Utada Hikaru - Beautiful World by avira0922

semi-hidden tobe map, his name isnt in tags and if you search tobebuta this won't come up. while not as brilliantly invigorating as life is game or as groundbreaking as rin to shite saku hana no gotoku, this is still a lovely map to accompany an even lovelier song.

something peculiar he does is he'll cut through the song with two totally nonsensical sliders. they make no rhythmic sense, almost to the point of farce, but they're still somehow beautiful:
00:23:755 (1,2,3) -
01:55:581 (1,2) -
and more obviously, 02:13:581 (8,9,10) -
what was he cooking? what went on in his brain? we'll never know. he does something similar in life is game at 00:27:330 (1,2) - . this is the last rhythm you would ever think of but it's infectiously playful.

01:04:190 (4,5,6) - little things like this
02:02:886 (1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,1) - and this

another delightful pattern is this megastructure at 01:49:581 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14) - . we encounter a similar idea in fanzhen's flow of life.

about old maps in general: it's so interesting to see all the praise heaped on icebeam's agony, especially by mappers who don't like any of the other old classics. the song is gorgeous and the map is truly a timetravel map with great rhythms, but it largely amounts to nothing more than a mediocre 2016 map: the only thing of value they can appreciate in an old map is that it resembles a half-decent new map.

taste is taste, and there are certainly plenty of old maps i dont like either, but one begins to suspect that there are entire dimensions of mapping going completely unnoticed by the current crop. the steady increase in player skill as well as the still growing emphasis on visuals at the expense of all else has resulted in a type of musical myopia; they can't see the forest for the trees, they hear the music with a permanent microscope. gone is any sense of musical structure, of the musical or melodic sentence, the phrase, progression, or any playfulness of musical interpretation. in fact, there's often more musical sensitivity from a novice mapper than an experienced mapper, because an experienced mapper has slowly trained it out of themselves. for all its innovations over the last decade, mapping has narrowed considerably.

"When we look at the sculptures of the past every single one is a work of genius, yet I don't for a moment think that even the least of their sculptors were also geniuses." the language of the older era lends itself perfectly to an understanding of musical structure: the tidy visuals suggested by the grid and inherited from ouendan, and especially the reliance on symmetries to make sense of the overwhelming density of objects. player skill and musical perception had not yet advanced far enough for mappers to forsake the sentence for the letter; they still had to contend with music as a series of phrases, and they had to learn to group sounds together into discrete packets of objects. over the years we've liberated mapping from these ancient strictures and this has brought us incredible innovations and opportunity, but as a result we've also liberated the innate understanding of musical structures that was previously the free birthright of older eras, and we've never since rediscovered it.

if back then any average joe could shit out a reasonably musical map, then imagine what a genius with an intuitive understanding of the possibilities of the medium could do. taste is still taste, but it becomes harder and harder to believe that there are people who look at something like basara and think, what gives? how does someone remain totally deaf to such inventiveness, such verve, such confidence?

you can dislike what you hear, but at least be able to hear it first. once you hear it, you'll never forget it.

Fuck tobebuta was so good

LET HIM COOK!!

tobebuta was not real

chudai

left my first playthrough on tobe's diff a little conflicted, 00:34:451 (1,2,3,4,5,6) - leaves an immediate impact, the copy paste afterwards at 00:38:625 and 00:46:973 without the reverb on the falsetto to back it up ended up muddying some of it's initial appeal.

compared to life is game which is comfortably the more technically proficient outing from tobe this year, I felt a desire for this map to really nail it's emotional highlights to really stand out - I feel like he nailed this the first time you play the pattern, which makes it sad that subsequent uses afterwards don't seem to achieve that same impact.