Last updated: Sep 2022

With the SOUND VOLTEX section of BEMANI PRO LEAGUE's second season coming up, here's a summary of how the tournament will work overall, along with specifics of the first few parts, based on what's on the BPL website.

Note that not all details are out yet as there is a lot of information that will be revealed later. Some details might get edited into this post; some might go into a future post.

Team Composition

There will be 8 teams, with each team consisting of 3 pro e-sports players. The teams are all affiliated with entertainment companies in Japan.

Tournament Flow

The tournament will consist of a regular stage, a quarterfinal stage, a semifinal stage and a final as follows:

To summarise:

• The top two teams in the Regular Stage will jump straight to the semifinals, with the teams ranked 3 to 6 moving onto the quarterfinals. The bottom two teams drop out.
• The top two teams from the quarterfinals will move onto the semifinals, joining the two teams that skipped ahead after the first stage.
• The top two teams from the semifinals will move onto the finals.

Regular Stage

Each match in this first Regular Stage will consist of three battles:

• 先鋒戦 (Vanguard battle) – A 1-vs-1 MEGAMIX BATTLE. Worth 3pt.
• 中堅戦 (Centre guard battle) – A 2-vs-2 tag battle. Both teams pick a song each for a total of two songs, and compete by the sum of EX score of the two players per team. Each song won is worth 2pt.
• 大将戦 (General battle) – A 1-vs-1 single battle. Both players pick a song each, plus there'll be a new song from the "BEMAN PRO LEAGUE -SEASON 2- Participation Confirmation Original Song Contest" for a total of 3 songs. The players will compete by EX score. The player-picked songs will be worth 2pt each, and the new song will be worth 3pt.

The player-picked songs in the tag and single battles will be subject to theme and level restrictions.

• The theme restrictions are all EFFECT RADAR attributes (NOTES, PEAK, TSUMAMI, ONE-HAND, HAND-TRIP, TRICKY). How they'll be decided upon will be revealed later.
• The level restrictions are as follows:

The list of selectable songs will also be revealed at a later date.

Some additional restrictions:

• Each player's participation in a match has an associated cost, to be explained in detail later.
• All players must participate in each match.
• Songs selected by a team cannot be selected again by that team within the same stage.

League and Interleague Matches

At the start of the Regular Stage, the eight teams are divided into an "L" League and an "R" League.

The L League consists of the teams:

• APINA VRAMeS
• GiGO
• GAME PANIC
• TAITO STATION Tradz

The R League consists of the teams:

• SILKHAT
• SUPERNOVA Tohoku
• ROUND1
• レジャーランド (LEISURELAND)

The teams within each league will play each other once in a round-robin fashion. After each match (as outlined above), teams will receive victory points as follows:

After all the league matches are over, teams are ranked within each of their leagues based on victory points received. Their rankings within each league determine the interleague matches:

• L League 1st place vs. R League 4th place
• L League 2nd place vs. R League 3rd place
• L League 3rd place vs. R League 2nd place
• L League 4th place vs. R League 1st place

Also based on the results of the league matches, the points awarded in each interleague match will be as follows:

The results of the interleague matches will determine the final overall rankings for the Regular Stage.

Other Stages

The general flow for the quarterfinals onwards have already been described above, but there's level restrictions per stage as follows:

• Quarterfinals, semifinals: Lv17 to Lv19
• Finals: Lv17 to Lv20

Specifics for the remaining stages will come out later.

Draft Meeting

On Sep 18 there'll be a draft meeting where each team's players and theme music will be decided. There are 34 player candidates, so not all of them will be chosen. This page has a list of candidate player profiles.

Player Selection

3 players will be drafted into each team via bidding, with bidding per round working as follows:

• Each team with the right to bid will simultaneously name a player.
• Players chosen by only one team will go to that team. Players chosen by multiple teams will have their team decided by lottery.
• Teams that failed the lottery will have the right to bid again, repeating the steps above until all teams use up their rights to bid.

Theme Music Selection

Each team will pick their own theme music from a number of candidates via the same bidding process as above.