Shimotsuki Haruka - Re:Call by Kagayaki

map feels comfortable due to copy pasting but wtf is 03:57:423 (1)
also the circle after the spinner at 05:20:433 (1)

what is good i feel like i needed to post this review or else i will have regrets.

so to start, i get that discourse around maps of this song can (very tiringly) revolve around /s/221364 the pinkheart set from like 2015 or so. but considering this particular map explicitly mentions that it is inspired by pinkheart, in this particular instance it would be pretty dismissive of me to go about this map without comparing between the two (and it wouldn't be long enough to be able to convey everything i want to say).

this map is actually not too hard to describe. 01:33:982 (3,4,5) - this pattern, for 5 minutes straight (excluding the solo, which we'll talk about).

this one pattern is probably the thing most people know the pinkheart map for. it's the culmination of the whole general theme of the map (which is based off the visual novel about overlapping timelines), and it's also a pattern that flows particularly well. another main thing about the pinkheart map (and particularly the chorus section) is that it utilizes 2 different gameplay elements (linear vs. circular movement) that are deliberately placed in contrast against each other at specific moments in the song. this is what most people miss when analyzing pinkheart maps, how to differentiate between maps that are made by pinkheart and rio (because rio does the same thing minus the deliberately placed contrast), and why the short versions of her maps are usually better (because this style of mapping is already very rigid and doing it for 5 minutes would either make for the most boring map ever or get u into 6 different creative burnouts for 1 map).

the main issue i have is that... the map tries to copy the pinkheart map to this degree to begin with. obviously making a map that's just a style study of another map isn't wrong -- i do it a lot, in fact. but the problem that the kagayaki map suffers from is that the whole map is taken at face value without considering how the theme works from underneath the surface of the map. they aren't really expanded, reinterpreted or even understood properly. it's very much like watching someone cook by watching someone else do it then also doing it themselves without knowing what even goes into the dish. the map is so concerned with not going too off the mark from the map it references, in fact, in this part 00:28:841 - where both the short and long versions of the map has a break and a long slider followed by a spinner, the mapper of this map just blanks out and repeats the same rhythm and pattern 00:28:841 (1,2,3) - 8 times in a row. and then it does it again here 02:14:627 -.

the only part that is novel about this map is the solo part (03:56:562 - ) where the mapper breaks out into a style they're more comfortable with, and also a style that feels like a complete antithesis of the whole flowy gameplay and aesthetic both this map and the original map did. arguably the only non-boring part of the map, this part features more variations in patterning, showing that the mapper clearly had more inspiration for this part alone than in the rest of the map. why wasn't this done more? is this solo literally just the sole point of the map? i for one would have appreciated a version that's more true to ur own preferences instead of being the human equivalent of an ai being commanded to create a completely new painting with half a reference image.

...but at the same time, maybe that's kind of the thing too with maps of this song. the pinkheart map was obviously really good to the point where it's basically defined what this song should be mapped like (similar to rrtyui's atomosphere but the difference is that nobody actually wants to map atomosphere because rrtyui's map already existed). it's created this toxic expectation of a map where This map is the canon, and any other interpretation, however good, is shat on precisely because it's not what the "canon interpretation" is, until it gets redefined with an even better map. this anti-coexistence problem is also very common and pervasive with so many maps out there. there are a lot of maps that do not deserve the hate for "simply not being up to par with the pinkheart set". /s/294900 hollow wings made some really good parts to the kaedekashizuru collab (this map isn't actually hated but nobody really knows about this collab), /s/3510879 i actually really liked the chaser01 map , /s/1131410 narcissu made one of the most underrated renditions of this song and /s/2119650 even though the visionary map went into a direction that i wasnt the biggest fan of, i can at least appreciate it for being incredibly bold with the ideas that it does have.

this map isn't any of them.

many maps tried to do this exact same thing where mappers map this particular song in a similar style to the pinkheart map, but the difference is that most of them still deviate from the referenced rendition a lot of the time. this map did close to nothing new, and what new it did do gets overwritten by the overwhelming majority of the map itself.

every once in a while i redownload this map thinking that maybe there's something interesting that i missed from this map every once in a while. i've done this exact same thing maybe 7-8 times now, and every single time i come out disappointed.

that being said i don't think this map is meant to be any kind of lightning in a bottle map and we're kind of just comparing between this person's best and this other person's worst creation. hell, /s/1610189 i myself wasn't immune to the boredom flop map where i do the same 2-3 patterns on a long song . so i went to go to the mapper's profile in hopes of finding something else that's newer and better, and as it turns out, this was their last ranked map, and for the last 2 years they've never ranked anything else.

that's unfortunate.