YMMV / Phigros

• Americans Hate Tingle: Or alternatively, Americans Hate Phigros — it has over 30 million downloads across both platforms and a considerable following in Asia, including its home country of China and especially in developing Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, due to being one of the more accessible rhythm games due to its freeware nature and creative chart designs that make use of the game's unique judgement line gimmick. It's rather telling that the game got a collaboration with CHUNITHM, a game that otherwise only really does collaborations with other high-profile rhythm games. But it is less-known in the rhythm game communities of Western countries other than Australia and New Zealand (such as the United States), where the people who have heard the game really don't like it very much and only a small niche of players enjoy the game, due to the longstanding stigma against mobile games ("not a real gaming platform") and Freeware Games ("I can pay money to get better games") as well as dislike for the game's unconventional note presentation. Regarding the game's freeware nature: Most low-income Western players have long preferred StepMania, osu!, and other "simulator" games for their free rhythm game fix, so Phigros doesn't stand out to them.
• Good Bad Bugs: Version 1.5.3 has a bug with the song "Starduster" on Easy difficulty, wherein getting an All Perfect causes the game to display your new personal best score as 1,025,641 rather than the correct maximum score of 1,000,000. By the time the development team caught it, the update had been submitted to the approval queue in some some app markets. This is because each chart stores the number of notes as a manually-entered value, rather than the game just tallying up the number of notes. Because the "number of notes" value that's coded into the chart (259) is lower than the actual number of notes (280), the game gives out more points than expected (the point value of each note is inversely proportional to the number-of-notes value) for each hit.
• Memetic Mutation: Phigros x Arcaea^Explanation Mentioning a collaboration between the two rhythm games in the official Phigros Discord server yields mixed reactions. At best, other users reply saying that mentioning the phrase will make something bad happen to Arcaea characters. At worst, other users will frown and bluntly dismiss that a collaboration will never happen. The phrase has been thrown around so much to the point the server mods discourage it, as well as possibly being banned.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "JunXion Between Life And Death", while Awesome Music, features a boy in white and with creepy red eyes hooked up to a bloodbag and surrounded by skeletons in a crosswalk, implying that he's near the end of his life (hence the title).
  • LeaF's hit song "MopeMope" is here, with all the aural Jump Scares, Mood Whiplash, and juxtaposition of cute cheerfulness and hellish cacaphony that entails. Thankfully there are no visual scares...unless you play on the Special difficulty, in which the background image sometimes darkens and tints to throw off the player.
  • The other infamous LeaF song, "MARENOL", also makes an apperance. The original background features Misui, the girl from the music video, with cuts on her arms that are heavily implied to be from Self-Harm. The updated Insane chart from the 1.5.0 update starts with a Slide Note suddenly being "run over" by a bunch of judgment lines, in a manner similar to the music video where the girl gets run over by a train. The updated background is even worse: Misui's arms below the elbow have been cut off, there's cuts on her legs too, and there's knives dangling around her. It's rather telling that on the Phigros wiki, it is the only song with its visual data to be hidden behind a trigger warning.
  • The Chapter 5 "boss" song is locked in a way that's different from the other locked songs. First, when you select it while it's still locked, there's no info about the song, just the eyecatch of the song which has only the silhouette of a girl against a cybernetic backdrop. When you do unlock the song, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The game resets to the title screen with a glitchy version of the title theme playing, then the song is introduced with a special screen and the mystery girl is finally revealed...only for the game to seemingly malfunction followed by a "fatal error" message against a red background, as if your expensive phone or tablet just broke. After about 25 seconds of suspenseful silence, the song finally begins.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Like virtually every mobile rhythm game (for some reason), this game's scoring system has a combo element to it; you can be kicked out of ν rank (960,000 out of 1,000,000) or even S rank (920,000) for missing one note in the middle and thus losing 50,000 points out of the 100,000-point max combo bonus, yet you have an accuracy score of 99%. Fortunately, player rating goes off of accuracy instead. Challenge mode introduces tighter timing windows and strictly accuracy-based scoring, but it makes you play three different songs in a row and scores in this mode are not saved.
  • The fact that the SP charts are only available on one day, ever, and that updating the app makes them inaccesible. It has led to players compiling .apk files of every version in order to allow others to play these charts...and that's if you're on Android, as iOS being significantly more locked down makes it much harder to use sideloaded older versions of the app.
• Shocking Moments: The game getting a collaboration with CHUNITHM. Mind you, Phigros is a non-profit game and CHUNITHM is one of the highest-grossing arcade rhythm games in Japan. Many players assumed that such a collaboration would never happen due to how costly it could be for Pigeon Games.
• Special Effect Failure: When "Spasmodic" is unlocked, your phone/tablet appears to crash. The fake error screen would be more believable (and perhaps more terrifying than it already is), if it wasn't obviously a video file being played back, as evidenced by the visual artifacts. This is likely for the better, as if the fake error didn’t look obviously fake some players might mistake their device for being really broken and take drastic actions upon it. There's also the matter of the error message being in Chinese, something unlikely to fool users of phones or tablets not made by Chinese companies.
• That One Attack: "Burn" IN (level 14) seems pretty straightforward, other than some chorts of 3 notes that can trip up thumb-based players...right until the last half of the refrain, at which point the notes start to come in from two directions at a time, sometimes in opposite directions, necessitating a lot of Trial-and-Error Gameplay to get down pat. "When you crash and burn" indeed.
• That One Level:
  • For those trying to get all perfects on all the level 13s, "Get Back" is particularly nasty, with upscroll that's far harder than you'll see in most level 14 charts and which refuses to stick to one pattern. The chart is also full of inconsistency as to where taps and drag notes should be placed, which messes with a lot of players.
  • "Dead Soul" IN is pretty questionable for a level 14 chart, featuring a lot of notes suddenly spawning out of nowhere and stop-and-go note scrolling, making it feel more like a level 15 in many players' eyes.
  • "On and On!!" IN is an absolute killer, rated 14 despite the overall feel of a level 15. Highlights include traveling jackhammers (think DX Choseino), surprise notes that kill your combo if you don't know they're coming, and pretty brutal upscroll right at the end. Somehow, when the 2.5.0 update re-rated some other alleged level 14s (Ark and [PRAW]), "On and On!!" didn't join them.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: When "MARENOL" got new artwork in a September 2020 update, it was met with some disdain due to it being seen as too violent and triggering (especially for those with mental health problems) for a rhythm game that isn't meant to focus on gruesome imagery. Those who don't find it to be Nightmare Fuel find that it's too bright (bordering on Mood Dissonance) and distracting compared to the original, until an update applied a blur filter to song artwork when playing the song.
• Tough Act to Follow: Phigros ended up being a very successful rhythm game with over 30 million downloads, which ended up becoming the yardstick that Pigeon Games' next project, Rizline, was negatively compared against. This is because Phigros is a completely free game, something that is seldom seen in the Rhythm Game genre outside of legally-dubious "simulator" games like osu! and Stepmania. And unfortunately a lot of those players were turned away by Rizline requiring an in-app purchase to access the majority of its content, despite the purchase being only 1 USD, whether due to not wanting to spend money on games or not having a method of doing so (younger players especially, if they don't live someplace where they can top up on iOS App Store or Google Play Store gift credit).
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: This game is rated E (for Everyone) on the Google Play Store, despite the rather gory song jacket for "MARENOL" which features a girl missing her hands, a noose around her neck, and dozens of scars on her limbs implied to be from Self-Harm. The iOS App Store is slightly better about this, giving the game a 12+ rating. Strangely, when an update of the game got rejected from Google Play Store due to inappropriate content, it wasn't because of "MARENOL", but because of "Dlyrotz" having artwork of someone smoking (i.e. maimed girl in a nightmare is okay, but one person having a relatively safe smoke isn't).