I'm very happy to say that this game has blown my expectations from last year. I thought this game is going to be dead in a few months, but after a relatively consistent line of updates, mainly the technical side but also the content, I can say that this game has blown away DJMAX Respect V from my preferred rhythm game of choice.

For a game worked on by a very small dev team (4 main developers! Although with outsourced help), the passion is definitely felt here: to make a rhythm game that is extremely well optimized (I even broke 1000 FPS!), with a ton of customization, brimming with style and polish, and, of course, unique bangers.

1st anniversary livestream impressions: What can I say... I'm shocked. Positively. They finally made a game that sold and decided to go all out with the composer list. This has truly became some sort of celebration to rhythm games internationally, and I'm so glad to be the witness. I'll gladly pay more than 30 bucks for the upcoming DLC.

This made me interested into the past before this game existed and... well, long story short, this game's (or even the entire franchise's) history has been full of bumps and roadblocks and to see the underdog triumph like this is nothing short of amazing. As the title might indicate, this is, in fact, the second attempted reboot of EZ2ON. Namuwiki has a pretty comprehensive history about this franchise's past games, although it's Korean only. It's a pretty interesting read.

Welcome to the big leagues.

Original review below (~1 week after early access launch):

I'm recommending this game with heavy caution because it is in early access, and the servers aren't really stable -- yet this game is always online for some reason even if it doesn't really have any playable online features at the moment.

I'm going to draw a lot of comparisons with DJMAX as this is also series with a really old legacy that they're bringing to the modern day. In fact, the game has 4K, 5K, 6K and 8K modes similar to DJMAX Respect V, but unlike DJMAX, 8K is actually 8K instead of 6K+2.

The EZ2DJ originals set list is (currently) not as robust as DJMAX. It has 222 songs at the time of review, consisting of mostly hip hop while songs from newer entries really only focus on techno with *maybe* some "anime pop" as I would call it. It also has a lot more remixes of songs rather than originals which really puts the game's song count a lot lower than 222. It doesn't really get better with newer updates as they only added 1 original EZ2DJ song from 2019, while the rest of them are BMS. Currently, if you're playing this game for originals, it's not really worth the consideration.

...but if you want a 5/6/8K game with harder charting and timing, this is an easy buy. The difficulty ceiling is much higher than DJMAX and it definitely fills a gap that other community-curated games aren't filling any time soon due to the meta. And honestly, having BMS songs isn't really a net negative at this point because the set list isn't that robust. This is a (much) harder alternative to DJMAX that you may want to consider purchasing once the game is more developed.