count one other interesting tidbit about keyboard mania second mix i was digging around online looking for info and i came across the cutting room fuller page for keyboard mania second mix there's apparently an unused graphics file holding stuff for the results page internet ranking etc the graphic actually contains a placeholder image of a pop and stage character which is another dead rhythm game pretty ironic and finally we have keyboard mania third mix which was the final arcade version of keyboard mania released on march 15 2001 just barely a year after the original arcade version was released this was also the only arcade version of all of them to feature licensed music i find it pretty interesting that keyboard mania as a series didn't really take advantage of licensed music at all music with piano and keyboard has been pretty prevalent in popular music throughout the years so i'm surprised they didn't use that to try and draw more players in in third mix konami decided to add some even higher difficulty to the already infamously difficult game four songs were given a chart with the another difficulty for those unfamiliar with bomani games another is the name for the highest difficulty chart in select bomani games such as beat mania and another is also the name of one of my patreon tiers the funny thing though is that konami decided to hide them behind a cheat code so if you want to unlock and another chart here's how first you have to know the song that has it they're not listed anywhere in the game so you have to either know which songs have it or try the cheat code on every song go into real mode and on the first octave of the keyboard hold down the c-sharp and d-sharp key and hit any white key then let go then hold down the f-sharp g-sharp and a-sharp keys and press a white key again then the game will load you into the another difficulty i do really wonder how they originally told players about this it's not exactly a super intuitive code and all that for only 4 songs with the difficulty it's pretty bizarre the last feature of note in 3rd mix is session mode the game was actually compatible with guitar freaks and dromania allowing linked play between guitar freaks drum mania and keyboard mania all at the same time on screen now is literally the only youtube video showing this feature off that i could find it seems like an oddly niche feature considering you need to have all three of those machines in your arcade next to each other and linked up but it's a pretty cool idea nonetheless and session mode would be maintained in guitar freaks and dromania after keyboard mania was discontinued after the arcade version finished up the ps2 saw its last version as well keyboard mania 2 second mix and third mix this version was more of a straight port of the second and third mixes songs with no cs exclusives this time around definitely makes me think that they were already done with the game at this point if there weren't any new cs exclusives the most notable feature in this version is actually that they added support for midi keyboards definitely a solid idea and a good way to sell the game to people who already have a keyboard rather than having to buy a controller that goes with it as well and probably also helped konami avoid manufacturing too many more cs controllers if they were already done with the series with the cs and ac versions of keyboard mania wrapped up we saw the final release make it out on july 23 2003 this was keyboard mania yamaha edition for pc this release is honestly pretty weird coming out over a year after the final cs version it's got a chunk of songs from all the arcade mixes of keyboard mania and also supported downloadable song packs from the official keyboard mania website that's pretty ahead of its time with having dlc song packs weirdly the game was only officially available bundled with a specific yamaha keyboard the yamaha portatone ez250i also for some weird reason existing keyboard mania songs from the arcade version all have their artist names replaced with konami 2003 this one is just super weird to me the fact that it exists at all is strange considering how far outside the main series it was in addition to it being only released with a specific midi keyboard it seems like it might have been a contractual obligation being fulfilled that they may have agreed to before they realized the series wasn't going to last very long with this game releasing the keyboard mania series was never to be heard from again there are probably a few factors contributing to the game not making it very far in the grand scheme of konami's rhythm games for starters the blatantly obvious issue is that the game is pretty damn hard if you don't play piano in real life you may have trouble grasping the complexity that comes with playing 24 keys and watching the screen especially if you're unfamiliar with keyboard hand placement the game was infamously known for completely overwhelming beginners due to the controller which from the get-go is probably something they would have trouble fixing and is most likely the reason that they added light mode after the first mix and dealing with the complexity issues it seemed like they tried a lot of unique stuff that just didn't stick session mode cs midi keyboard support light difficulty etc just a bunch of weird stuff to try and give the game a wider appeal the game series also seemed to have a bit of a lack of content compared to other games of the time for bomani for example the original keyboard mania had 20 songs beat mania 4th mix released this same year had 103 songs so maybe it just didn't have the push internally to try to get the game a bit of traction 20 songs is definitely very little for a game genre expecting players to play a lot and improve over time a combination of its design and potential lack of internal effort overshadowed by its high entry difficulty was a recipe for disaster and ultimately led to the death of the series it's always a shame to see a rhythm game series go under but i think in the case of keyboard mania we actually got the best result we could have after a game died a few years ago konami released nostalgia another keyboard piano style rhythm game that focused more on being a fun arcade game and less on being an accurate piano rhythm game you could argue that it's basically a soft reboot of the keyboard mania franchise and nostalgia as a series has already been ongoing longer than keyboard mania was it's definitely nice to see the keyboard rhythm game concept didn't die as it fits the genre pretty well so i actually think kibomania as a franchise has served its purpose and probably just doesn't need to exist anymore with its spiritual successor pushing onward keyboard mania joins the ranks of dead rhythm games thanks for watching check out my twitter and my twitch links are in the description below 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 time [Music] you