YMMV / BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!

For YMMV tropes applicable to the BanG Dream! Anime, see here.

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• Best Level Ever:
  • "Melancholic" on Expert qualifies due to its perfect mix of difficulty, speed, catchiness, and sheer fun factor.
  • If you've gotten used to the pace of "Koi wa Chaos no Shimobenari" on Hard, EX isn't that harder... aside from those fast, sweeping slide notes.
  • Hello Happy World's cover of "Romeo" also deserves a mention. A song with multiple complex and diverse note structures, with an equally varied and satisfying note map, makes for a great level to play, let alone listen to.
  • "Natsumatsuri" on Expert isn't that much more difficult than its Hard counterpart; the song itself is a real bop, while the speed and notes are predictable but challenging.
  • "Life Will Change" on Expert only looks difficult at first glance, but when you realize the notes (especially the sliders) go with the riff, it suddenly becomes really fun to play.
• Breather Level: First of all, any Song whose Expert difficulty isn't any higher than 23, which often have also low tempo, note complexity and total note count to boot with, are generally examples of this. But special mentions goes to these songs:
  • The second and third event songs, "LOUDER" and "Goka! Gokai!? Phantom Thief!" both have relatively difficult Hard and Expert charts, which are originally rated 19 and 27 across both songs ^note After the difficulty revision, both songs' Hard chart are now rated level 21, and the latter's Expert chart is now rated level 28, respectively. The event song after, "Your Gift to Me", is a comparatively relaxing song with a level 16 Hard chart and one of the easiest Expert charts in the game at only level 21. It also has the lowest note count of all songs in it's Expert chart, only clocking in at merely 371 notes. ^note As of the song level difficulty readjustments, "Your Gift to Me" actually kept it's level 21 rating at its Expert chart, making it the one of the easiest Expert songs in the game, tied with "Our Path" and "Nakanai Nakanai".
  • "Yes! BanG Dream" has by far one of the easiest Expert chart in the game with a difficulty of 22 ^note formerly 20, the lowest possible difficulty an Expert song can get, but was changed due to re-adjustments. Even then, it's still very easy, with only three songs rated lower on Expert, one of them is the after-mentioned "Your Gift to Me", which is equal to some particularly difficult Hard song beat maps, and outright easier than at least one of them (Such as "Ringing Bloom" and "HELL! or HELL?", which originally had level 23 charts on Hard, later readjusted to level 25, the two of these are also amongst the hardest songs on Expert). Later, a more challenging Special level chart version of this song was added, but it's still rather relatively tame by level 26 Special beatmap standards.
  • Speaking about a band's debut song, "Orchestra of Smiles!" is a level 23 difficulty on Expert and doesn't pose a challenge, even to the point of only being barely harder than the above song. It does have several sliders and flick notes, but these are only used sparingly. Like "Yes! BanG Dream!", this song also has a more challenging Special chart, but still relatively easy compared to most song's special charts, rated level 25.
  • Unusually for Roselia, whose songs generally tend to be amongst the hardest in the bunch, "Our Path" is actually one of the easiest songs in the game with a level 21 Expert chart. Much like "Your Gift to Me", it has a much lower tempo than the majority of Roselia songs, establishing it as the easiest Roselia song, and one of the easiest songs in-game.
  • "Glamorous Sky" is widely considered to have the easiest level 26 Expert chart, as it has no real gimmicks and isn't even a particularly fast-paced song. This disparity becomes more apparently when compared to two 26* released prior to it, Senbonzakura and Koi wa Chaos no Shimobe Nari, which are tricky enough to better warrant their rating. It is a Marathon Level though, being one of the longest songs in the game at 2:21. Oddly enough, despite the difficulty revision generally reduced the level of unusually easy songs, it still kept its level 26 rating on its Expert chart.
  • "Fuwa-Fuwa Time" was formerly rated level 26 on Expert, and later have a Special beatmap with special notes rated at level 25, which has somewhat more predictable notes and tolerable note speed. It's also one of the songs that gets a rated difficulty downgrade after a certain update, reducing it to merely level 25 on Expert and level 24 on Special.
  • "Tokimeki Experience!" is generally agreed to be the easiest level 25 chart, being a very simple chart that is mostly single notes and simple slides with few flick notes; the only slightly tricky part is the chorus which has some simultaneous slider-note sections, but even those are very gentle compared to other songs in the tier.
  • "Choco Cornet Love" has a slow tempo and easy notes (mainly composed of regular single tap notes with occasional hold note, and few slider and flick notes), much like "Your Gift to Me". It's originally rated level 23, but due to being seen as very easy for experienced players to Full Combo (let alone get an All Perfect) on it, it was reduced to just level 22.
  • RAISE A SUILEN, much like Roselia, they generally have hard songs (which often are rated 26 or higher), but have a notable outlier song in "Embrace of Light", which only has 376 notes, making it the song with the second lowest number of notes on it's Expert beatmap, second only to "Your Gift to Me" again as mentioned from before. "Embrace of Light" is also tied with "Our Path" for the lowest note per second at merely 3.3 note per second.
  • While also arguably intentional due to being a relaxing song, "Nakanai Nakanai" has only merely 404 notes, just only above "Your Gift to Me" and "Embrace of Light". It also has a slow tempo and low note density, much like those two songs and "Our Path".
  • "Shangri-La" is a cover song by Roselia that is granted the mercy of being one of their relatively easier charts on EXPERT with a difficulty level of 24, but it got an even easier and lower-rated Special difficulty beatmap rated at merely level 23. It has special notes such as the side flicks, but overall the song itself is simple and is shallow on notes, making it a good song to start practicing on flick notes that most later Special difficulty beatmaps have. Here's an example of a gameplay on SPECIAL, showing how easy this song is on that difficulty.
  • To a lesser extent, there are other songs that got relatively easy Special beatmaps at level 23 as well, such as "Gekkouka", "Silhoulette", and "Agechaou", and none of these were particularly difficult to begin with.
• Broken Base: The 6th Anniversary update. Some fans see it as a logical next step for the game, welcoming the new cards, Live2D models and features added to the game such as the 3D Live MVs. Others, however, dislike the new art style and additions such as the 5-stars and Master Rank system, accusing the game of trying to become another Project SEKAI.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • It's gotten to the point where some players have "plznogurenyumiya" as their usernames, due to some (cover) songs being overplayed due to their fame (i.e. the aforementioned Guren no Yumiya, Ready Steady Go, Sorairo Days, Silhouette, Sobakasu, Soul's Refrain and Cruel Angel's Thesis, among others). Guren no Yumiya gets more of this because, as well as being overplayed, it's one of the hardest songs in the game.
  • Players grinding for event ranks often prefer short songs with high note density and relatively short songs, which are the best for scoring. If you're in a high-level room, expect to hear a lot of "Unite! From A to Z", "Jumpin'", "Guren no Yumiya" (again, albeit the number of players picking this song have significantly decreased), EXIST, and SAVIOR OF SONG (which is also one of the hardest songs in it's Expert beatmap, at level 28, sometimes picked deliberately to make less skilled players fail at the song and lose a lot of score, or forced to pick it's much easier Hard beatmap instead).
• Difficulty Spike:
  • While level 26 and onward is no slouch in its own right, be prepared for a wild swing in difficulty between some songs. Heaven help you if the song is from either Afterglow, Roselia, or RAISE A SUILEN. ^note On the other hand, Poppin' Party's level 26 songs, while are no slouch, are still much easier to handle with.
  • A more noticable one is found in between the Hard and Expert beatmap of "SAVIOR OF SONG". On Hard, it's rated level 20 and is somewhat fair, but on Expert, it's rated at level 28, meaning you will get into a world of hurt if you aren't prepared for it's intense note speed.
  • "FIRE BIRD" used to have an even more massive difficulty jump between its Hard and Expert beatmaps. It's Hard beatmap was originally rated at level 18, but it's Expert beatmap is at level 27. However, later updates increased it's Hard beatmap's song level to 20. Despite this, the significantly difficulty disparity is still quite large enough to make a difference between easily failing the song on Expert, but is not much of a problem to Full Combo it on Hard.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Suits, an all-female trio that serves the Tsurumaki family, given their status as always-prepared agents who would do anything to make Kokoro's wishes come true.
• Fan Nickname: "Kurafuto Eggu" for Craft Egg. All 35 members of all 7 bands randomly say this (and "Bushimo!") when booting up the game. Moca's is the most memorable.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Persona 5 and the Persona series in general. Many players have Persona themed usernames, and the Persona crossover event definitely helped with the overlap.
  • The game is liked by a fair number of fans of non-idol music games due to letting players play as much as they want and also not having any restrictions on difficulty selection whatsoever, allowing newcomers to instantly apply the skills they've picked up from other games. If you want to spam 10 Expert charts in a row right off the bat, the game won't stop you.
  • With Project SEKAI due to both being rhythm games made by CraftEgg and featuring Vocaloid songs covered by an Original Generation. Project SEKAI players even call Bandori their "sister game".
• Gateway Series: Due to the presence of cover songs from much more popular anime, games, Vocaloid, and dramas, Bandori went from obscure to hype city when the mobile game came out.
• Heartwarming Moments: Lisa's original voice actress, Yurika Endo, retired from acting right before the Don't Leave Me Lisa!!! event in the worldwide server. When the results were finalized, the top ten scorers changed their band lead to the Lisa event card, and changed their usernames to send a message of thanks to Yurika. As the cherry on top, they changed their comments to the lyrics of "Hidamari Rhodonite" that play in the event result screen.
  Thank you Yurika Endo! With love, Bandori worldwide community <3
  • The same was later done at the end of the Happy Summer Vacation event for Rinko's original voice actress, Satomi Akesaka, as she is graduating from Roselia due to hearing issues.
    • This did not go unnoticed by Akeshan, who thanked the GBP Worldwide player base for their gesture.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Bang DREAM covering various Vocaloid songs becomes this when you realize that CraftEgg likely thought they should make a whole game based around the concept of an Original Generation of characters covering Vocaloid songs, which led to the creation of Project SEKAI. Some of Bandori's music jackets for their cover songs even feature the Virtual Singers alongside the cast long before Hatsune Miku and her friends would become characters that interact with the main cast in SEKAI.
  • Sumire Uesaka voices Shirasagi Chisato, the bassist of Pastel*Palettes, the band covering "Lum's Love Song". Guess who voices Lum in the reboot?
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Huh...?^Explanation The first event, the sakura party event, has a stamp of Arisa saying "Huh...?" as one of the rewards. Many people who unlocked it tend to spam it en masse in Multi-Lives.
  • "Are you okay?"^Explanation The "Tomoe SOS: Ako's Grand Nursing Operation" event has a stamp of Ako asking "Are you okay?" as one of the event rewards. Players everywhere took advantage of this stamp by spamming it anytime a player in a multi-live messes up and fails to get a full combo while everyone else has, or if they fail the live by running out of life points. Whether it's meant to genuinely ask the player if they really were okay during the multi-live or if, as is the usual case, using the sticker in a mocking manner depends on the player using the sticker itself.
  • Player naming is a meme unto itself; there's a Twitter account that posts funny, interesting, or just plain weird names and sets of names. Specific names and name formats:
    • Pls no (song)^Explanation Some players put down a nickname along the lines of "no (song) pls" or "pls no (song)", likely because they're tired of playing the offending song over and over or because it's That One Song for them; two of the biggest candidates for this format are "Guren no Yumiya" and "Shuwarin☆Dreamin'". Unfortunately for them, this gets other players to troll them precisely by picking the song in question.
    • x stars no (character)^Explanation Used by players who spend lots of stars (sometimes paid) to try to get a high-rarity card they really want from the gacha, without success.
    • (sticker) if ur gay^note A popular player name format, allowing the game's LGBT Fanbase to identify each other by saying to spam a certain emote (usually a less-used one like "Bushido!" or "Fleeting..."). In fact, "Fleeting..." is so common for this that sometimes people will spam it even if no one has the "fleet if gay" username.
  • Speaking of Eve's "Bushido!", some parts of the Internet picture her wearing Graham Aker's season 2 costume.^Explanation Because Graham went under the pseudonym Mr. Bushido — and both Eve and Graham are very much Occidental Otaku, though Eve is biracial and learning more about her own heritage.
  • Thanks to a Twitter bot and some wiki vandals, a meme went around suddenly where people would claim that Roselia's story featured Ohara Mari becoming their backup dancer and helping them learn to care about each other.
  • Yandere Kaoru/Kaoru killed Hina^note When a card came out with Kaoru wearing a black dress, sporting a very unsettling Slasher Smile, and looking down a well where she and Hina had been sitting on the side, the fanbase obsessed over the apparent Out-of-Character Moment, especially yandere fans.
  • Despacito for Bandori EN^Explanation When the staff of the English-language version explained that some songs won't be exported due to licensing problems but that they were going to bring in EN-exclusive songs to make up for it, fans immediately took to joking that one of the exclusives is going to be a "Despacito" cover or the frequently-rumored "Despacito 2".
    • This rapidly mutated to DeSHUWAcito, and the declaration "That's so sad. Aya, play Deshuwacito".
  • Haha Rin bassist^Explanation Hagumi is often compared to Rin from Love Live!, also defusing a Fandom Berserk Button meme for Love Live! fans.
• More Popular Spin-Off: At the moment at least, the mobile game's taken off much faster than anything else in the franchise, with Love Live! fans looking into it and producing fan works mainly based on the bands introduced in it—Hello Happy World!, Afterglow, Roselia and Pastel*Palettes. Although Poppin' Party has its fans, the other bands have proven to be Ensemble Darkhorses.
• Older Than They Think: At least several fans think that this is the first mobile rhythm game about bands instead of idols... unless one recalls Delightwork's now discontinued Band Yarouze!! mobile rhythm game with a similar premise but instead of girls, it was a game of Cast Full of Pretty Boys.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • For international players, the way Random select in Girls Band Party multi-lives irritates a number of players. If all five players pick Random, a shuffle of all the songs in the game is run. But if less than five players pick Random, the game will only pick between the non-Random songs that were chosen, which is completely different behavior that can seem unintuitive. This is a case of something Lost in Translation: in the Japanese version, the option is called "omakase", which translates roughly to "your choice", indicating that the player choosing it is okay with playing whatever song others pick, rather than wanting to play a completely random song.
  • Flick notes get some flak due to how it's handled. Most other rhythm games employ a swipe note mechanic instead, you're expected to slide over the note as it's passing the line. In Bang Dream, you have to start on the note itself, then slide off of it. This can lead to awkward note hitting cues due to the game needing to figure out if you did the mechanic correctly after the fact. The only saving throw this mechanic has is that the game doesn't care which direction you slide off from, which can help in dense sections of notes.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It's about the closest you'll get to an idol/band version of CHUNITHM (and for those outside of Japan, closest they'll get to Chunithm at all). This was further reinforced with an update that allows changing between different note skins, one of which is a horizontal-bar skin (as opposed to the default elliptical note skin) that looks just like the notes used in Chuni.
• Surprise Difficulty:
  • One would expect Roselia to have the hardest songs in the game given the seriousness of their sound and their in-story technical skill, which is indeed the case. However, the other band seen as having the highest difficulty songs is Hello, Happy World!, whose manic, cheerful sound is about as far from Roselia as you can get but still lead to very fast-paced songs like "Goka! Gokai!? Phantom Thief!" and "Sugar Song and Bitter Step" which are considered to be some of the more difficult Expert charts in the game at 27 and 28 respectively.
  • Poppin' Party is generally known for having relatively easier songs overall compared to most of the bands... and then there's "Setsuna Trip", a song covered by Poppin' Party, is the second 29 song in the game on its SPECIAL chart, prior to the difficulty re-rating. It was so difficult that it got actually raised to 30 instead, making it the second song to have the dubious honor of being elevated to 30 on SPECIAL difficulty, the first being RAISE A SUILEN's HELL! or HELL?.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Many of the events involve comedy, Heartwarming Moments, or Tear Jerkers. Then there's the Runaway Rabbits event story, which is about...catching cute runaway bunnies.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Chapter 15 of Roselia's story in Girls Band Party has the band finding out about the shady deal that Yukina was in talks with that would've guaranteed her a spot at Future World Fes at the expense of her entire band. Sure, she was conflicted about it, and started to realize that being in a band was more than just her own goals, but the fact that she actually considered the offer for a while seriously breaks her bandmates' hearts, who can't help but feel like they've been betrayed and were only being used for her own selfish desires.
  • Another Roselia-related Tear-Jerker: the aforementioned retirement of Lisa's first seiyuu, accompanied by the song for the "Don't Leave Me, Lisa!" event — Hidamari Rhodonite.
• That One Attack:
  • "Tear Drops" on Expert, otherwise considered an easy song, has its now-infamous death slides: three very fast screen-wide notched slides in quick succession right before the second refrain, which will instantly drain your life if you mess them up. Anyone playing with thumbs, especially on medium-to-large devices, may not be able to go from one side of the screen to the other fast enough. Its harder Special map proudly features the slides as well.
  • The refrain to "Little Busters!" on Expert has double tap notes followed immediately by double flick notes that can be very tricky to hit correctly.
  • "Don't Be Afraid!" on Expert has a 7-note eighth-note scale that spans the width of the playfield, occurs twice, and can easily break a full combo if you're playing on a phone and are not particularly coordinated with switching thumbs.
  • The intro to "MOON PRIDE" on Expert features several short slide-note pairs which have very small gaps between the notes and the sliders, all coming at a blistering pace that makes it difficult to lift your finger from the note in time to hit the slide. It's easy for an unprepared player to lose most of their energy bar in the first ten seconds of the song. And then they show up at the end of the song, too!
  • Many maps end on a long slide note signifying the last few notes of the song. However, "Kimi Janakya Dame Mitai's" Expert map, which appears to end on one of these, instead follows it with a serious of fast notes and some surprisingly tricky notched slides, which can serve as a nasty surprise to anyone who let their guard down after thinking that they FCed the song.
  • The consecutive long-range slide notes on "Koi wa Chaos no Shimobenari" EX can and will cause your SAN points to be in danger.
  • Alien Alien, where the last verse has flick on every beat when the other verses don't do this.
  • The intro to "Easy Come Easy Go" on Expert has Afterglow's infamous fast-paced drumroll after a slow beginning, then immediately followed by a long spam line of switching between tap and flick notes before ending it with a double-flick. Players must remember their left finger must do the tap notes while the right do the flick notes, the real problem is that the fast tempo and rhythm can make them unprepared to when the drumroll ends and the spam starts.
  • If you thought the death slides on "Tear Drops" wasn't bad enough, there's "Maware! Setsugetsuka" and its slides on the chorus, on EXPERT, SPECIAL, and even HARD...
    • On EXPERT, there are the sections of repetitive dual tap notes with the closer note, all of them coming fast with hardly any break between them, and don't forget there are two of these sections. While the song already has high tempo and some fast notes overall, and the slides themselves aren't as sharp as the ones in "Tear Drops", the sheer number of having to deal with these slides in addition to double-taps is what single-handedly pushed the EXPERT version of Maware! Setsugetsuka into the territory of That One Level.
    • On SPECIAL, the chorus part works differently instead: the aftermentioned double tap/slide spam are changed into two long-lasting, curved hold/slides, but there are double-tap notes with both curved slides and flicks at the same time near the end of the chorus, which in addition with the side flick notes, makes the marked level 26 SPECIAL beatmap not much better compared to it's EXPERT chart on 27.
    • Even HARD also have the rapid slides similar to that of EXPERT, minus the second notes that have to be simultaneously tapped at the start of each slide (case in point). And this is on a song that was initially rated 21 on HARD! Likely because of this, the mass song difficulty level rework made it so the song's HARD chart was increased to 23.
• That One Level: There are a lot of challenging Expert and Special songs (and some relatively difficult Hard level songs) that can prove to be very difficult to clear, let alone Full Combo. Generally, any song with an Expert or Special chart that is level 28 or above would very likely to qualify as this, but some of these stand out:
  • "Guren no Yumiya" is commonly considered one of the most difficult songs under Hard difficulty, with quick slide notes paired with non-slide notes, note-flick pairs, and a punishing pace (to the point where some consider a few Expert songs to be easier than Guren no Yumiya on hard). This is inverted on Expert difficulty in terms of relative song level, however, as while its Expert map is difficult its generally seen as among the easier level 27 song beatmaps.
  • "Don't say lazy" has a breakneck pace and a nearly nonstop barrage of slider notes ending in slider-flick pairs that can drain your life very quickly if you can't figure out the rhythm, even on Hard. It's considered more manageable than Guren no Yumiya because its pattern is relatively predictable, though.
  • "Sugar Song & Bitter Step" has a gigantic difficulty spike between Hard (level 21, formerly 20) and Expert (level 28), to the point where it is avoided in Multi-Lives during events because players are forced to lower the difficulty just to consistently finish the song. Or at least it used to be, as later a Special difficulty beatmap at level 25 that is a well-balanced moderate between the Hard and Expert difficulties is added
  • "Worldwide Treasure"'s first half, which consists of Kokoro rapping over disc scratches, can be a nightmare to any player who has difficulty with slides, as it has a barrage of slides at strange angles followed by very short and fast slides interspersed with flick notes. If you can get through that, though, the more conventional second half of the song is much more straightforward.
  • "Roku chounen to Ichiya Monogatari" is the first song in the game to have a rating of 29 on Expert, and for good reason; the song starts off relatively intense before throwing an intense barrage of notes for the chorus and ending with a truly absurd storm of sliders and flick-slider pairs.
    • The Special beatmap of the same song is also rated 29. While its note structures are different (featuring insane slide notes from Romeo as well as rapid+flick from Opera of the Wasteland), there's no doubting that it's just as difficult if not even worse.
    • And that's not without saying the new, super hard SPECIAL difficulty beatmap rated at 35. It also combines the special notes exclusive to the new special beatmaps, adding them on top of the already nigh-impossible to Full Combo chart!
  • "Happy Synthesizer" on Expert might not have any sliders, but what it has is OVER 900 notes on Expert, a fast pace, and it goes on for so long that it's literally a strain on the thumbs. What it lacks in tricks it makes up for by wearing you out.
  • "Unite! From A to Z" on Expert has a blistering pace that combines difficult zigzag slide-flick pairs, fast note barrages and short slide-tap pairs that practically require pure muscle memory to create a chart that is commonly agreed to be the most difficult level 26 song. To make matters worse, it's by far the best-scoring map in the EN version and still one of the top-scoring maps in the JP version, even years after its release, so its a very common song in Grand Multi-Live rooms. Thankfully, the special version of this song is significantly easier and a downgrade in a difficulty at level 25 (albeit at the slight cost of scoring efficiency, but it is considered one of the highest-scoring songs between those rated on level 25 in it's Special difficulty.)
  • "Ringing Bloom" is rated a 23 in Hard (revised to 25, as high as an average Expert difficulty song) and 28 (revised to 29 later) in Expert for good reason. It has everything difficult in a fast-paced song: constant stream of notes, tricky slide notes, short slides into flicks, and the combination will probably wear out your thumbs, too. Even the Easy and Normal are rated way higher than any other song's equivalent difficulty level beatmap, being rated level 12 and 16 respectively.
  • The newest special chart from "Setsuna Trip" (formerly rated level 29, now revised to level 30 due to being widely agreed as one of the hardest songs in the entire game) is a whole new level. The chart has the highest note count for any regular non-full song, at 1087 notes. Like Roku Chounen, it is extremely hard plus the addition of new note types contributed much to the difficulty spike.
  • Miiro on Expert is a non-stop barrage of notes, sometimes accompanying random flick notes here and there, where it makes you feel like you're having a sprinting race with your thumbs/fingers. The kicker is its original difficulty rating is 26, but it feels way more like a 27. Eventually, it actually got bumped into level 27 with the batch of song difficulty updates.
  • "HELL! or HELL?" finally made its appearance in Girls Band Party, with its Special map being the game's first 30* level. Combining insanely fast taps with a maze of curved slides and directional flicks, you'll certainly have to choose between hell or hell as its 1,196 notes come at you at lightning-speed, not letting up for a second. Forget getting a Full Combo; just *clearing* this song is a massive challenge. Oh, and that isn't all, this song also is one of the few songs to get a second, super hard Special beatmap rated at 33!
  • Likewise, "SENSENFOKU" is another song with a level 30 chart on Special, with also the same very difficult special notes much like "Setsuna Trip" and "HELL! or HELL?", and like the latter, the notes comes out like an insanely fast barrage. Especially at the end part that contains a tense section where you need to rapidly tap single notes and sliding some fast sliders, while also watching out for arrow notes thrown in between them. It might not have as much notes as the two songs at 972 notes, but regardless, prepare for a merciless challenge if you're attempting this song. Even the song's level 28 Expert beatmap also proves to be difficult, much like those two other songs.
  • "FIRE BIRD" might been already a really challenging Level 27 song on Expert, but it's FULL version's Expert chart (rated at Level 28) manages to be an atrociously difficult FULL song even by the FULL song standards ^note To put it in comparison, three out of the six other FULL songs are at level 26 and the other three are at level 27, as all parts of the song (except for the few breaks) are merciless in terms of dropping tough patterns, ranging from many tap notes in quick sucession and quick sliders notes that comes simultaneously with a flick note at the beginning or the end. If that's not bad enough, the number of notes you have to deal with this song is 2331. Speaking of which, the regular version FIRE BIRD also has a SPECIAL chart rated at Level 29, with the note intensity, tricky usage of sliders and flick notes taken even higher to the extremes than it's regular EXPERT chart.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: More than a few players are not happy with the characters' new art style following the 6th Anniversary update, with the majority of criticism directed towards the removal of the unique "spiky" eye design and paler skins.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Persona collab, despite using the well-fitting Afterglow for Persona 5 outfits and advertisements, gave them a Persona 4 song and gave the 5 song to Poppin' Party for the sake of having the franchise mascots do the song from the most current and high-profile game. A number of players found this annoying, and while they admitted that the covers turned out pretty well, many thought Afterglow should have done the 5 song and one of the songs from 4 should have instead gone to Pastel*Palettes, the band that best fit the 4 motif of searching for one's true self rather than refusing to acknowledge that you might want something different from what everyone else is pushing on you.
  • "COMIC PANIC!!!", the song for the Afterglow event, Girls Anthology, was not released during the time the event was originally run, with the song featured during the event being their cover of Haikyuu!!'s "Imagination". "COMIC PANIC!!!" was instead released a few months after the event ended. While Schedule Slip is a likely reason to why the song was not released during the duration the event was running, it didn't stop the ire of several fans who wish that they release "COMIC PANIC!!!" as the challenge song instead of "Imagination", given how the song had the image of the Girls Anthology event in mind. Thankfully, the song was released properly in the worldwide servers of the event.
  • Similarly, the song Romeo, sung by Kaoru and Kokoro released roughly ten months after the event A Rose's Name in a Transient World, Kaoru's first four star event focused around her starring in Romeo and Juliet alongside Chisato. In the worldwide release of this event the song Romeo was bundled as the feature song for the event itself.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Marina and the Player Character are technically the proper protagonists of Girls Band Party; both of you are the ones trying to get five bands together for a big multi-band event. The player is a Featureless Protagonist, while Marina has a very plain design and a generic polite personality and is not part of any band, helping to make the five bands stand out more.

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