Man, I finished the songs on normal, and experienced a pretty steep learning curve (day 1 patch wasn't out so I couldn't use LR for scratches) and now I'm in hard with the LR patch.
Good god. It is way too hard to play this game and it's bumming me out. Normal has become not exciting enough and hard is killing me. I feel like my eyes are splitting and I'm feeling actual discomfort in my eyes after failing Pursuing My True Self (Shinichi Osawa Remix) about 10 times. I did eventually pass it though.
I don't know... I think this might be the worst implementation of a rhythm game I have experienced. Splitting the notes between both sides is pretty bad. I can't keep up with everything on screen because the notes like to break their clockwise/counterclockwise patterns sometimes and go all over the place. It also feels like some of those notes are designed to get lost in the mess of a screen sometimes.
Also, tying the pass/fail to the health bar is pretty lame. It's the reason I couldn't pass the above song. I had a fine score plenty of times but made some mistakes at the end and couldn't get back into green before the end.
It'd be nice to see a patch to adjust hype penalties on missed notes in Hard.
It's even worse on All Night. One or two misses and I am already falling the song.
Hitting the circles helps a lot regarding the public, but holy hell at some of their positions.
Use mods.
And it's weird to see several complaints about the UI. Are you guys comparing this to Project Diva fP4D's closest analogwhere the notes literally appear all over the screen with no rules associated with them, and are sometimes even created to intentionally misdirect and confuse the player?
PDF isn't even bad. Most of the songs will have the next note near each other. You don't need to search it and the note won't appear suddenly on the other side of the screen.
They do some tricks to throw you off, but either you get surprised once or you can just see the note trajectory (notes next to each other follow each other really close).The timer in the notes also helps if you don't know where they are coming from.
Project Diva was my second rhythm game ever and I had less issue with it's UI than I had with P4D.
The biggest problem to me is that the yellow notes and circles blends with the background. I have no issue with double and hold, but the regular notes should have been red or any other color but yellow.