Trivia / CHUNITHM

• Cash-Cow Franchise: CHUNITHM is one of Sega Amusement's highest-grossing arcade titles, rivaling the likes of other rhythm game top-grossers like beatmania IIDX.
• Development Gag: The 蔵 (Warehouse) WORLD'S END charts are all early versions of the ORIGINAL charts that got scrapped at some point.
• Late Export for You:
  • Five years after the game's original Japan release, the game finally got an overseas version for the East Asia market, CHUNITHM SUPER STAR, in November 2020. Overseas players would then finally nearly catch up with Japan with CHUNITHM NEW being released in 2022, roughly a year after the Japanese version, bringing the international version just a few months behind the Japanese version. The exact rollout depends on country: Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea got CHUNITHM in 2020, but Philippines had to wait until 2022 for its arrival in Quantum chain-arcades and Indonesia in 2023 when the Singaporean arcade chain Cow Play Cow Moo opened up a branch in Indonesia and brought a few cabs for their grand opening.
  • In 2022, China got a region-tailored release based on CHUNITHM NEW.
• No Dub for You: In the international version, Chuni Penguin still speaks in Japanese. She does have a dub in the Chinese version, however.
• No Export for You:
  • Like maimai, the game is only available on the Eastern side of the Pacific (and even then, not many parts of Asia has the game compared to it’s sibling maimai). The official Round 1 USA Twitter explains that this is due to licensing issues^note Remember that many music games, this one included, have a lot of Japanese licensed songs, and trying to get licenses for those songs so that the games they're on can be legally played outside of Japan can often be expensive and/or difficult. This is what part of what lead to SEGA producing different builds of the game for Japan and overseas. that prevent the game, amongst other popular music games, from being brought across the Pacific. Eventually the game started appearing in Round 1 USA locations, running PARADISE LOST with all online functions disabled, but as these are Japanese builds, they are technically not localized versions.
  • The "Gold" cabinet introduced for CHUNITHM NEW and which features 120 FPS gameplay among other things was released for Japanese arcades only. The overseas version instead simply got NEW as a software update.
• No Port For You: Like many arcade rhythm games, don't expect to play this in the comfort of your own home unless you buy the cabinet and have a way to bypass the game's Copy Protection. The next best option is to use a simulator of the game such as Seaurchin with a fan-made arcade-spec controller, and those are still not cheap.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Sega did not retire the use of 60 Hz Silver Cabinets in Japan starting from NEW. There are still some arcades in Japan that use Silver Cabinets rather than or in addition to the 120 Hz Gold Cabinets for current versions. In fact, the game even saves certain game options separately for 60 and 120 Hz cabs.
• Remade for the Export: Rather than release an existing, much less current version of the game to the pan-Asian market, SEGA released SUPER STAR, which is a unique version based on STAR's interface. The official explanation is that the interface of CRYSTAL and CRYSTAL PLUS would be overwhelming for newcomers and to start new-to-Chuni regions off with a smaller songlist with less licensing for SEGA to deal with.
  • In a developer's note, SEGA is planning to move to CHUNITHM NEW, only a year after its maiden international release.