maimai milestones
june 15, 2025
so, i've been playing maimai for, what, almost a year at this point?
this silly little washing machine rhythm game has taken up way too much of my time and money. and honestly? i barely regret it! it's been such a nice investment of my time and as a bonus it can be a great form of *some* exercise.
literally after i posted the last entry however, i went up to the nearest arcade that had these... and this happened.
10k rating! i guess it's a pretty big milestone for a maimai player to reach 10,000 rating? the people i was playing with were congratulating me, and i decided to have a bit of a celebratory dinner of sushi and a cream cheese waffle. it's not a lot, but it was good, and that's what mattered, but enough about the food! we should answer the question of...
how did we get here?
i guess this all starts way way back? this is when i had my first proper exposure to maimai. there's this arcade near where my mom used to work? it didn't have a lot of games, but they had maimai DX there. usually, i would just go past it and play on the initial d arcade cabs they also had. but one day i decided to give it a go. i don't remember all that much other than absolutely fumbling it on lagtrain at advanced difficulty.
actually, unbeknownst to past-Winter, i've actually seen maimai way before, just didn't know what
it was called! i might've first seen it in a jaidenanimations video where she talks about her
time in japan.
(this is the part of the video
i'm talking about)
fast-forward a few years later, i go to a mall with my family. we've been there before lots of
times already, actually. i was in for a big surprise there. the newer arcade there had somehow
gotten ahold of a pair of maimai buddies cabs! this was a total shock to me since this was the
first time i've ever seen this particular chain of arcades have maimai. so naturally, i give it
a go again. after that, i do my due diligence and research more on the game and decide for myself
whether it'd be worth it to start.
(saow's video(s) on this sorta stuff helped
me a lot)
i decided "why the hell not" or whatever, and my washing machine journey officially began!
okay, now we're getting there
i found that there were certain levels i would be comfortable playing at. at the time i started out playing advanced charts at about levels 7 to 8+. i was only slightly increasing the difficulty until i decided to ramp up the difficulty by beginning to play expert charts at about levels 8-9+ unfortunately, i don't have a full timeline of things, so this is based off of my shitty memory. now, however, my difficulty "comfort zone" sits at around 9 to 11+ at expert charts. fortunately, i am able to do some lower level master charts, but i haven't S-ranked any of them so far.
back then, i never knew when was the next time i could play maimai. it was only whenever my family would go to a mall that had it or when i could meet up with my friends and they had that where we were headed. it was only recently that i've started to have a more regular play schedule. ever since summer vacation started, i've kinda made it a sort of goal to play every week at the nearest mall that had the game. so far, i'd say i've been at it consistently. and, unfortunately i am broke now. haha...
it was during one of these weekly play sessions when i encountered some people playing that day. certainly not an unusual occurrence, it's happened before, but since there was only one maimai cab, the queue was kinda long. one of the players who were there greeted me and asked if i was in the discord server. naturally, i said no, i wasn't even aware of a discord server for the local player community so this was a big shock. the folks there seem to be pretty nice, actually. i don't talk like... a whole lot. i'm not the type to talk a lot in servers, i'll be honest. actually, some folks from that server were actually the ones who were with me that day i reached 10k! i would say that my maimai journey so far has been great. but what happens now?
going from here
i'll be honest: i dunno. i'll still keep playing, practicing, improving for as long as i can. but sadly, my time to play maimai is rather limited. i don't know when, but, i'll be moving to canada soon. sadly, maimai isn't as prevalent and, uh, up to date in north america. this means this little chapter of my silly life will come to an end. but i'm glad it happened.