Within Temptation - The Unforgiving by Armin

appreciate the review, nice play @141

The songs are pretty good but that map itself isnt too bad.

map long ah hell

im not reading that shit bro

Bro wrote all that to flex their htfl scores

(This review is not about the quality of the map, which is pretty good, it is about my personal experience with it. We’re making rateyourmusic comments now baby get ready)

When -GN first fced The Unforgiving FL in 2021, he said that this map would teach you something about yourself and your head. While I didn’t understand exactly what he meant at the time, now I can confidently say that its one of the truest things I’ve heard about this marathon out of the hundreds of takes I’ve heard since.
This map isn’t “hard” in the conventional sense of it, or even the way that many marathons are. My other largest accomplishment, Umineko no Nako Koro ni Compilation HTFL, gets most of its difficulty from traditionally straining patterns and sections, which require a good memory and technical skill to perform, while also having a lesser requirement of good consistency to maintain playing capability for 40 minutes. Most songs in the compilation were very consistently mapped, sections were either difficult and required your focus to preserve combo or weren’t and served as break sections where you could zone out and let your muscle memory do the work for you. As a whole, the map felt strenuous to play but in a doable way, playing always felt mostly relaxed and I never got too upset at it.
This relaxed experience, however, can’t be said of The Unforgiving. This map gets almost all of its difficulty from 3 songs, 2 of which get made much easier with HT, leaving just In The Middle Of The Night (majorly the third break) as the only hard section in this 70 minute map. Almost every play I set in my month-long grind for this score was just me playing the first 14 minutes of the map to get to the only hard section, missing, and then restarting for 2-4 hours, which quickly became extremely draining and demotivating. And, even though the rest of the map was (comparatively) extremely easy, I couldn’t just hope to sightread it once I got passed. These other songs often contained random blind jumps or patterns that really didn’t flow in an easily rememberable way that I kept having to come back to over and over again, which made my practice days into long sessions of me playing patterns that I mostly already remembered just to make sure I could pull them out of my ass when I was on a run. Combined with the sheer amount of material I had to remember (almost 2x that of the longest map I had memorized previously), even memorizing, my favorite part of playing FL, became torturous. Pulling off the fc was equally hard, not only did the play take over two and a half hours to complete, but because the blind jumps are unfortunately pretty consistently peppered throughout every song of the map, which means there are no break songs where you can just chill, every song requires complete focus unless you want to risk missing 80 minutes in. Add to that the stress of playing A Demon’s Fate while knowing that messing up means that you’ll have to wait an absolute minimum of multiple hours for another attempt and you get some of the worst, longest held nerves I’ve felt while on an fc.
So, what does all this mean? What did I learn about myself from fcing The Unforgiving HTFL? I guess I’m just not cut out for these really long maps. My brain is great at holding a lot of information, but this much just kind of breaks it. I guess everyone has that type of limit, and mine is somewhere in between 40 and 70 minutes. Also, I need my break times. I can’t do this constant focus shit man, I want to listen to more Wheel of Time. Finally, not very partial to In The Middle Of The Night, I still say this is one of the best FL sets in the entire game, just not that diff. Play Iron instead.

Final Rating:
Mapping: 7/10 (9/10 if no In The Middle Of The Night)
Enjoyment Rating: This map literally made me suicidal for half a week/10
Would I recommend: If you’re starting out on FL, please play the individual songs, but stay away from the marathon, it is just not worth it. If you want a long map play parapara instead.

in the middle of the night is actually the worst map ever made

jesus