YMMV / Just Shapes & Beats

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The Big Bad, thanks to lack of context surrounding why it decides to take over the world and how the player obtains the Triangles. Its hostility in your first encounter could be it trying to prevent you from stealing the Triangles — there's no reason the Triangles couldn't belong to them, and you're the one who stole the Triangles from them to make the world. It'd be pissed over that and would try to remake the world in its own image, if it was the rightful owner. Even the DLC that explains the interquel between obtaining the triangles and using them to create the world doesn't have any evidence that goes against this theory.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The battle with the giant Illuminati pyramid that serves as the first boss besides the Big Bad. It shows up out of nowhere with no explanation, and after the battle it disappears, not even appearing in the Dance Party Ending.
• Breather Level: “Try This” by Pegboard Nerds, despite being the last level before you face the final boss, is fairly easy compared to the other later levels. The level is on the shorter side and obstacles move slower and have a simpler pattern making them relatively easy to dodge. There’s also less of an emphasis on Bullet Hell patterns, with projectiles being in lesser numbers and having wider spaces in between them. While it does start to get pretty cramped during the second half, you can easily reach that part with no hits assuming you’ve acquired enough skill through the previous levels.
• Catharsis Factor: After being helpless at stopping the Big Bad from taking over the world, corrupting everything the player held dear, putting them through hell fixing the world and even destroying the player in a hopeless fight twice, gaining your 11th-Hour Superpower and blasting the living daylights out of the villain with lasers while taking zero damage from his attacks definitely is stress-relieving.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: "Close To Me" is the most popular boss fight in the game, easily overshadowing the actual Final Boss, due to the emotional gravitas in the scene.
  • In terms of non-boss songs, "Try This" is often considered the standout due to its heavy Spy Fiction theming.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Project Arrhythmia around its Steam release, as it shares the exact same concept of a bullet-hell to the music - leading to it being called a clone or rip-off despite the developers of both games being okay with the similarities.
• Fan Nickname: Since all of the characters in the game have No Name Given, it's left up to players to come up with their own.
  • The horned pink-circle Big Bad is commonly called Blixer, Fresh, or Boss in the fandom.
  • The pyramid and flower bosses are named after the songs that accompany their boss fights, Barracuda and Lycanthropy, respectively.
  • The Big Cube who is corrupted into an enemy and fought in "Close To Me", is commonly called "Sadboi" by the fanbase, for obvious reasons.
  • The triangle-shaped Macguffins are called the Treeangles.
• Fanon: While their names are never mentioned in the game, it's assumed that the Big Bad's name is Blixer and the 3rd and 4th bosses (the pyramid and cactus) are respectively named Barracuda and Lycanthropy, named after the songs that play during their battle.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Geometry Dash. Unsurprisingly, considering that GD is a rhythm game about shapes and beats as well.
  • With Project Arrhythmia, over time following the initial rivalry mentioned above. A major difference between the two music bullet-hells is that Project Arrhythmia has a level editor - leading to many creating fan-made Just Shapes and Beats levels in it.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Whenever you rescue one of the three large triangles, thereby restoring The Corruption from the land. Of note is the second one where after a grueling boss fight against the blue cube, it is triumphantly restored, who then hugs the player out of the thanks.
  • In a meta-sense, when you download a pirated version of the game and it plays a video from the dev. The dev acknowledges this but he says he can sometimes understand when people just don't have money to buy/support a game since he experienced this himself as a kid. So all he asks is for you to share the game so it can be supported.
• Memetic Mutation: It's common to compare the little magical triangles to Doritos, and depict The Boss as being addicted to them.
• Moe: The blue cube (while uncorrupted), the boat, and the helicopter, but especially the helicopter.
• Moment of Awesome: The entirety of the final boss battle, from its fantastic build-up in the beginning, to the music that plays, to the visuals, to watching a tiny square single-handedly stand up to an enormous monster that's Drunk with Power. And it all ends with with the square gaining complete invulnerability and blasting through the villain with powerful lasers.
  • The "Tower" scenes are also quite awesome, with the Big Bad blasting some heavy metal riffs on the top of a really tall tower.
  • The whole scene with the boat carrying you as it bravely sails through stormy pink waters infested with dangerous corrupted monsters. The track "I'm Being Reelistic" by Omnitica that plays makes it all the more adrenaline-inducing.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Rainbow road!" followed by one of the triangles restoring something or someone to their former glory. Except during the final boss fight where the sample is distorted and the triangle instead grants said final boss a terrifying One-Winged Angel form.
• Older Than They Think: Due to it being a popular example of the concept, other Bullet Hell games set to the music are often compared to Just Shapes & Beats. However, it's not the first game with the premise - for example, Soundodger used the idea six years before it.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Story Mode only saves after completing levels, not after watching cutscenes, and cutscenes are unskippable. Did you just watch that 3-minute cutscene after beating that boss, then decide to leave Story Mode or close the game before playing another level? Have fun sitting through that same cutscene again.
• Tearjerker: After you beat the boss's final form, it crushes you, shattering you to pieces. We then get a brief moment of the cube, boat, and helicopter mourning over your death, with the boat even trying to splash water on you. Luckily, the blue cube resuscitates you using the two triangles on its head as a defibrillator, but watching them grieve beforehand is still downright heartbreaking to see.
• That One Attack: The charging Liu Kang silhouettes in "Mortal Kombat" come at you quickly and in droves, and are quite difficult to dodge reliably. Can't react fast enough? Pink stuff wins! Beatality.
• That One Boss:
  • "Close to Me", while also being a candidate for Best Boss Ever, is perhaps tougher than all forms of the Final Boss. Its attacks tend to leave little room for the player to dodge the laser burst it does afterward, requiring considerable reflexes to get past, and its screen-spinning sawblade attack can be completely random when it comes to the projectiles he fires. In addition, unlike all the other songs in the game, which are cut to be about 2 minutes long, this one plays in full, which is more than 4 minutes^note The saving grace is that there are several moments in the song where you don't have to do anything, such as the moments when Blue Cube is struggling to escape from the saw blades. And the first minute of the song is incredibly easy. It's a brutal fight that matches the atmosphere it presents.
  • "Annihilate" features waves of centipedes that are difficult to slip through due to their erratic wiggling patterns, as well as a section where the boss constantly switches back and forth between attacks that have almost mutually-exclusive safe areas. Normally this track wouldn't count since it's the Final Boss, but it can show up as the randomly-chosen third stage of a Challenge Mode run, depriving players of the 30-point (or 60-point in Hardcore difficulty) Challenge Completed bonus.
  • As part of the Lost Chapter update's collection, "Spider Dance" is a nightmare even worse than Annihilate. Whenever the boss is onscreen, expect it to be followed by a complete clusterfuck of quick-moving spiders combined with large hexagonal sections of the level flashing pink to leave practically zero breathing room.
• That One Level:
  • "Termination Shock" by Sabrepulse is arguably the game's first truly difficult level, especially when one considers how early it appears in Story Mode. This level has a whopping four checkpoints and features large pillars that will extend out of a side of the screen before quickly sweeping out in a direction indicated by the spikes on one side of them. Additionally, the fourth part introduces "staircases" of them that give you very little wiggle room to dodge them as they fly at you. Good luck getting this stage's S Rank in Challenge Mode.
  • Roughly halfway through your journey, there is "Cool Friends (Murtagh & Veschell Remix)" by Silva Hound. This level will bring your progress to a halt if you aren't prepared. Specifically, midway through the level, a giant saw blade takes up nearly half the screen drops down, spewing debris everywhere. The window for avoiding the squares it shoots out is very thin, and the open space to dodge is limited. Oh, and there are 3 more afterwards. Good luck.
  • People also have a tendency to hate "Into the Zone" by Shirobon. This level removes the sides of the screen and in the third part has pink lines that are very difficult to dodge.
  • All 5 of the levels introduced in Mixtape 3 are much harder than the levels before them. "Creatures Ov Deception" features many orbs shooting tons of fast-moving smaller orbs that fly erratically, and is also one of the fastest songs in the game, "Deadlocked" has a fast auto-scrolling segment with lasers that create flying cubes and large boxes that occasionally shoot out even more, as well as an ending that practically fills the screen with pink in Hardcore mode, "Lightspeed" blocks off the sides of the screen, fires projectiles everywhere, and features 4 spiked balls that zip around to every corner with only a split second of telegraphing, and "Katana Blaster" requires much precision to fit between droves of tiny projectiles, moving walls, and X-cut lasers that make dashing difficult, yet a requirement. But none of those four can compare to the frantic difficulty of "Granite", with groups of lasers that cover half the screen constantly, small bullets that fly everywhere, and clumps of circles that explode into even more bullets. God help you if you try Hardcore mode.
  • And if you thought that was bad, it only gets worse with the Lost Chapter's levels. Spider Dance has already been described under That One Boss, "Airborne Robots" has tons of lasers that leave very little room to squeeze into combined with a constant stream of bullets from every angle, "Interlaced" spams screen-swiping lines and tight, wavy patterns in between lasers to make dashing an absolute requirement, "Last Tile" throws a mishmash of everything the game has to offer at you, and finally, "Born Survivor" combines screen-wide projectile waves with orbs bouncing every which way and small strings of squares that seem explicitly placed to trick the player into thinking the edges of the screen are safe.
• That One Sidequest: One of the post-game challenges requires you to assemble a playlist of at least 10 songs and complete it. Playlist Mode does give you unlimited lives, but it doesn't change that every time you die, you have to rewind to the last checkpoint. Oh, and you can't use Party Mode to breeze through. Not exactly a good challenge for the time-constrained. The challenge after that requires you to run a playlist consisting of every single boss track in the game, which is 7 songs but if you die during a boss you have to start from the beginning of it due to having no mid-boss checkpoints.
  • Getting an S-Rank on any song without dashing. This is downright impossible on many songs as there are instances where you absolutely need to dash across unavoidable pink obstacles like the hexagon shapes in "Spectra", otherwise you will take damage.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Very much so. The visuals in the game are absolutely stunning and the music that it goes along with makes it all the more awesome.
• The Woobie: The blue cube in "Close To Me". It is separated from the player early in the game and is one of the few boss characters who was fully supportive and helpful before its corruption, which made it very sympathetic in most player's eyes. Thankfully, beating "Close To Me" fully cures them from the corruption.

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