osu! / YMMV - TV Tropes

Broken Base:
- Whether osu! is a Japanese or Western game, mostly: demonstrated brilliantly by I Can Be Your Friend
- From what can be seen, the main discussion is whether or not the overabundance of Anime Theme Song beatmaps is a bad thing.
  - The gradual shift from "free OTO/EBA clone for fun" towards competitive scene, and the way it streamlined ranked beatmaps, also led to Casual-Competitive Conflict, during which a lot of early players eventually migrated to other rhythm games.
- Storyboard toggles, skin toggles, and black backgrounds are argued as either necessary for competitive players, or ruining the creativity within osu!. peppy, the creator, has claimed he will never add a full toggle on any creative elements without having some sort of condition. For some time, that condition was having to play the map at least once with everything toggled on.
  - Now, all those elements can be toggled off and on without any condition.
- The questionable legality of all the beatmaps^note, especially when coupled with the game's subscription service^note, is a major point of contention. Expanding on this, there's the practice of music artists having their songs removed from the game. Some think it's a fair move on the artists' part and that they have the right to not be comfortable with the way their works are represented by third parties, while others think those musicians are overreacting and another case of copyright law being abused to hurt end-users who just want to play and make charts to songs with no interest in profiting off of them.
- The fanbase is split on the validity of touchscreen plays. Touchscreen makes it harder to maintain accuracy and hit long streams. However, it trivializes jump aim at the top level since players can use both hands to click right on the notes. This makes almost any jump map a cakewalk and makes borderline humanly impossible maps doable, and worth a lot. Many people saw this as encouraging Crippling Overspecialization, and disapproved of the fact that touchscreen players could enter the top 500 after only playing for a year or two, while other top players spent years and years perfecting their skills to get there. Others argued that it was not touchscreen's fault, but the pp system's fault for weighting those plays so heavily when they had such bad accuracy.
  - This formerly 900pp play by freedomdiver was the straw that broke the camel's back, leading to touchscreen's nerf. Now when the game detects that a player is using touchscreen, it will severely Nerf the pp they would otherwise get from aim. Players are still massively divided by this nerf, believing that a hard pp falloff for bad accuracy is still much more appropriate, since this change basically makes touchscreen plays worthless unless they are actually humanly impossible to do with mouse or tablet.
  - Inverted with touchscreen + keyboard players, who are nearly unanimously praised by the community for their unique playstyle. Since they only use one hand to aim and do not actually tap with the screen, their aim is more consistent at the cost of more difficult reading, since their hand is blocking the screen. This is seen as more in-line with the strengths and weaknesses of mouse and tablet. SapphireGhost, one of the most popular old school osu! players, was known for using this playstyle.
  - Note that while the original games were made to play on a touchscreen, osu! was optimized for tablet play, and most maps are ranked assuming that the player only has one object they move around (whether it be a mouse or tablet) to hit notes.
- Players who derank (or similarly, keep their rank down) in order to play rank-restricted tournaments. It's even worse when there's a prize for winning, like badges or money, since they are seen as "farming" easier tournaments. Some argue that it's the organizers' responsibility to find a better system that does not rely on rank, since these players are still participating within the rules. Others argue that regardless of rules, doing such a thing is immoral in the first place; since a player who should be higher ranked is playing others who are legitimately in that skill bracket, every match turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle, and almost certainly results in a victory for the deranker.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
- The game is called osu!, not Osu! nor OSU! Not even the main developer likes that.
- It's on the receiving end of this trope from fans of other rhythm games — claiming another rhythm game is inspired by osu! (when, the vast majority of the time, the devs do not claim it as an inspiration) is a good way to generate animosity from players of that game.
Fandom Rivalry:
- With various other Rhythm Game series. Fans of other series scoff at the excessive number of Anime Theme Songs, scoring that is based excessively on combo and modifiers, and lack of original content (as opposed to, say, the BMS community, where many artists produce original songs for play in beatmania simulators). Players of osu! defend the user content-based gameplay and the fact that the game is "free" (insofar that the game doesn't cost money, never mind the sheer degree of copyright infringement regarding the beatmaps), and the odd review here and there for other, for-profit rhythm games are often complaints that they have to pay for the game content.
- Thanks to a "best rhythm game" Twitter poll tournament in 2022 by Ohio State University's Rhythm Games Club, more specifically a semifinal round that pit osu!'s Standard mode against Arcaea, a pretty horrific rivalry broke out between osu! Standard and Arcaea players, with a lot of tweets regarding the poll being some rather violent shade against the other game and its fans.
Fan Nickname:
- osu! users can add their own nicknames to their "highlights" list.
- Peppy, the lead developer of the game, is occasionally called Pepsi.
- Cookiezi is often called C, or "Shige," after his preferred handle Shigetora.
Friendly Fandoms: Not necessarily a fandom, but the subreddits for osu! and Ohio State University (OSU) get along quite well. osu! started as a mild source of annoyance for r/OSU due to many confused players posting osu! content on their subreddit, but the two communities have since made peace and collaborated on April Fools' jokes, where they "swap" discussion topics for a day and intentionally play into the confusion. In fact, Cookiezi's Blue Zenith play is still one of the highest-rated posts on the university subreddit. Of course, osu! players who go to OSU have the best of both worlds.
Gateway Series: Generally averted; the subset of the player base whose first rhythm game is osu! is notorious for refusing to try other rhythm games.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This game, made by someone from Australia, has huge fanbases in North America and Japan. Even then, osu!'s community is very diverse, and you'll find players from a majority of developed countries around the world.
Memetic Mutation: Now has its own page.
Narm Charm: The reason NotShinta's Aha? is actually liked by some people.
Nintendo Hard: Thought Elite Beat Agents and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan were hard? You haven't seen anything yet. The hardest songs from Ouendan/EBA are approximately 3.5 stars on the revised star rating scale released in mid-2014 (the difficulty range that would be considered appropriate for an average osu! player is 4-5 stars, by the way.), and these games are already Nintendo Hard on their own. The hardest songs on Osu takes this up to eleven, with revised star rating exceeding 7 stars, such as "Can't Defeat Airman". Such crazy streams and jumps do not exist in the original Ouendan/EBA games. Certain maps can even have 10 to 11 stars.
- A common joke between pro players (rank 1000 or less) is saying they have problems passing "Can't Defeat Airman", there are a few beatmaps where almost all players have to struggle, such as "xi - FREEDOM DiVE (FOUR DIMENSIONS)", or "IOSYS - Utage wa Eien ni ~SHD~ (TAG4)". (Though that one is meant to be played by four players simultaneously.)
- Prior to the mid-2014 update of difficulty calculation system, original star rating scale could not keep up with the escalating difficulty of the newer beatmaps with topped off at 5 stars.
  - There are the few maps that completely break the old star rating system, such as xi - FREEDOM DiVE, where the hardest difficulty is rated at around 2.5 stars, which is the average Easy difficulty rating, and the other, also insane+ difficulty is rated at 4.5, which is a typical Hard difficulty. Certain maps with high difficulty settings go ABOVE the 5.00 limit (although not by much).
  - Adding on, there are several joke maps with star ratings into the negative and beyond, even reaching up to -infinity/5 in some weird special cases.
- For osu!mania 4-key, there are some maps that, while they would only be maybe a 6 star map in osu!mania, they could go up to 20-footers in Stepmania (like That Was Too Slow [4K MX] or miracle 5ympho X [Black Another]). An 8.5-star map might be around a 26-footer or harder, something like Kinetic or UKF Dubstep VIP in Stepmania.
Older Than They Think: Many popular songs actually appeared in other rhythm games first, notably "FREEDOM DiVE" which first debuted as a song for the beatmania IIDX simulator Lunatic Rave 2.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- osu! is meant to simulate Ouendan and EBA. Unfortunately, this includes whatever Scrappy Mechanics the source games have, including spinners (which beatmap creators seem to be a little obsessed with, especially when making harder maps) and the very, VERY combo-based scoring system. The scoring system also creates a point of soreness when it comes to the leaderboards, as it's very common for someone with a lower accuracy to beat out another player who has higher accuracy by a few million points, all because the former maintained a full combo while the latter had a couple of misses.
- The Performance Point (pp) system, that is intended to balance scores between maps with a wide variety of max combos but also makes plays that aren't Full Combos almost always worthless. Some mappers also intentionally create maps designed to give pp to the playerbase, which has been met with significant controversy from the community.
  - These so-called "pp maps" are often easy to read (as the algorithm does not account for elements of reading difficulty such as note density), have simple rhythms, have a few Difficulty Spikes that push up the value of the map among otherwise easy sections, and often only require the player to be good at one or two skills. They are usually either very short, allowing players to retry over and over again, or excessively long, padding out the map with easy sections for minutes to take advantage of the length bonus.
  - Defenders of these maps argue that they are fun to play because they read so cleanly, and that mapping for pp is not an intrinsically bad thing because players will still gravitate towards the maps that happen to be overweighted regardless. Opponents of this practice claim that plays on "pp maps" are not impressive and that they encourage "one-tricking" one's way through the game, essentially being responsible for Crippling Overspecialization within modern players' skillsets.
- Modifiers multiply your score. One of these modifiers (Double Time, or "DT") multiplies the speed of the song by 1.5x to give a score multiplier of 1.12x. The only modifier that gives as much is the Flashlight mod, which involves memorizing the entire map. So, to get onto the leaderboards of lower difficulties of a mapset, you often have to use Double Time, which not only artificially inflates the difficulty of the beatmap, but also will probably make the song sound terrible. This on top of the combo-based scoring makes for a very frustrating scoring system; while there is an option in multiplayer matches to use accuracy as the deciding metric, and some community competitions use accuracy as well to determine rankings, if you're going for the overall leaderboards or you're in a score-based match or competition, good luck.
- The Hidden mod in particular is a topic of contention in the community. It only makes notes fade out, and does not actually make the map mechanically harder. Back when pp maps were not as prevalent, the score and pp bonuses it gave were fine, since it was a case of Hard Mode Perks - putting Hidden on a balanced map does make it more difficult to follow. However, many argue that on many modern pp maps, where reading is easy, Hidden is purely preference since it makes little difference playing with or without it. Owing to this, Hidden has recently been rebalanced to Nerf its bonus on low-density jump maps.
- The Overall Difficulty ("OD") parameter on a map is what scales most heavily with pp, which makes sense, as it controls how difficult it is to get good accuracy. Higher OD values used to be reserved for difficult beatmaps, and the general rule was that the numeric value for OD should not exceed that of the Approach Rate, or "AR" (how fast circles appear on screen). However, on maps with simpler rhythms (such as the aforementioned "pp maps"), the increased difficulty in timing hardly matters to experienced players.
  - A notorious practice in pp mapping is to make the OD of a map disproportionately high for its star rating. It's not uncommon these days to see AR 9 maps with an OD of 9.3 or higher. The patterns are often so linear that everyone ends up getting good accuracy on these maps anyway.
  - This also opens up the door for modifier abuse; they were intended to make beatmaps harder, but some of them include an increase in OD among their other changes, making the rewards sometimes completely eclipse the increase in difficulty.
- More than a few players would like the option to toggle hitsounds and/or backgrounds unconditionally, a feature peppy is unwilling to implement (he did it anyways).
- Playing with a mouse is this for some players, particularly those who can't afford a tablet or a touchscreen, due to not only being uncomfortable but also a faster way to give a player carpal tunnel syndrome. That said, it can also be a Self-Imposed Challenge for some people.
Self-Imposed Challenge: While it can also be a Scrappy Mechanic, playing with a mouse can be this depending on the player.
"Stop Having Fun" Guys:
- Can happen sometimes with overzealous players.
- Don't you dare farm AR 8 maps with Double Time, it proves you have no skill.
- How dare maps without Insanes get ranked, they have no Performance Point value!
That One Boss: Can happen with any player on any song.
- This version of Team Nekokan's "Can't Defeat Airman" has become a meme within the osu! community itself as being "That One Song." Despite being easier than Blue Dragon's version or Sushi's version, it is still considered very difficult to pass.
  - Part of the reason for this is that the beatmap in question is one of the first ever made, and contains many elements of Fake Difficulty, such as smaller circle size, low Approach Rate, inconsistent spacing, and a rather high slider velocity. None of these elements would be found in a so-called "Normal" difficulty today.
  - It is also required to pass this map in order to get an achievement for completing every song in the "Video Game Pack No.1" map pack. Since this is the only song in the pack with one difficulty, and passing it is not easy for Novice players, quite a bit of wrath is generated in the process of trying to beat it.
- Image Material, mapped by Scorpiour, is notorious for how difficult it is to FC. Due to its length, high BPM, and frequent streams, the best that anyone could manage for a long time was a high combo with a few misses or sliderbreaks at the end. Image Material was thus regarded as a "cursed map" in the community for over two years, until Cookiezi FC'ed the map in late 2015. Modern speed players tend to have less trouble with the map, though, as shown by the many FC's over the years, particularly late in 2020.
- There are several ranked maps that seem to have been designed to be un-FC'able, such as Apparition and The Promethean Kings. No score on the leaderboard is even close to a Full Combo, as these maps are so long and so straining that they are likely above the capabilities of any of the top players right now.

YMMV / osu!

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