I've had a glance through this thread and also the OT thread also and there have been many stories about people getting hooked onto this game and then their life "ends", so to speak...
So I thought I would share my story on the game.
As an Aussie who isn't a complete newbie to rhythm games (FreqQ/Amp, Gitaroo Man, GH & RB, etc...) this series is something that passed me by, perhaps despite the PSP being region free, it basically remained 100% local. I knew of people talking about it (PDf specifically), but again I never really followed up on anything.
Roll around March 2014 and the Vita gets a demo, for shits and giggles I downloaded it on the 26th March and I believe my thoughts on the demo were something like..
Sooooooo..... Downloaded the demo...
Played the demo on the way home...
Failed a few times due to public transport issues...
Didn't fully read instructions so, NFI what I was also doing...
Got a bunch of Standard clears...
Checked PS Store, $43???
Fuck that, will wait for sale or PS+
.... 24hrs later ... I had found out that Perfect meant no dropped notes, and decided that Excellent was the highest rank... achieved that for the 3 songs and then deleted the demo...
Apr 4th - Cracked and bought it off PSN (I'm so weak! even if was still a week!) , this game is my to and from work game.
Apr 8th - I cleared Normal with a mix of Great/Excellent rankings, didn't do Easy at the moment, and tried the first song on Hard and then that same song on Extreme. Going to be rather fun and intense to try and "Excellent" this game!
Apr 14th - DLC purchased... (OMG, what is happening to me!)
May 2nd - I have a major problem with this game now and that is that I keep moving the goalposts...
Easy & Normal are all now at Perfect rank... and I have about 4-5 Perfects under Hard (one of which was a 7-8 Star difficulty), the OCD in me suggests that if I can Perfect one of the harder songs on Hard, then I can do them all.
May 21st - All hard songs all completed to Perfect. Still not much time has been spent on Extreme songs. My ultimate goal for Hard was to not use any Bonus items and I cleared that, Rin-chan Now! for some reason was the sticking point song, only took 39 complete playthroughs to get it, numerous retries obviously!
Looking at game time, 70hrs! the fuck did all that time go! lol
I'm at the crossroads though at the moment, largely being a button only player, I need to train myself on using the D-Pad more, so going to dive into the Diva Room stuff for another 10-20hrs or so and then come back to learn in Extreme, I'm honest enough to know that Extreme would be the death of me, so hopefully finishing it and perhaps a global average of 95% is enough for me.
By that time, comes about, I'll have likely imported the PS3 version also and happily do this all over again! God damn addictive songs that I don't understand a single word of!!!!!!