YMMV / REFLEC BEAT

• Americans Hate Tingle: Amongst the English-speaking BEMANI community, Reflec Beat was historically not very well-received compared to other BEMANI games. As of 2014, this has been less of the case, with more American fans playing it.
• Breather Boss:
  • "Sakura Reflection" is a fairly simple chart that is rated a 10 for some reason, while several of the top 9s are harder.
  • For 11s, "Bad Maniacs" on Hard and "Maware! Setsugetsuka" on Special are considered the easiest by a long way.
  • "DOUBLE IMPACT" is, apparently, a 12, though you're likely to clear it before you can take the 11s mentioned in That One Boss below.

• Goddamned Bats: TOP notes. They're hit at a different height from regular notes, making them particularly annoying for beginners. It's not uncommon to get confused by seeing a fading note when it hasn't even hit the timing line yet, only to realize a moment later that it was a TOP note that you just missed. While many charts can still be cleared without hitting TOP notes, you will most likely lose to your opponent from missing notes (especially Just Reflec notes, which carry an extra penalty for missing), and some charts, particularly Shakunetsu Beach Side Bunny on Hard, have enough TOP notes that ignoring them guarantees that you will fail.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Reflesia of Eternity ended up being the final game in the series.
• Ho Yay: For some reason, the series is the origin for a number of songs with gay subtext:
  • Juicy, a romantic tune sung by DJ YOSHITAKA (and, in the full version, kors k as well). The artist is credited as "kors k Lovers DJ Yoshitaka".
  • VENUS, a unit consisting of Sota Fujimori composing the song and Yoshitaka on vocals, has brought us "Survival Games", "Far Away", and "Wow Wow VENUS", all of which have the duo posing in not-so-innocent ways on the songs' respective album jackets. The last one is particularly infamous amongst English speakers; "Wow Wow VENUS", a line repeated throughout the song, can be easily misheard as "Wow Wow PENIS" (to say nothing of the question of what Yoshitaka's looking down at on the jacket...)
  • BONUS is like VENUS, but with kors k instead of Yoshitaka. Their sole non-cover song so far is "Going My Way".
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint is that the game looks too chaotic to play.
• Memetic Loser: For some reason, Series Mascot Pastel-kun has become a Butt-Monkey amongst BEMANI fans on social media, who like to tweet images and make Vines of Pastel-kun plushies undergoing all manners of abuse.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "FLOWER", a.k.a. "the song that crosses over to every single BEMANI game", started its journey here, in a collaboration with jubeat.
  • "Dadadadadadadadadada". Yes, that's its title. It's seen a lot of mashups, even being mashed up with Tunak Tunak Tun.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • The first game has no Top markers on Basic, and two on Medium and Hard. limelight adds two Top markers on Basic, and a third one on Hard.
  • groovin'!! has the Special difficulty added.
  • Reflec Beat 悠久のリフレシア increases not the maximum difficulty (the hardest song introduced is on par with the existing Rebellio), but the overall difficulty of the game, with many more songs at the top level than there were before.
• That One Boss: Several.
  • Limelight has "HAERETICUS." Its jacket looks like it'll be fairly intense, but no one was likely to have seen that chart coming. Notably, when VOLZZA expanded the difficulty ratings, HAERETICUS was bumped up to Level 12, whereas most 10+ songs stayed at Level 11. So, essentially, it's Harder Than Harder Than Hard.
  • Any song that relies heavily on fast streams of objects, e.g. "chaplet", can be annoying to play.
  • Licensed song "STRONG" from colette is infamous for its difficulty to read and time; despite being only at Level 10, many players are passing 11s before they can get their head around this one.
    • Its successor "ANTI-HERO", from VOLZZA 2, has heavily swung patterns and a killer ending on top of it.
  • Several Reflec Beat Plus exclusives can be like this:
    • The Konami music medleys have been noted to be very awkward to play for 9s. The Super C, A-JAX and Gradius medleys deserve special mention.
    • "Atarashii Hikari" by 9mm Parabellum Bullet is awkward to play on top of possibly being poorly synced.
  • "ZZ" relies heavily on chained triplet patterns, which are far too easy to hit in the wrong order. It's a heavy roadblock in VOLZZA's CLASS 1 course, on top of being followed immediately by...
  • "fallen leaves", a very brutal 11.
  • The Mahjong Fight Club medley from colette's Autumn season is just unnecessary, being unusually fast-paced for a 10.
  • "Arcanos" was an annoyance for its first appearance due to its "slow scrolling speed" Fake Difficulty. But when the time came to revive it in the new version, speed mods were available, and the old slow chart wasn't even approaching a challenge. The solution? Speed it up during the ending!
  • Some of the SPECIAL charts are far more difficult than others. "Matsuken Samba II" packs a lot of difficulty into a 9, whilst "Dadadadadadadadadada" heavily uses jacks during the titular memetic part of the song.

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