I Beat, You Beat, We All Beat for Jubeat

There’s one game genre you can always depend on in Tokyo.

Amid all the games that are awkward buggers, making it hard for the unindoctrinated to have fun in a Japanese arcade, rhythm action remains starkly decipherable.

When you drop a hundred-yen into Jubeat for the first time, you know you will need to choose a song and then do a thing to the beat of the song. However weird these games get – like “Chunithm”, named with the admittedly original portmanteau of “tune” and “rhythm” – there will always be a core that is, at least in principle, accessible.

Trends are moving away from the very friendly outstretched hands of drums and guitars and the like, but the welcoming throb of the quantised pulse will always shine through.