Show By Rock!! is a Japanese mobile rhythm game created by Sanrio, developed by Geechs and currently managed by Edia. Unlike most of Sanrio’s other works, Show By Rock!! is aimed toward an older audience including adult men, as opposed to purely young girls. The game has three lanes, with taps and holds. Players need to get bromides (cards) in the game with skills that help them in gameplay. There are 27 bands currently in the game: 14 original bands, and 13 based on real Japanese musicians.
An anime adaption of the game started in April of 2015, and aired with four seasons and one spinoff miniseries come 2020.
The original game ended service on December 26, 2019. The setting was moved to a new Rhythm Game app, Show by Rock!! Fes A Live, featuring more new characters (including those introduced in the anime Show by Rock!! Mashmairesh).
With the many characters in this game, please put tropes about specific characters in the Characters page.
This game provides examples of:
- Animate Inanimate Object: Three of the members in Chammy Chaplets are plants, and the drummer of Gauga Strikes is a mountain.
- Bland-Name Product: Boo Doo Kan is clearly a stand in for Budokan. Lampshaded during the Clammbon Live promotional event.
- Cast of Snowflakes: At least when in myumon form all of the characters look very unique.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: All card borders' colors show which element they are: yellow is light, purple is dark, green is wood, red is fire and blue is water.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: In boss battles, it is advisable to drop hold notes mid-note right before the boss's attack gauge is filled so that you can sneak in an additional attack instead of defending the boss's attack notes. Unless the soul is high enough, this is outright vital.
- Early Game Hell: Like many mobile games, the player has to draw out of the gachas for better cards, and before they get them, progression can be frustrating. Especially exacerbated by the presence of clear lines in tour mode, which bar you from passing a song if you don't get at least a certain score, no matter how well you hit the notes. This can be especially frustrating for experienced rhythm game players who otherwise have no problem playing the highest tour mode difficulty.
- Experience Points: There are three different kinds of experience in the game. Your band can earn experience to level up, your cards can earn experience when you feed other cards to them, and you yourself earn experience that ranks you up.
- Flawless Victory: Cleared songs with no notes missed are marked as Full Combo while doing the same with all perfect notes are marked as Master Combo.
- Harder Than Hard: Expert difficulty, which is the only difficulty where 8 star songs can be played, compared to hard difficulty which goes up to 6 stars only.
- High School AU: Two events have this concept:
- Rom-Sensei is about a cultural festival and its preparations at a school where Rom is one of the teachers. As it turns out, it was All Just a Dream, specifically Rom's.
- Show By Rock!! Academy is a large-scale event that centers around the conflict between two schools.
- Intercourse with You: The song NAKED by Rapezziauto is about sex, and they don't bother hiding it.
- Interface Screw: Ghost mode in score attacks, which makes notes fade completely shortly before you are supposed to touch them.
- Level Grinding: You'll need to do this if you want to evolve your band once they reach their final evolution, as it takes awhile to reach level 99.
- You also need to level grind for angel cards if you have a UR+, as those also go up to level 99.
- Life Meter: The bands' tension gauge which surrounds the spots where you touch the notes.
- Little Bit Beastly: The characters in the game have Unusual Ears.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: Loading screens are frequent in this game, but they're short if you have a decent internet connection.
- Money Grinding: Every Sunday there's an event where you play songs and earn cards that sell for high amounts of sound dollars as rewards. This is where the majority of your money will likely come from, and you'll need to grind it if you want to level up your bands.
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Nintendo Hard: Oh yeah. The higher the difficulty, the faster the notes flash and the more finger-tapping is involved, often requiring the player to tap all three buttons for long stretches of time. Without a maxed out band, a few missed notes means instant failure. The only saving grace is that the timing is much more lenient than most mobile rhythm games and dropping hold notes does not cause them to miss. - No Mouth: As could be expected from the creators of Hello Kitty, the Myumons have no mouths in their Funny Animal forms, however this is averted for their humanoid forms.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The bands that have actual musicians in them tend to be heavily based around them. The musicians whose music appears in the game include:
- Asstellus (Dropout Sensei)
- KFK (Gaugastrikes)
- Marie Ueda (Shinimonogurui)
- Silhouette from the skylit (Demons Venom)
- Alice Juban (Alice Beans)
- clammbon (Labomunch)
- yksb feat. Milo x 31Style (Rapezziauto)
- kiki* (Chammy Chaplets)
- 04 Limited Sazabys (04Tobizbits)
- Usotsuki (Tekebakitsu Sou)
- A Crow is White (Shirorakurosuka?)
- Band Gokko (Fukashi Gimmick)
- BIGMAMA (Spectrenotes)
- Officially Shortened Title: SB69.
- Purple Is the New Black: The dark element is represented by bright purple, as opposed to black.
- Pun-Based Title: The "Show by" in Show by Rock!! is a riff on the japanese word shoubai (商売), referring to a business or job. This ties into the "music millionaire" theme of the first game.
- Rank Inflation: Ranks for clearing songs go all the way up to SS; the higher the difficulty, the higher a rank you need to pass. The game also manages to apply this to the pass/fail qualification, with an additional challenge line above the clear line worth extra rewards.
- Rare Random Drop: Ultra Rare bromides are hard enough to get from the super gacha, with a 2.5% drop rate (with a 35.7% chance of being the guaranteed SSR+ card in a 10-pull), but version 4.4 took this up to eleven with the introduction of Legend Rares, which are even stronger than UR's and have a whopping 0.35% drop rate.
- Almaz, an item used to level up limited UR's past their usual level cap of 50, counts in a more traditional sense. They can be gained as rewards for completing songs; the drop rate isn't disclosed, but it's really slim.
- Rhythm Game
- Socialization Bonus: Having friends as support instead of guests net you more friend points and allows the usage of the support's passive skill.
- Spell My Name With An S: Starting a discussion about how a name of a character is spelled isn't really difficult.
- Is it Darudayu, Daru Tayu or Daru Dayuu?
- Shuuzo, Syuzou, Shuuzou or Shu zo?
- Crow or Kurou?
- Logia, Rosia or Roshia (or Roger)?
- Candy Lapin or Candy Rabbit?
- Shokoyurui, Shokoquirrel, Choquirrel?
- Lin or Rin?
- Airen, Aileen, Aireen or Ailene? The Twitter and anime went with Ailane, which just adds one more spelling to the pile.
- Spinoff Babies: The Spring New First-Graders' Festival event in April 2018 had every character involved (with the exceptions of Rom, Shuzo, and Fujiraid) aged down to first graders in a grade school setting. Marie Spira, Rin, and Demon Mangu got UR's depicting them as six-year-olds as well.
