NEW Pop'n Music: Welcome to Wonderland!

NEW Pop'n Music: Welcome to Wonderland--
General information
Theme	Alice in Wonderland
Hardware	Arcade
Date Release	N/A
Number of Licensed Songs	2
Number of Original Songs	6
Number of CS Songs	?
Number of Crossover Songs	?
Number of Remixes	?
Number of Cut Songs	?
Total Number of Songs	8
Staff
Producer(s)	?
Director(s)	?
Staff	?
Programmer(s)	?
Chronology
Previous	-
Next	-

NEW Pop'n Music: Welcome to Wonderland! is a 2020 music/rhythm video game developed by BEMANI and published by KONAMI.

This incarnation serves as a complete revamp of the Pop'n Music franchise, with a completely new arcade cabinet and game mechanics. Location tests were held from February 7th to 8th, 2020 at JAEPO 2020.

It is unknown if NEW Pop'n Music: Welcome to Wonderland! would be an installment for the main game title lineup or a spinoff game, before its development had been ceased.

Gameplay and Development

Gameplay

There were numerous changes to gameplay between this game and previous installments.

• The 9 buttons have been made smaller and moved closer towards the front end of the cabinet in order to:
  1. Arrange them so each button is under its respective column on-screen.
  2. Make room for a new touch slider panel. This touch slider introduces 2 new note types:
     • Light pop-kun (ライトポップ君, Light pop-kun^?) which can be hit with either the regular buttons or the touch panel.
     • Flick pop-kun (フリックポップ君, Flick pop-kun^?) which can be hit by flicking the touch panel left or right, depending on what direction you have to flick.

Song charts continue to use the traditional 9 buttons during gameplay, but players can also use the touch slider nearly simultaneously to follow Light and Flick Pop-kuns as required on screen.

This game only contains NORMAL and HYPER charts for each song, and the rating scale is revamped.

Possible Cancellation Of The Title

The game did not appear as an upcoming game in Konami's FY2021 2nd Quarter Financial Results, and there has been no news at all regarding the title since location tests occurred. The release of pop'n music 解明リドルズ instead of Wonderland has led to fan speculation that development of the game has likely been cancelled.

Reception

This newer incarnation and rebranding received critical backlash from Pop'n Music fans and the music/rhythm video game community, complaining about the new character sprites (3D chibi characters instead of the original 2D animated caricatures), the noticeably smaller controller size, lack of quantity of characters, and the addition of a touch slider panel similar to that used in other rhythm games like Chunithm or Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade. Fans also disliked the game's toys-to-life feature using flat acrylic figures of the mainstay characters, Mimi and Nyami.

Trivia

• Unlike previous Pop'n Music game incarnations, banners became smaller and were moved towards the left-side of the screen, near the player's character.
  • Rival characters for songs are absent on the music select screen.
• Mimi and Nyami are the only selectable characters and no one else.
• Playable and rival characters are now 3D-rendered chibi caricatures, unlike the 2D sprites from previous titles.
• The acrylic standees that were introduced contained barcodes that could be scanned by the game, seemingly letting you play as that character.
• The Groove Gauge and Music Timer bars are now vertical and were moved to opposing sides of the screen. The Groove Gauge is to the right of the player character, and the Music Timer is left of the rival character.
• The two new licenses that appeared during NEW pop'n music Welcome to Wonderland's location test, Phantom Joke and 少年よ我に帰れ, were added to pop'n msuic peace on August 3rd, 2020, further contributing to fan speculations of the game being shelved.
• CHARA-POP is absent from this game.

External Links

RemyWiki page