Scrappy Mechanic / Rhythm Game

• Guitar Hero III:
  • A Boss Battle mode, where periodically through the main career mode, the player will have to guitar-duel famous guitarists such as Tom Morello, Slash and the Devil. It's exactly what you'd expect to happen when incorporating Mario Kart-esque powerups into a Rhythm Game: The AI opponents play flawlessly, and depending on the player, the difficulty of the matches ranges from trivial to absolutely impossible, thanks to being almost completely dependent on getting the right powerups and using them at the right time, and if the AI can do the same to you. It should already be telling that the first guitar duel is said to be the hardest, simply because your opponent's notechart simply doesn't have enough consecutive notes for you to reliably defeat him with anything but a specific powerup. This is probably why World Tour reworked the duels (your opponent still plays flawlessly, but gains multiplier at a much slower rate and is capped at 3x, and power-ups are gone, so the objective is simply having a higher score than your opponent) and completely removed from the campaign in later titles.
  • The Whammy Bar is annoying to players and observers alike. Not only is it required to max out points on some songs (darn that Star Power meter), but it ruins notes that were never meant to be whammied. That, and you have to take your hand off the strum bar to use it, so on shorter notes or staggered chords, it can be a nightmare.
• The PS1 port of DanceDanceRevolution 1st Mix brings us Arrange Mode, which is essentially the same as normal mode, with one key difference: if you step on a panel when you aren't supposed to, instead of nothing happening, you instead get an "OUCH!!" judgment, which drains your Life Meter even moreso than a Miss. So if you have a crappy pad, or you like freestyling, or you step on panels when nothing's happening to keep the beat...
  • DDR X introduces shock arrows; if your foot is down when they reach the target zone, your combo breaks, your health takes a hit, and the whole chart goes invisible for about a second. Even worse is how they're placed: while mines in In the Groove / Pump It Up Pro // StepMania can be placed in one or two columns at a time if one wishes, shock arows ALWAYS fill all of the columns. This means you'll have to jump completely off the pad every time they come. And you'll be doing a LOT of said jumping, especially in "Horatio". They come back in X2, where every Challenge chart to contain them is EXACTLY THE SAME as Expert, only with the shock arrows replacing certain steps.
  • Even as of the current game, you're still required to pay double price just to play Double Play, a mode in which one player uses both sets of panels, unless the "joint premium" setting is switched on. In contrast, beatmania IIDX and Pump It Up not only allow double modes on a single credit, but will even let you switch between single and double between songs.
• Pump It Up:
  • DDR is pretty merciful with its doubles charts, never requiring the player to make jumps with the arrows more than ~2.2 cells apart. No such mercy in Pump, where at its highest levels, the game expects you to be able to do "stretch" jumps and rolls (patterns that require hitting quickly or simultaneously hitting panels on extreme opposite ends of the stage, such as 1P's ↙ and 2P's ↘). Risking intense muscle pain just to make these jumps is not fun.
  • And as if that wasn't bad enough, Pump It Up also introduced the concept of three pad chords, requiring you to -you guessed it- slap a third pad with your hand while executing a jump onto two more, or slapping a pad while maintaining a 2-pad hold note. These would not only throw you off-balance and be difficult to time, you'd likely hurt your palms on the hard surface of the pads, which are after all designed to be stamped on.
  • One of the longstanding complaints with the game particularly from the competitive scene is the scoring system. Okay, so you get a fixed number of points based on step judgement with Perfects giving 1000 points, no problem. However, the game throws a combo bonus on top of that: you get 1000 more points on a Perfect or Great if your combo is 51 or more which means you lose 1000 potential points on a Good and 50000 on a combo break, in a game where scores typically reach into the low millions by the end of the chart. In a tournament, a player who is significantly ahead in terms of accuracy can lose the entire round to their opponent simply because they missed once and their opponent got a full combo even if said opponent has relatively lousy accuracy. This video by championship-level player happyf333tz goes into further details.
    happyf333tz: Let's say two players both get one Miss literally one note apart from each other in a song. You would expect a draw, since both players missed one note, right? Wrong. Because of the fact that the score system relies heavily on combo, the player with one higher Combo would be the winner in this situation. And this begs the question: What makes that one different note more valuable than the other? ^note In the example he cites, the judge counts of both players are identical, but Player 1 has a 50 max combo and 66500 points, and Player 2 has a 51 max combo and 67500 points.
  • In order to get the highest possible scores, you need to enable Rank Mode, which gives you a Score Multiplier in exchange for forcing on features that make the game more difficult. This wouldn't be too bad, if not for several forms of Fake Difficulty: background videos are set at full brightness, stage break is on (meaning you can not only fail by draining the lifebar, this also voids your remaining hearts), and timing windows are set to Very Hard Judge; that last point isn't problematic in and of itself, but Pump has a non-negligible number of charts that are not synced correctly, and using Hard or Very Hard judge makes incorrect sync stand out even more.
• Minigames in the Patapon series. The main gameplay uses player-entered rhythm based musical sequences that call for a variety of attacks, and then every single minigame is a call-repeat rhythm game that uses a single button (or TWO for a minigame in Patapon 2). These minigames are sometimes the only way to get top level weapons.
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents:
  • Spinners are what set the dedicated players apart. Partway or at the very end of a song, you're meant to stop tapping beats and instead draw really fast circles on your DS screen while a timer counts down. Do well and you'll gain tons of bonus points - do poorly and you'll lose a sizable portion of your health meter. Towards the end of the harder difficulties, the spinners get so demanding that no matter how flawless a player's rhythm is, they'll live or die based solely on the dexterity of their wrist. Naturally, those who fail to meet the expectations of the later spinners will quickly grow to hate them since they alone make the final songs near-unbeatable or at least impossible to score a Perfect on, putting the higher ranks out of reach.
  • The scoring system is pretty frustrating. Each note has a base value of up to 300 points, depending on how well you time the note. Seems pretty standard for a rhythm game. Then comes the combo multiplier; by the end of the song, a single note can be worth tens of thousands of points. In other rhythm games, missing a note simply means you lose a few points. Here, missing just one note will completely botch your score, especially if said miss is in the middle of the song. Mercifully, the Gameplay Grading system is strictly based on note accuracy, but it leads to situations where an A-ranked run scores much, much higher than an S-ranked run.
  • And if you're playing the popular OTO/EBA clone osu!, you get all of the above, plus multipliers for using modifiers as well. One particular modifier speeds up the song by 50%. This means to obtain a top-tier score on a song, you not only need to not miss a single note ever, you also need to increase the song speed, which makes the chart much more difficult and will probably make the song sound terrible.
  • The Life Meter continuously drains, making the Ouendan series some of the few rhythm games where you can fail a song in the middle of a combo.
• DJMAX Technika's unlock system. On completing certain missions in Platinum Crew mode, you'll unlock a song (or in the case of one mission, a course)...but you can only use that unlocked song or course 3 times before you have to unlock it again. Thankfully, this is being revised for Technika 2 where you gain unlocks by simply going onto the Platinum Crew website and purchasing the unlocks once using your in-game currency. The one flipside to this is that unlocks are fairly expensive, especially for the more difficult songs.
• beatmania IIDX:
  • Backspin Scratches, in which you continuously spin the turntable in one direction until the end of the note, then spin it the other way at the very end. It's awkward to keep spinning the turntable, and even moreso to spin it back at the end, especially if there are key notes between the start and the end of the scratching. You can enable the Legacy option to get rid of them, but you'll be stuck with an Assist Clear if you do.
    • Multi-Spin Scratches are this but even worse, requiring you to change directions multiple times during the note.
  • The decision to remove original songs with every new release. This was originally done to save on disk space, but as Technology Marches On there's less of a reason to do so, as the low cost of storage means there's plenty of room for them even as more songs get added over time (indeed, removed songs are often Dummied Out instead of deleted from the game entirely). It's often thought that it's now done so that they can be re-added to future releases as an easy way of adding "new" content, as IIDX is the only BEMANI series that still removes original songs on a regular basis.
• Directional scratch notes in DJ Hero. If you get many of these in a row, you'll need to press the button, spin the turntable controller in the correct direction for a very short amount of time, stop spinning, and repeat. Needless to say, doing this many times in quick succession can be physically painful.
• Rock Band:
  • A bug in drumming called "squeezing", which is a scrappy for those anal about the scoring. If you hit the crash on a fill a little early, and then in the next split-second hit what would have been there if the fill wasn't in the way, you get the points for hitting those notes. This means you have to memorize what to hit and finish fills a little awkwardly for extra points. Usually not enough to make a difference unless both players are doing perfect, but can cause a rift between Scrubs and "Stop Having Fun" Guys. Singing has a different version of squeezing; in some cases, for the absolute maximum points, you need to hit overdrive exactly as the overdrive zone ends, as opposed to doing so in the middle of the zone. If you're too late though, you'll fall out of the zone and not trigger overdrive at all, and the optimal point isn't on rhythm. This also encourages using the select button instead of shouting for overdrive, since it's more precise. Similarly, arrhythmic overdrive timing also applies to guitar\bass\keyboards, same as Guitar Hero.
  • Drum fills in general are slightly controversial among Rock Band players, in that choosing not to trigger Overdrive can allow drummers to coast through parts of songs that might otherwise prove deviously hard. It does hurt your score to do this though, and it's basically a useless strategy in Rock Band 3, where no-fail mode does not disqualify.
  • The two DS Rock Band games and the only on PSP share an annoyance that is sure to ruin your gameplay experience: You are required to switch tracks to play as different instruments at the end of every chain. Thankfully the games are more generous in difficulty, but the game often forgets to signal you to PREPARE for a solo. Expect failing a Full Combo only because a surprise Guitar Solo brought you from drum to guitar track INSTANTLY.
• Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA:
  • In the first game, scoring is greatly increased during a single section of each song called Chance time. A single perfect hit normally awards 500 points, with up to 250 points of combo bonus. In Chance Time, the combo bonus raises 20 times faster and caps 5000 points higher, meaning a single Chance Time commonly awards more points than the entire rest of the song, despite being less than twenty seconds long. This meant that unless you are gunning for a perfect score, 90% of the game is almost completely irrelevant. Perhaps the sheer weight of Chance Time sections are why they're absent from the Project DIVA Arcade and Project Mirai games.
  • It works in reverse, too. There are some songs that are scored so harshly that missing even one note in chance time guarantees a rank of STANDARD. Frustrating if you're trying to unlock the extra models.
  • The timing windows in both games in general are fairly harsh by typical Rhythm Game standards. This is compounded by any judgment below FINE (the second highest out of 5 possible note judgments) being a combo break; compare to IIDX where a GOOD (the 3rd highest out of 5 judgments) will maintain a combo, or DanceDanceRevolution where a GOOD (again, 3rd highest) will break a combo but the timing windows are looser. This wouldn't be much of a problem for those just wanting to beat songs, but you are required to hit a certain percentage of notes with combo-maintaining judgments to clear the song (80% in Diva 2nd, varying depending on difficulty level in Diva Arcade) on top of keeping your Life Meter above 0 during the song.
  • Project Mirai DX
    • While you're watching the music videos, you can add comments like on Nico Nico Douga. What's wrong with them? To start, the max character length for a comment is 16 like in many other 3DS game contexts; fine for Japanese, not so much for Western languages, not helped by the fact that Western-region 3DSes don't allow Japanese script input. Additionally, you can only send one comment at a time via the above methods, which means if you have any multi-comment gimmicks set up in any songs, those are going to get ruined when sent to other players.
    • If you spend more than a week without interacting with a character (including your current main partner if you spend a week without booting up the game), said character will get angry and completely lock up the game until you either verbally apologize or tap a button a whole lot of times. Being punished for not constantly playing a game is not fun.
• Theatrhythm Final Fantasy:
  • The game kicks the difficulty of the already stylus-burning Dark Notes up a notch on the higher levels. Remember the slide triggers with arrows on them? On the higher levels, they rotate. Many Bads will ensue.
  • In the sequel's battle mode, the HP Swap attack is often hated because it can activate even if you have more HP than your opponent. Then again, the whole mode is a cacaphony of Mario Kart-esque screw-you-over items unless you play on Ultimate-but-with-no-EX-attacks mode.
  • In the first game, you can only earn up to 7999999 points if you use equipment and abilities; to earn the remaining 2 million required for a perfect score, you need a "Stoic" bonus obtained by not using equipment or abilities at all, defeating half the point of the RPG Elements. Thankfully, subsequent installments remove this and allow you to go up to 9999999 points no matter what.
• jubeat:
  • jubeat saucer was infamous for its "song swap" system; every month through updates carried out via Konami's e-Amusement network, some songs were cut out while other songs are introduced or revived; this mechanic made many players unhappy, and was a source of memes for some players. This made it the first BEMANI game to delete songs through online updates. However, as of February 1, 2014, almost all previously-removed songs^note licensed songs that were removed at the start of jubeat saucer and were not revived later are still gone have been revived, and song swap DID NOT come back in jubeat saucer fulfill.
  • The rating scale over time has become less and less useful, due to the wide range of challenge present amongst level 10 charts. The fact that two songs have level 10 charts on Advanced and one song, "Megalara Garuda", has level 10 charts on Advanced and BASIC, shows that the rating scale is effectively obsolete amongst top-end players.
• In O2Jam:
  • The same speed mod is applied to all players in a multiplayer room. This is a huge problem for players who have different preferences in speed modifiers for the same song.
  • Several level up missions require the usage of modifiers such as Hidden and Sudden to complete. However—and this is where the game's Freemium aspect rears its ugly head—modifiers come in the form of "rings" that each only last for one song and must be purchased with in-game currency that is bought with real money, which is unfair to players who don't have a way to purchase rings. The problem can be mitigated somewhat in that the player does not need the ring themselves; if they are in a room hosted by another player, one who has the necessary ring, they can still complete the mission without having to pony up cash.
• Love Live! School idol festival:
  • The game is infamous among Rhythm Game players for the way scoring is handled: Instead of being based strictly on what goes on within the current song, the player's score is also based on their team's Attributes, which influence points per note, and Skills, which can do things like randomly add points or loosen the timing windows every x seconds, combo, notes, or Perfects. Many new players get frustrated getting all Perfects on the first few songs yet still getting C ranks because their starting teams are complete garbage compared to what they can eventually assemble; to have a non-zero chance at getting the coveted S rank, one will need to scout out SR- and UR-rarity members and then level them up through Practice, a mechanic usually reserved for RPGs that don't try to pass themselves off as competition-viable games. While some players argue that the player still needs to hit notes accurately and string combos to gain points, there is also the counterargument that the Attribute system still caps the player's maximum score and by extension rank. As a result, many players who want to truly play competitively instead go off judgement counts and ignore everything else.
  • Related to the above, the fact that the game offers absolutely no reward for obtaining an all-Perfect performance — not even a Cosmetic Award, unlike most rhythm games where a perfect play is feasible — means there's just no point in trying to do it, and even if you do decide to go for such runs, you'll have to manually keep track of them due to score not being necessarily indicative of performance.
  • Songs in the Hits folder require you to clear the Easy chart to unlock the Normal chart and the Normal Chart to unlock the Hard chart. For rhythm game beginners, this is not a problem, but those who "immigrate" from other rhythm games may find this as an example of video game "hand-holding". Fortunately, songs in the B-Sides folder don't have this requirement; all you need is the necessary LP. Which in turn leads to another Scrappy Mechanic...
  • The harder a chart is, the more LP you need to play it. The idea is to prevent players from recklessly taking risks; on the other hand, you'll most likely need far more practice on an Expert chart than an Easy chart. Because of this, failing something like "Soldier Game" on Expert can be incredibly frustrating, because it takes a lot of grinding to have the LP capacity to try it more than once in a row.^{To elaborate on that specific example...} Expert charts in the B-Sides folder take 25 LP per attempt. You recover one LP every six minutes, or ten every hour. Therefore each attempt costs two and a half hours worth of LP. Alternatively you can use a Love Gem to instantly recharge stamina, but Love Gems are difficult to grind unless you pay for them and you might prefer to save them for Honor Scouting instead.
  • For some players, Events are this. Score Matches have you competing against other players in hopes of not getting last place and therefore getting Event point bonuses. School Idol Diary events have you farming tokens for Event songs, which you then play for Event points. Every few hundred or thousand Event points, you get rewards such as Love Gems and Coins, with an SR card as one of the highest rewards. However, this SR card comes non-Idolized. To get a second SR card so you can Idolize it, you need to finish the event with a high enough ranking percentile, which means grinding more points than a large percentage of other players. And considering that this is a "free-to-play" mobile game, this means that to stay competitive, one needs to play constantly, practically every waking hour, and maybe even sink Love Gems to refill Stamina and keep grinding. As a result, many players who want to get their Idolized SR rewards end up burning away large chunks of time from their daily lives and money just to stay in the top percentiles to get two of that particular card, often burning out on the game in the process.
• Combine the issue with timing judgements and combo breaking in Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA and scoring dependence of characters in Love Live! School idol festival and you'll get Tokyo 7th Sisters. This is mitigated by the fact that charisma restores more quickly than most rhythm games ^note  1 per minute, the fastest restoring rate of all rhythm games and all difficulties are accessible right from the start.
• Most, if not all mobile rhythm games with playable human characters will have the issue of the characters' attributes and levels influencing grading and scoring more heavily than the player's skill, which is handled differently from game to game. Love Live! School idol festival, despite what has been stated above, is not the worst example of this. For example, in the defunct mobile game IDOL-RISM, playing songs in difficulties above normal require high ranked and leveled characters to even pass them as having too low of a score results in failure regardless of your actual performance.
• In most rhythm games, getting a "perfect" rating simply requires you to clear the stage with a perfect score. In Rhythm Heaven, however, you can't just pick a minigame and flawlessly perform it; instead, you have to wait for the game to offer a "Go for a Perfect!" challenge on a randomly-selected minigame, and then attempt that minigame and perfect it. And you only get three chances; not only can you lose a chance by missing (which by the way results in a Jump Scare screech sound), but you also lose one if you quit out of the minigame in mid-attempt or play another minigame altogether. If you lose all of your chances, you'll need to play other games until the next time the game offers a Perfect challenge, which will be another minigame that you haven't gotten a Perfect on yet. The pain comes not just from trying to play perfectly, but also doing so under the intense pressure of having limited opportunities. The one saving grace is that if you got the medal for every single minigame (and thus have nothing left but to get all perfects), you will always have a "Go for a Perfect!" available.
• Groove Coaster:
  • In many rhythm games with a Harder Than Hard difficulty available, you simply need to fulfill certain conditions on the difficulty below it to unlock it for the song you want. Not so in the arcade version of GC; to unlock a song's Extra chart, you have to not only get an S rank on the Hard chart, but also on Simple and Normal despite having demonstrated that you're good enough for Extra and too good for anything below Hard.
  • Are you playing the game in the United States? Enjoy your ripoff prices! The only arcades in the US that carry Groove Coaster are Round 1 locations. Whereas most rhythm games at Round 1 that also use 2-minute cuts of songs cost 6 credits (1.50 USD before bulk-purchase and loyalty discounts) for 3 stages, Round 1 corporate dictates that all Round 1 branches in the US must set Groove Coaster to 6 credits for 2 stages. And just to add insult to injury, the US is the only country where Groove Coaster is typically set to two stages; everywhere on the Asia Pacific, the game offers 3 stages per credit no matter the price (for comparison, 100 JPY for 3 stages is the standard in Japan). In spite of griping about this from players and said players refusing to play, nothing has been done at the corporate level to address this (not helped by there being no way for non-employees to contact Round 1's corporate offices), meaning that if you want to play at a more reasonable price, you have only two options: play in Event Mode if it's available and be limited to a small pool of songs, or outright leave the country.
  • Groove Coaster 4 locks out the last 1/3 of the difficulty scale with a "Get an S rank in a chart of this difficulty minus one to unlock this difficulty level" system (for example, get an S on a level 10 chart to unlock level 11, get an S on a level 11 chart to unlock level 12, etc.). This leads to a lot of problems where you can be capable of clearing charts of one level, but you can't play that level because you can't get the 900,000 points necessary on any chart in the level below it (and it doesn't help that you can easily botch that requirement because of chain bonus; one miss can easily make you lose 50,000 potential points). Just to add insult to injury, if you played a chart in an earlier game (which doesn't have the difficulty locking system, Extra notwithstanding) and it's above your permitted level, the chart locks back up for GC4 until you meet its difficulty's requirements. This gets worse if you play in the US, where the NESiCA network goes into maintenance in the middle of the day or in the evening (in Asia, the maintenance takes place early in the morning), so even if you didn't mind playing a few casual rounds in guest play, if you mainly play "boss" charts you will not be able to play any of them during maintenance.
• 8 Beat Story does not give out cards for rank D scores, which is very jarring as other mobile rhythm games give at least one card upon clearing a stage. This essentially forces players to play lower difficulties to grind cards as leveling materials. For players entirely new to the genre, this is not a problem, but experienced players who have played other games are forced to play below their skill level for a while until they have gained sufficient team value to gain rank C in score.
• Slides in maimai are disliked by new players, partly because they require being tapped and then slid, but also because they can be rough on bare hands (as in, you can get blisters and friction burns from charts with lots of fast slides) and depending on how well-maintained the cabinet is, slides can fail to register causing "Late — Good" judgements at best and "Too Late — Miss" at worst. Many players are advised to wear low-friction gloves because of this.
• THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage does a good job of avoiding most of its competitors' scrappy elements, but falls headlong into this with the Live Party event. In this event, a team is formed from five players' cards, who then play the song. Event points are awarded based on combined performance as well as "contribution", which turns out to be heavily based on how good your card is - if you're the only SR in a group of SS Rs you can expect to wind up in last place even if you get a full combo.
• Many BEMANI games will end your credit early if you fail on any non-final stage, meaning that you have to play it safe with chart selection on those stages just so you can get the most out of your money, only reserving pushing yourself for the last stage of your credit. Some games that do this offer some form of failure insurance (beatmania IIDX offers DJ VIP Passes that guarantee three stages and playing SOUND VOLTEX on Standard Start instead of Light Start lets you continue after failing a song, but only once), but those often require surcharges that are not supported on cabinets running in the United States. Only MÚSECA guarantees three stages with no surcharge or multiplayer "saving" (having someone else in a match clear the song, which prevents everyone who failed from getting a Game Over) required, something that most modern non-Konami arcade rhythm games also do; DanceDanceRevolution also offers the same if you're playing in the US, where premium start is priced the same as standard start, but you need an eAMUSEMENT Pass to use premium
• Blaster unlocks in SOUND VOLTEX. You play songs on Excessive Rate, a special "hard" Life Meter on which letting the meter runs out causes an instant failure (as opposed to the standard "you can let the meter out, just fill it to 70% by the end of the song" behavior) to fill the Blaster gauge by about 5% per clear; when it's full, you get to play one Exhaust-difficulty chart on Blaster mode so you can unlock the song's Infinite/Gravity/Heavenly chart. Once. For about 900 of the song's HP a run out of a few thousand. You can pay a surcharge for Blaster Start, which lets you play two songs on Blaster mode...but it's only available on Japan-region cabinets with PASELI enabled and on non-Japan Asia-region cabinets. Since Round 1 USA locations — the only locations outside of Asia to officially carry the game — use Japan-region builds but don't have PASELI, unlocking Blaster charts is an exercise in sheer patience and throwing lots and lots of money at the machine just to unlock ONE chart.
• Dance Rush notably only allows two stages per credit at most, and this cannot be changed even in the operator settings. There is a mode that allows earning an additional stage, but it requires PASELI, which is Japan-exclusive, leaving American players stuck with two stages. Oh, and as salt in the wound, some unlocks require Extra Stage, and thus are impossible to earn in the US.^note There are tax and business laws that prevent PASELI from being implemented in the US, so this isn't entirely Konami's or Round 1's fault. Whether an update or corporate decision will allow Standard mode to be played (possibly at the same price as Light mode, similar to how DanceDanceRevolution A charges the same for Standard and Premium modes with the only requirement for the latter being an eAMUSEMENT PASS) remains to be seen, though it is unlikely since DDR A has a dedicated North America build and Dance Rush doesn't.
• Few rhythm games punish misses as harshly as Re:Stage! Prism Step does; expect a game over after making as few as two mistakes. This annoyed players to no end, at least until the stamina system was removed and you could retry songs as much as you wanted (or in this case, needed).
• WACCA will not let you use your Aime card to play if you already have data for the game in another region. (For example, if you have ever played the game in Japan with your card, you cannot use it in the United States.) This stands out in comparison to other net-enabled arcade games, which will either let you use data started from another region (most rhythm games) or make you use new region-specific data but at least not make you purchase a new card (Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune).
• Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure:
  • Some minigames require you to draw a circle on the touch screen. Tracing a circle takes noticeably longer than just tapping or tracing a straight line, so figuring out when to do the gesture is pointlessly tricky.
  • Some games use motion controls, which are not always perfectly accurate. "Enter the Waiter" is That One Level due to how far you have to move the system to dodge and how fast the attacks come out.
  • The above two issues are made more frustrating by the way the game handles rankings. Rather than being based on your score, like most rhythm games, it's based on how much health you have left at the end of a stage. Missing a single input can take multiple letter grades off your ranking. This is fine if it happens early enough that you can still regain health, but the difficult sections tend to be near the end of a game.

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