forever gutted that i never managed to nab that first fc on this. i sank hundreds of plays into it over the course of that week and i dont regret it. a truly beautiful map
it's by no means an unsubtle map, but one thing that is delightfully unsubtle about it is its sense of unrelenting drive. it doesn't let up for even a second. crucially, when the song slows down at 00:18:721 (1) - chloe keeps spacing and sv relatively high, and this sets the tone for the rest of the map. at 02:40:054 (1) - many other mappers would dissemble and break up the section with patterns and kicksliders to follow the guitar. but chloe elects to follows the spirit of the law rather than the letter, and we're subjected to the blunt force trauma of a double deathstream that is perfectly in keeping with the fearlessly direct approach of the map.
the other thing so instrumental to the atmosphere of the map is how structured its distance spacing is. it's the "subtlety of unsubtlety"; a very curious paradox. he paints in broad strokes and doesn't fiddle with the minutia of patterns--distances are large and constant, sliders long and powerful, jumps come in neatly ordered shapes, streams are unfussy and straightforward, slider arrangements are ostensibly as conventional as they come. and yet, with all these blunt, almost obvious patterns, chloe somehow manages to express the more subtle aspects of the song.
neither of these are choices that would necessarily work in many or even most other songs, which makes it all the more delightful that they fit so perfectly in this one.
i mean, i could go on pointing out patterns forever. and it's not that any of these patterns are individually gamechanging, it's the overwhelming amount of them and the unwavering faithfulness to structure, coupled with plain good music sense, that produces a beautiful accumulatory effect. this map is also surprisingly rich in that specific flavor of mapping that asian countries in particular are so good at, and is also so hard to describe: a delicate balance between line and curve that implies the horizontal/vertical axes without referring to them directly.
dont know if any of that made sense, these concepts are some of the hardest concepts in mapping to translate into words, at least for me. but these are fun to write.
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.
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.
one can only guess what ancient, personal dimension he was tapping into to produce this kind of rhythmic alchemy. the map itself sings alongside the song: sliderends exploding on white ticks straight into bizarre 1/2 stops, faithfully following the drums only to at a moment's notice abandon it for some vocal or instrumental nicety, ingenious patterns blossoming and wilting away in the span of a second, generous spacing ranging haphazardly across the entire playfield, whimsical syncopation—he leaves no stone unturned, exploiting every single second of blue amber's varied drumline to weave together this intricate tapestry of rhythmic innovation. totally unpredictable and with neither rhyme nor reason, but when all's said and done everything makes frighteningly perfect sense. a true wizard of the editor
a bygone age where, when a novice mapper was faced with a blank canvas and had no clue what to do, they found their way by mapping not with their eyes but with their ears, their hands, and their heart. but all that aside, 100pa- uploaded this map a month after he made his account.
there's nothing really special about this one, if only because fanzhen's mapping career is absolutely littered with these casual masterpieces. this just happens to be a personal favorite of mine. starting from 2:00 the map unleashes about 40 great patterns in a row until the excellent finisher at 3:34, where fanzhen proportions out a dizzyingly virtuosic 20-second long progression sequence that takes you all the way to the final spinner.
a plainly remarkable map from 2011. lizbeth takes a supremely effective method of copypaste patterning to one of the most lush songs i've ever heard. the juxtaposition is illuminating; equanimity in mapping doesn't diminish a song's emotionality, but actually heightens it. a hidden gem for sure
when compared to the other greats of the game kiddly was never quite an ideas guy, but what he lacks in ideas he more than makes up for with overwhelming visual beauty. vijore achieves aesthetic perfection not by beating you over the head with sheer object density, but by pure poetry of arrangement. kiddly carefully paces out onoken's otherworldly epic with the meticulous, almost mathematic elegance so characteristic of that particular chinese cs5 style. his cs5 aesthetic is the most beautiful (except for maybe kloyd's) and certainly one of the most recognizable of all time, and his arrangement idiosyncrasies are never as potent and concentrated as they are here.
sometimes i wonder if it's unreasonable to expect slider mappers to inject even a modicum of musical sensitivity into their maps. but then i remember: someone's done it before. and of course nothing needs to be said about ak74's slider design and arrangement. my only complaint is that the harmonies are somewhat obscured by the hitsounds
kloyd's abilities haven't diminished over the years, quite the opposite, but this is the premier cs5 stylist operating at the height of his powers. simplistic object arrangements that, in anyone else's hands would be unremarkable, here acquire a hypnotic quality, no doubt in part thanks to the song. long object chains lead themselves across the playfield only to veer off, swanlike, into unexpected detours. curve and line have never complemented each other so convincingly as in this map.
a recent masterwork from the best mapper in the game, whose every map takes you to its own personal universe. this one leads you tiptoeing through nagayama maki's gossamer vocals with gentle cross-screen jumps and minute sliders that capture every glimmering background detail. no one can create atmosphere like this.
this is still, somehow, the most musically effective use of 2b to date. instead of using 2b as a crutch, he uses it as another tool to express his rhythmic voice. endlessly creative, with its various sections well differentiated, this was my first mapping love and remains one of my favorites to this day
nee doushite
1. 00:59:198 (2,1,2,3,4,5) -
2. 01:48:178 (2,3,4,5,6,7) -
funky
1. 00:19:555 (1,2,3,4,5,6) - 00:49:096 (2,3,4,5,6,7,8) -
2. 01:33:025 (1,2,3,1,2,3,4,1) -
this map is literally fine, i have no idea wtf you guys are on about. i kind of like it actually
forever gutted that i never managed to nab that first fc on this. i sank hundreds of plays into it over the course of that week and i dont regret it. a truly beautiful map
he is simply built different
it's by no means an unsubtle map, but one thing that is delightfully unsubtle about it is its sense of unrelenting drive. it doesn't let up for even a second. crucially, when the song slows down at 00:18:721 (1) - chloe keeps spacing and sv relatively high, and this sets the tone for the rest of the map. at 02:40:054 (1) - many other mappers would dissemble and break up the section with patterns and kicksliders to follow the guitar. but chloe elects to follows the spirit of the law rather than the letter, and we're subjected to the blunt force trauma of a double deathstream that is perfectly in keeping with the fearlessly direct approach of the map.
the other thing so instrumental to the atmosphere of the map is how structured its distance spacing is. it's the "subtlety of unsubtlety"; a very curious paradox. he paints in broad strokes and doesn't fiddle with the minutia of patterns--distances are large and constant, sliders long and powerful, jumps come in neatly ordered shapes, streams are unfussy and straightforward, slider arrangements are ostensibly as conventional as they come. and yet, with all these blunt, almost obvious patterns, chloe somehow manages to express the more subtle aspects of the song.
neither of these are choices that would necessarily work in many or even most other songs, which makes it all the more delightful that they fit so perfectly in this one.
and that's not to say that's all there is to the map either. a plucky attitude alone doesnt achieve anything without great patterns to give it substance. listen to how these patterns function with the song:
00:17:722 (1,2,3,4,5,1) -
00:26:721 (1,2,3,4,5,6) -
00:29:388 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1) -
00:34:721 (1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3) -
01:02:721 (1) - 01:41:388 (1) - he uses these kinds of abnormal sliders sparingly so they're all the more effective when they do pop up
01:05:388 (1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2,3) - the line of circles cutting through the middle of the song is fantastic
01:16:054 (1,2,1,2,1,2,1,1,2,1) -
01:18:721 (1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) - counterclockwise, followed by 01:21:388 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,1,2,3,4,5) - clockwise
01:27:721 (1,2,3,4,1,1,2,3,4,5,1) - that feeling of structure
01:37:388 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,1,2,1,2,1,2) - again
01:40:054 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) - 02:06:721 (1,2,3,4,5) - 02:17:388 (1,2,3,4,5,6,1) - he loves these, i love these
i mean, i could go on pointing out patterns forever. and it's not that any of these patterns are individually gamechanging, it's the overwhelming amount of them and the unwavering faithfulness to structure, coupled with plain good music sense, that produces a beautiful accumulatory effect. this map is also surprisingly rich in that specific flavor of mapping that asian countries in particular are so good at, and is also so hard to describe: a delicate balance between line and curve that implies the horizontal/vertical axes without referring to them directly.
dont know if any of that made sense, these concepts are some of the hardest concepts in mapping to translate into words, at least for me. but these are fun to write.
jenny rom on osu. irresistibly upbeat song, loads of fun to play
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.
one can only guess what ancient, personal dimension he was tapping into to produce this kind of rhythmic alchemy. the map itself sings alongside the song: sliderends exploding on white ticks straight into bizarre 1/2 stops, faithfully following the drums only to at a moment's notice abandon it for some vocal or instrumental nicety, ingenious patterns blossoming and wilting away in the span of a second, generous spacing ranging haphazardly across the entire playfield, whimsical syncopation—he leaves no stone unturned, exploiting every single second of blue amber's varied drumline to weave together this intricate tapestry of rhythmic innovation. totally unpredictable and with neither rhyme nor reason, but when all's said and done everything makes frighteningly perfect sense. a true wizard of the editor
a bygone age where, when a novice mapper was faced with a blank canvas and had no clue what to do, they found their way by mapping not with their eyes but with their ears, their hands, and their heart. but all that aside, 100pa- uploaded this map a month after he made his account.
there's nothing really special about this one, if only because fanzhen's mapping career is absolutely littered with these casual masterpieces. this just happens to be a personal favorite of mine. starting from 2:00 the map unleashes about 40 great patterns in a row until the excellent finisher at 3:34, where fanzhen proportions out a dizzyingly virtuosic 20-second long progression sequence that takes you all the way to the final spinner.
a plainly remarkable map from 2011. lizbeth takes a supremely effective method of copypaste patterning to one of the most lush songs i've ever heard. the juxtaposition is illuminating; equanimity in mapping doesn't diminish a song's emotionality, but actually heightens it. a hidden gem for sure
lets fucking go urushi
when compared to the other greats of the game kiddly was never quite an ideas guy, but what he lacks in ideas he more than makes up for with overwhelming visual beauty. vijore achieves aesthetic perfection not by beating you over the head with sheer object density, but by pure poetry of arrangement. kiddly carefully paces out onoken's otherworldly epic with the meticulous, almost mathematic elegance so characteristic of that particular chinese cs5 style. his cs5 aesthetic is the most beautiful (except for maybe kloyd's) and certainly one of the most recognizable of all time, and his arrangement idiosyncrasies are never as potent and concentrated as they are here.
sometimes i wonder if it's unreasonable to expect slider mappers to inject even a modicum of musical sensitivity into their maps. but then i remember: someone's done it before. and of course nothing needs to be said about ak74's slider design and arrangement. my only complaint is that the harmonies are somewhat obscured by the hitsounds
1:01
1:26
3:12
jusut a couple dudes tossing off the best patterns youve ever seen
kloyd's abilities haven't diminished over the years, quite the opposite, but this is the premier cs5 stylist operating at the height of his powers. simplistic object arrangements that, in anyone else's hands would be unremarkable, here acquire a hypnotic quality, no doubt in part thanks to the song. long object chains lead themselves across the playfield only to veer off, swanlike, into unexpected detours. curve and line have never complemented each other so convincingly as in this map.
a recent masterwork from the best mapper in the game, whose every map takes you to its own personal universe. this one leads you tiptoeing through nagayama maki's gossamer vocals with gentle cross-screen jumps and minute sliders that capture every glimmering background detail. no one can create atmosphere like this.
this is still, somehow, the most musically effective use of 2b to date. instead of using 2b as a crutch, he uses it as another tool to express his rhythmic voice. endlessly creative, with its various sections well differentiated, this was my first mapping love and remains one of my favorites to this day