YMMV / In the Groove

• Americans Hate Tingle: You would expect that since it's the Spiritual Licensee to DDR and with much harder charts, it would catch on with top-tier Japanese players. It didn't; the physical games barely released in Japan, and most Japanese players prefer DDR and its chart style and music. The ITG scene is almost exclusively Western. Of course, this may have served to damage the Japanese fandom. Once DDR A was released in America, several Americans who had honed their skills on ITG and Stepmania officially became some of the greatest DDR players in the world.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Hardcore of the North Single Expert has over 800 steps. By no means easy, but the arrangement and consistency makes it easier than some charts that have fewer steps.
• Follow the Leader: Both ways. In The Groove took the 4-arrow paradigm from DDR and ran with it, including new features like mines (which were already in Stepmania). In DDR X, DDR added shock arrows, which are pretty much mines. However, shock arrows always cover all four panels, which one might argue is missing the point of mines in the first place. In DDR SuperNOVA, they also started introducing ITG-level boss songs, though this may be more because players had pretty much 100-percented the whole DDR series at that point.
• Funny Moments: 800$ BOOM. A player forgets to take his feet off, hits a mine, and loses a tournament.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the r21 patch for ITG2, players can play custom stepfiles, but the song cannot be tagged as being longer than 2 minutes. Emphasis on "tagged"; the implementation of the feature read from the music file's metadata to determine length. In the updated r23 patch, songs now automatically cut off at 2 minutes and 15 seconds, regardless.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The "We're just getting started!" Splash in the original game. Only one more would be released. Though it can also be seen as Heartwarming in Hindsight given that some of the ITG team would go on to create StepManiaX.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the mid-noughties, Konami sued Roxor over this game's patent infringement on DanceDanceRevolution as well as for the reuse of DDR cabs for ITG, and acquired the rights to ITG (i.e. killed it). Then in 2020, famously former DDR sound director Naoki Maeda, as well as Paula Terry who is well-known for her vocal work for BEMANI songs, would contribute songs to ITG's Spiritual Successor, StepManiaX. In other words, the faces of DDR are now providing songs to DDR's competitor!
  • "Konami will sue," you say? The StepManiaX team first went to Konami to ensure that no legal toes would be stepped on before releasing the game. In other words, Konami will no longer sue.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • 800$ BOOM (In a tournament, both players appeared to have gotten a perfect score on "Liquid Moon" in the tournament's final round. But one player, thinking the round was over, started celebrating and forgot to take his feet off the panels right at the end, hitting a row of mines and dropping his score. The "$800" refers to the difference in prize money, since he dropped from first place to fourth as a result of his score going down.)
  • KONAMI WILL SUE (Refers to the fact that ITG is a Spiritual Licensee to DDR. It got a lot less funny when Konami actually did sue.)
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: Overall, the Driven course may be harder on Hard than on Normal. However, there is one part near the end of Monolith where, on Hard, there is a steady stream of arrows, and on Normal, there are only off-beat (blue) arrows. Combined with the mods in the course, these arrows are difficult to hit at all, while the stream on Hard is easier to read.
• Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Despite its obvious DDR inspiration, it's still a very popular game in the Western rhythm game community due to the quality-of-life touches it added and its charting style, with fans continuing to make modded editions of the game with new songs and charts long after the official editions were snuffed out by Konami's lawyers.
• Older Than They Think: A lot of features commonly thought to be introduced in ITG, such as different scroll perspectives and mines, actually first appeared in Stepmania, which this game uses a fork of.
• Porting Disaster: The PS2 port. The game was functional, and even included some cool features like a screen that displayed your overall progress in the game, but:
  • The loading times, especially when going back to a previous menu, were pretty bad.
  • The fonts and overall design weren't altered at all to accommodate the PS2's video resolution, making the smaller text hard to read, akin to Gran Turismo 2.
  • Perhaps worst of all, the songs were subject to one of the most surreal cases of Bowdlerization in recent history. Roxor followed every single instruction given to them from the ESRB to cement an E rating. Lyrics such as "beware of the dark side of town" were replaced with lyrics elsewhere in the song, which sounds as natural as one would expect. Now it's the wet side of town. Surprisingly, this didn't affect actual gameplay too badly. Fortunately, the PC port had the proper uncensored music, and didn't have any of the other problems the PS2 port had.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Plenty based on DDR songs.
  • The first game has "Disconnected" for "PARANOiA", "I Think I Like That Sound" for "Drop Out", "Hand of Time" for "Healing Vision", and "Pandemonium" for "Gamelan de Couple" and "Legend of MAX".
  • The second has "Energizer" for "MAX 300", which even nicks the slow part of "neoMAX", a fan remix of "MAX 300". "Energizer" piles on the references to the MAX series especially thick. It's very likely named as it is due to "Energizer Max" batteries, it has a big jump followed by slow section in the middle (though it's longer and brighter than the slowdown in "The Legend of MAX" - the background video shows a freaking field of flowers), and the first sixteen steps of both the Medium and Hard charts are the same as the Medium chart from "The legend of MAX".
  • Not every Suspiciously Similar Song in ITG is taken from DDR though. The second game has "Determinator" for "You Are What You Is".
  • "We Know What To Do" (which they neglected to mention is a very off-context remix of the original) resembles "Crow Song", a popular StepMania song of the day.
  • And finally there's "Bumble Bee" and "Tough Enough", licensed songs that were in DDR, albeit with shorter edits.
• That One Attack:
  • Determinator Single Expert 12. Seventeen arrows per second. That's like an engine running at 1000 RPM, except replace "engine" with "feet".
  • Delirium Single Expert is a cakewalk by 12 standards for most of the song... but the last part is a long stream of 1\16th arrows at 166 BPM (eleven arrows per second) that just. Won't. Stop.
  • The "Speed Up" section in Robotix on Expert. To clarify, it's a steady, consistent 8th note pattern on the left and right arrows, however the scrolling gradually gets faster and faster until it's impossible to read visually, thus forcing you to keep to the beat of the 8th notes through your own internal rhythm.
  • Tell is rather a harsh Single Expert 12 chart because of its infamous use of a 16th triplet pattern that ends awkwardly with a jump. Because this chart uses it so frequently the community coined the term "Tell Jumps" for it whenever it surfaced in other charts.
  • The "Fade In" modifier on courses, which makes arrows not appear until they're halfway up the screen. While other modifiers such as "alternate" are worse, those ones are accordingly in courses known for having crazy modifiers and lighter steps. "Fade in", on the other hand, appears casually in a lot of the courses, and mean you have half the reaction time you normally do to hit the arrows.
  • Utopia Single Expert 11. The chart is solid for the most part until it gets to two certain sections where the arrows just... stop going with the rhythm of the music. It is ridiculously annoying for those trying to get a Quad Star/100% on the song. Chart can be seen here
• That One Boss:
  • Any ZiGZaG song is definitely one, but special mention goes to the VerTex songs for their infamous high scroll speed and mine density.
  • "Disconnected Disco" on Expert Double.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Opinions are divided on the issue of whether ITG is a ripoff of DDR or a worthy successor. Opinions are generally divided by which side of the Atlantic that someone falls on.
• Vindicated by History: Mines were derided at first for being a form of Fake Difficulty. Then when DanceDanceRevolution X introduced Shock Arrows, those were criticized for being ITG mines but covering all four panels at once and eight in Double Play (with the rare "only one side" Shock Arrows here and there), causing ITG mines to be viewed in a better light due to affording more flexibility with chart design since mines can be placed on fewer than four arrows at the same time.