If you’re a fan of rhythm games, you’ve certainly heard of KONAMI‘s pop’n music series of games. The series is one of the original BEMANI titles that the company released all the way back in 1998. Its lineage goes from the arcade, home console, and PC. Japanese arcade game distributor Bally Pond has been known to reveal upcoming titles a little pre-maturely, even showing off the beatmania IIDX Lightning Model cabinet a whole six months prior to its release. Today, the distributor did a similar thing by revealing a yet-announced version of pop’n music, pop’n music Kaimei Riddles.
If you remember, we paid a visit to the Japan Amusement Expo, JAEPO, earlier this year where KONAMI showed off a completely new version of pop’n music with a brand new cabinet that utilized a touch panel similar to Chunithm and Project Diva, as well as significantly smaller buttons than those found on current generation pop’n music cabinets. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of this game, sure it was very clearly an alpha build of the game that was likely rushed to be able to show off, but it just didn’t feel like pop’n music.
We still don’t know if pop’n music Kaimei Riddles will be using the current cabinets or if this is the final name for the upcoming title using the new style cabinets, but one thing is for sure is that it’s a good thing to see KONAMI still pumping a bit of love into the pop’n music franchise.
When it comes to the release of pop’n music Kaimei Riddles, we don’t know when the title will be coming out because like I previously mentioned, KONAMI hasn’t exactly announced the game yet and Bally Pond jumped the gun, again. But at least we know something’s on the horizon.