”click the circles. to the beat.”#

osu! is a deceivingly simple game. One could summarize it by the tagline above – long time players should recall nekodex’s voice and the iconic menu screen music. But that tagline is also deceivingly simple: osu! is much more than just clicking to the beat, or another “aim trainer”, or yet another VSRG^[1] in the case of osu!mania. The core mechanics aren’t difficult to understand; your input consists of only two actions: cursor movement, and pressing two keys. Circles, sliders, and spinners are the only interactable objects in this entire game. In theory, all you need to do is just move your cursor to the right spot, and click at the right time.

From this description alone, it sounds insanely fucking boring. If you’ve ever played piano tiles on a phone when you were a kid, I would imagine you eventually dropped it because you got bored. So logically, anyone who isn’t already into other rhythm games should be confused as to why hundreds of thousands of active^[1.1] players keep putting their time into osu!. They’ve spent thousands of hours on this game for seemingly no reason. It’s not another FPS game – unless you specifically decide to play multiplayer, there are no lobbies to directly interact with other players. It’s not a sandbox game like Minecraft, where there’s an infinite number of ways to play, just like the infinite things you have the ability to create. It’s not an aim trainer either, despite what the CSGO community would like you to believe; aim trainers have no new content, only a number to keep increasing through exponential effort – but more on that later.

osu! has been active since 2007; that’s almost 18 years! The current top player is only a year older than this game – and many new players are even younger than it. Fucks sake, even I am barely older than this game. But despite osu! being so old, it still continues to steadily grow every single year. Most games just die the moment the hype settles down – that is, a couple of years after their release. Why didn’t this happen?

Rhythm games have seemingly carved out a niche community that require a different kind of entertainment. Rhythm games are about listening to music and vibing along, for lack of a better term. There would not be rhythm games without the music – that’s just an aim trainer. This distinction is what separates an aim trainer from a game that has a nearly infinite amount of content, only limited by the amount of songs that exist in the world. Of course, many would argue that copyright severely limits the songs a rhythm game could legally provide. osu!, for the most part, skirts by these regulations by using the same loophole all social medias use – putting the responsibility on the users to obtain usage rights, which many often don’t. While unfortunate that it has to come to this, there simply is no alternative for a rhythm game that has any sort of long-term future. In essence, this game has to stay out of the mainstream eyesight to keep surviving, otherwise it would be hit by copyright strikes left and right, taking down many beloved maps.

[//] # (TODO)

¹: _{VSRG is a term for rhythm games that feature multiple keys scrolling vertically. In osu!‘s case, this gamemode is called osu!mania.}

¹⁻¹ : _{defined as the top ~200k-ish, the other 16 million registered users are mostly inactive.}

hmmm… let me try this “osu!”#

The first thing you’d notice when starting this game up for the first time is that it’s heavily associated with anime culture. From the anime girls plastered on seemingly half the map backgrounds, especially for older maps, it seems like everything is the same. Many people are turned away at this point, since they aren’t interested. For me, I didn’t know about the hatred for anime back then; I didn’t really even know what anime was in the first place. In the early days of osu!, this game was a safe heaven for the people into that stuff; back then, say, 2013, it wasn’t socially acceptable to say that you liked anime, it was weird. But this isn’t the only reason why there’s so many Japanese songs in this game – it’s become this way for other reasons you’d never think of. (I’ll cover this later)

If you still kept playing despite every single beginner map^[2] being anime OPs, congratulations! You’ve fallen another level deeper into the rabbit hole. Now thinking that you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll have likely tried something more difficult, only to immediately fail. After playing your first few harder maps, you might be on the edge of giving up: “how on earth do people play this fucking game??” Some at this point might believe that the trick to becoming a top player is just to memorize everything. But this is nowhere close to the truth. Memorization is a skill that is unique to each map, and takes dozens upon dozens of hours to build up. If I open up osu! right now to play something at random, just the mere act of being able to play it is proof that memorization is not how everyone plays osu!. Instead, I’m sightreading the map, just like those who play musical instruments can sightread sheet music, meaning to play a piece of music for the first time, without ever having the chance to memorize it.

But stick with me, set yourself a small goal like “I will get 100% accuracy on this easy map” and spend enough hours to complete that goal. Once you finally do it, it will feel like one of the most satisfying and rewarding things you have ever done. Looking back at your local leaderboard, it’s easy to see how your grades increased linearly from a D, C, B, A to an S, or if you’re really fancy, a double S, along with your accuracy as well. Next you’d likely find more maps to download and play from the osu! website, probably based on songs you like. The crucial part is that you go to harder maps bit by bit, and don’t immediately get overwhelmed by something way out of your skill range. Save it for later; one day you’ll likely be able to read and play it perfectly fine.

²: _{A “map” or “beatmap” is a user submitted creation that places and times objects like circles to a song’s rhythm.}

why is this so hard#

[//] # (TODO)

ffs now i have carpal tunnel#

Hand and wrist injuries have always been a part of this game, due to the intensive nature of higher level play especially in recent times. Multiple top players have gotten a hand injury and have had to take a long hiatus in order to let their injury heal, or otherwise quit entirely. You could assume that every single player will eventually get carpal tunnel or perhaps arthritis from the millions of times they have pressed keys in rapid succession. But despite this most active players never get an injury. Why?

The most important thing to understand about osu! is that there are no shortcuts. (aside from being quite literally born with better genetics, but this is a highly debated topic) In order to “get better” you need to put in incredible amounts of effort, or as the community says it, “play more”. Advice and ‘coaching’ will only help you improve so far, and most often only when many months have passed with you behind a skill barrier. Building the muscle memory and eye coordination to be able to read harder maps takes a long time. Your skill will likely improve very slowly and non-linearly, at times very fast and other times you can go months being stuck behind a skill barrier before you ‘break through’ during a single play session. It’s for this reason that osu! is one of the most skill-based games to exist – pay to win doesn’t really exist, only at the very top of the game. Buying a better keyboard and using a drawing tablet instead of a mouse will only actually provide a noticeable advantage at very high levels of play. Many people have become top players with absolutely horrible hardware though, so it’s not necessary. (60hz monitor, membrane keyboard, using mouse is debatable).

It’s for this reason that is difficult to obtain a hand injury – it’s just infeasible. A new player might get extremely exhausted after playing for 30 minutes, a long time player might be able to play for 6+ hours (assuming they don’t get mentally exhausted) without their hands or wrist being in any pain. Building finger stamina and muscle memory to play efficiently is a process that doesn’t happen overnight, and if one is playing a particularly energy-draining map they can compensate in realtime by either tapping more softly, pausing, or taking a short break. Playing is never supposed to cause actual pain, but your fingers getting exhausted under strain is good – it helps you build stamina. By stopping before you have actual pain, you prevent yourself from getting a hand injury.

Then again, we have stories like this, so make sure to take good care of your hands! You can’t ‘undo’ an RSI; pain for possibly the rest of your life is not worth the mere 500pp you were farming for countless hours without taking a break.

i have smol pp#

“pp” is often joked about by beginners or outsiders from the funny sounding name, but it’s an acronym for “performance points”, the main^[3] scoring system of this game. Used for ranking your submitted plays on a map, your highest ever pp values obtained are then combined in a weighted total, and used on the global leaderboard. Having a single leaderboard like this that does not reset is one of the most important parts of osu!, and players will spend hundreds of hours grinding scores to climb the rankings towards the top. Not all do this, however. Becoming obsessed with increasing your rank is a pretty well known effect (becoming a “pp farmer”) that can ruin your mindset in-game and in real life as well. As rrtyui once put it: “plz enjoy game”, illustrating a different mindset towards osu!. Instead of trying to climb to the top by playing overweight maps, you, as the phrase implies, just enjoys the game. Taking the fact you will likely never become #1 global is a hard pill to swallow for people, however in order to get past the pp farmer mindset you need to calm down and enjoy playing maps that you actually like. Why am I mentioning this? It’s because like in many games, sometimes competitiveness goes too far and people forget there’s other ways to play such games. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Chasing arbitrary values forever is absurd, yet many players do it regardless.

³ : _{Yes, osu! has different scoring methods for a variety of purposes however I’m tyring to illustrate the importance of having a single unified global leaderboard.}

who the fuck is cockiezi#

osu! has one of the most unique competitive histories in existence. There’s nearly endless things I can recall happening almost instantly since I started playing years ago. From the stories of those who were around for even longer, I have an even longer history of what events happened throughout the game’s existence; variously pp milestones, histories of the many #1 players and their best known scores, along with hundreds of other incredible scores set over the years. This sort of documented and collectively shared history is an incredibly unique aspect of osu!, passed down to new players through discussion in the subreddit, through osu! “historian” videos, from 3, 4, 5, 6, 7-year-old scorepost^[4] threads, one will eventually learn enough to appreciate past events and can appropriately react to the ever-increasing speed of osu!‘s top players’ improvement. (human skill cap, anyone?) By having a global leaderboard whose presence is so omnipresent throughout the entire community, top players are idolized in a sense, forever seemingly.

Even when applied to the present day, I check r/osugame almost daily to see what new unexpected scores have been set or what developments have occurred. I could wake up tomorrow to the #2 player, Accolibed (as of writing this) dethroning the #1 player, mrekk after over 968 days of uncontested reign – as of writing this today, the longest in the game’s history. It’s this “reality show” of some sort that is one of the best aspects of osu!. And if you do something truly incredible, the community will make sure to remember it for an incredibly long time. I can list dozens of scores of the top of my head that are some of the best in the game’s history; but why should I technically care? They’re not mine. I don’t really have an answer to this, but it’s something of awe to see a player you’ve idolized setting a legendary score, even better, if you’re watching it live. (another reason why top players often have big twitch audiences)

As for the title of this section, Cookiezi is a legendary player that used to absolutely dominate the game across various periods between 2023-2018. Many prominent scores, such as Freedom Dive +HDHR, set over 7 years ago, have not been beaten to this day. Many osu! specific memes such as “727” or “WHEN YOU SEE IT” initially arose from his scores.

⁴ : _{A scorepost is a post on the r/osugame subreddit that displays a specific score set by a player in order to showcase it and also provide room for discussion. Some people will dedicate their time to creating such scoreposts as fast as possible, sometimes with the usage of bots (they’re playing the karma lottery).}

why is there japanese everywhere#

[//] # (TODO: why new players complain abt anime)

Many new players get turned off by the large amount of Japanese songs, anime backgrounds, and otherwise association to anime culture. I pretty much haven’t watched anime in 4 years, but I still play this game.

A large portion of the submitted maps use Japanese songs – why is that? Well, there’s pretty much endless explanations:

• Firstly, osu! was based off a Nintendo game named “Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan”, and was initially just a desktop port, not designed to be anything bigger than that.
• Japan has dominated the rhythm game category for decades, there’s no short of mappable songs that contain interesting-enough rhythm to make it worth mapping.
• Oftentimes, Japanese songs have comfortable tempos and rhythms that can create interesting maps without being repetitive. Anime openings in particular almost always have an extremely comfortable rhythm and as a result, get turned into what are called “farm maps” to easily climb the global leaderboard.
• In addition to the above, the vast majority of jpop contains syllabic singing: meaning that each note of the song corresponds to exactly one syllable/kana, unlike English where oftentimes syllables are stretched across multiple syllables. This “Melismatic Singing” makes it hard to create good maps, since switching between vocals and other parts of the song is much more difficult. There’s a better explanation of this in this great video. This doesn’t mean that mapping English songs is impossible, but instead that many fall into a small subset of genres (rock, metal, English covers of Japanese songs). However, you will never find maps featuring rap songs, simply because that it is nearly impossible to map them.

All of this compounded over many years to create a community that overall favors jpop. This doesn’t mean you can’t find your favorite songs, just know that beyond the 4-star barrier it’s very difficult to make good quality maps of music genres that are incompatible with rhythm games. If you are a diehard anti-weeb, that is fully your opinion to hold, but don’t go complaining about anime in your rhythm game without understanding why it is this way.

waltuh put your dick away waltuh#

It’s always disappointing to see someone getting exposed for something disgusting they allegedly did, and the allegations eventually turning out to be true. osu! has had no short supply of such incidents, and every single time it happens it’s a huge deal, especially if it’s a top player or otherwise someone entrenched in the community. But I believe that the premise that this game is only filled with degenerates, groomers, and sexual harassment is nonsense at best, and otherwise a deliberately malicious narrative at worst. This game has no more groomers than another other game. How often do we hear about well-known CSGO players being exposed for something personal they did? I doubt you would be able to list many off the top of your mind, despite that community being much more degenerate and toxic. But because of the way the osu! community is small, tightly bound together, and chronically online, and news about new allegations being dropped will immediately spread to all corners of the community.

I can remember allegations being dropped against players who I have never interacted with, never even seen, or ever even heard about. But because of the way this community is incredibly tightly-knit, I can remember every single incident that happened. This highly skews the perception the entire community is the same way, and that really isn’t true. New players often look at the questionable map backgrounds that are often used (tons of suggestive content) and reach the same conclusion independently, but this is only a small subsection of the community.

This entire shebang becomes even funnier when you realize that most of the top players (and in turn, the wider player-base) is basically kids arguing with other kids. Not exactly the most mature group. I can recall multiple past incidents when a top player has been witch-hunted based on unproven and shaky allegations that were blown out of proportion. The amount of times this has happened is staggering.

[top player age chart]

multiplayer wher???#

Some of the most popular games in history have been single-player games: Minecraft, the original Tetris, RDR2, Terraria; the list keeps going.

TODO: mention double scarlet by spazza

who needs other games though?#

If you ask an osu! player who is already very deep in the rabbit hole about the other games they play, the most common answer you’d probably get would be “uhhh csgo, sometimes”. osu! grew very rapidly when the CSGO community first found out about this ‘aim-trainer’ (despite it never having been one, it does not improve your aim in 3D games) and became obsessed with this rhythm game. In some sort of twisted irony, this game rose from the ashes of disillusioned CSGO players. Perhaps that’s why some of the toxicity is so similar between the communities.

[//] # (TODO)

In my experience, I’ve really struggled to find games worth putting my time into; the ones worth spending thousands of hours on. Back in the day, it was Minecraft, then Fortnite, but I repeatedly kept getting bored. I’d burn out after completing my bi-annual survival Minecraft play-through. Sure, very rarely, I can dedicate a few dozen hours to a new indie that I can play with friends. Would I spend any more time on it myself? No. At some point after starting osu!, I drew away from all other games after realizing that they just were never that fulfilling to me. Do I really want to solo queue Valorant/CSGO and get a dogshit team that makes me lose another game? Do really I want to start another Minecraft SMP only to do repeat the same progression again, and quit after a few weeks?

I’m absolutely positive someone will get over irrationally angry over this statement: FPS games are really fucking repetitive. The only time I ever open CS2 anymore is to kill time without really having to think, and just tabbing out when I die every single round. I just don’t find this fun. It’s too repetitive, even when I’m not dying.

what’s your fucking point#

I don’t have one. This was just me yapping about my experience with games, and my love for osu! in particular. Maybe I’ve convinced you to go take a look and try out osu!. Perhaps I should tell you not to, but if you’ve already decided to, it’s probably too late. You’ll be here forever. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.