My Thoughts on Various Rhythm Games

Last updated: N/A

Here are my thoughts on a range of rhythm games I've played. This may be updated to include more games, information and updated perspectives of mine on the games.

Since some of these games are constantly under development, I'll make it clear as to when this page was last updated so you can know what information has changed and may of become out of date.

Below this line is a table with info on each game. You can jump to a game's section by clicking on its title. If the game's section doesn't yet exist, it will be crossed out.

Covered Games

Game	Rating (1-10)	Estimated Play Time	Skill / Rank
osu!(stable)	8	See relevant section	←
osu!(lazer)	6.5	Low	Same as stable
Muse Dash	7	Middling	Can A 10s
Etterna	8.5	>31 hours	27.53 MSD
Project SEKAI	6.5	I'm at rank 11	Can pass most Masters
DDR (Recent releases)	5.5	Low	Can play 5s
Pump It Up	8	Middling	Passed an 11 in full mode

osu!(stable)

This is probably the first rhythm game I played, and one I hold closely to my heart. I created my account in March of 2018. By then the game had already matured, but its old website (which I actually preferred tbh) was still fully usable. I've never cared too much about the PP system. I always just played it for fun and to push myself towards higher levels of play. I've only ever farmed on occasion and in short bursts. I just don't see the appeal in limiting the skillsets I can play just to see a god damn number go up.

What I like

• Deep history
• Massive library of mapsets to pick from
• Official and unofficial competitive and collaborative events are held constantly; an overall thriving community
• Great UI
• Can run on basically anything with remotely modern OpenGL support. I've even been able to get a recent version to run on Windows XP
• Has a solid editor for the standard and mania modes
• Their forum is still going strong despite the rise of centralized social media platforms

What I don't like

• Community outside the forums is complete cancer. There's constant drama, cheaters (many of which are pretty high profile), sloptubers
• PP system (especially in osu!mania) is
• Most aspects of skinning which don't just involve drag and dropping an image into a folder require you to tweak the skin.ini folder. Many of these changes require constant trial and error to set correctly
• No custom rates. You have to choose between the ill-named Half Time and Double Time / Nightcore mods which change the rate to 25% and 50% respectively.
• Although I find the combo-based scoring fun, it's terrible from an objective point of view. It actively encourages players to decimate their accuracy by mashing (or abusing the hit windows by intentionally hitting early or late to avoid misses) just to keep their combo instead of just dropping a note or two

Stats you probably don't care about

As of 30th November 2025, here are my stats for all of osu!'s modes:

osu! game mode	Play time	My (Predicted) Skill	Total PP
osu!standard	3d, 8h, 31m	Medium-high	2,984
osu!taiko	1h, 24m	Low	251
osu!catch	21m	Very low	0 :/
osu!mania	4d, 6h, 38m	High	7,015

osu!(lazer)

Posed as the "next major update"^[1] to osu!stable, but actually an entirely new osu! client built from the ground up to be easier to build features upon, and to be cross platform. It's also open source, which has its benefits.

What I like

• Audio latency is really low, low enough that it's a bit jarring to me whenever I revisit Lazer, as my muscle memory is tuned to the latency of Stable.
• Graphical skin editor makes simple in-game UI adjustments easy to use

What I don't like

• Although the rate control is nice to have, the UI for accessing it pretty clunky (especially compared to Etterna or Quaver)
• The file structure is impossible to work with
• changes in gameplay feel wreckless especially since the game's modes never changed since they got added
• Can't be skinned nearly as much as stable despite having
• UI (especially in the editor) feels like it was made for smartphones or tablets despite the game being desktop first
• osu!mania still kinda sucks, plus the gameplay changes just make it play like a bootleg of Quaver
• Only supports Windows 10 and above, and will likely jump ship to only supporting Windows 11. This isn't particularly important, but it's still a shame. osu!(stable) supports Windows 7 officially, and even works on Windows XP. oldstable works on win2x and might even work on all versions of Windows 9x as since MattKC backported .net 2.0-3.5

Etterna

TO DEAAAAAAAAAAAAATH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I believe I first installed this game some time during 2023.

What I like

• Inherits most of Stepmania's massive back catalog of user-made content
• Etterna ranks pretty much anything, so you'll see a wide
• Packs are really convenient
• Wife (Their scoring system) actually rewards high level play and punishes mashing accordingly. Pattern manipulation is still possible but it's more difficult and punishes you more than it does in most other rhythm games.
• MSD is more robust than most performance point systems (especially osu!mania's) and has not just a combined difficulty rating, but individual difficulty ratings for each major skillset.
• Accuracy is determined by your deviancy from when you were supposed to hit the note
• Has a lot more note types than most other VSRGs (Fakes, lifts, rolls and mines), which keeps the gameplay more engaging, and allows charters to represent the song in more accurate or interesting ways
• Incredibly customizable and extendable

What I don't like

• The UI is a little bland, but you CAN at least skin it to look nicer
• There's no way to download individual songs on the game's site. You'll have to download a whole pack containing the song if you'd like to play it.
• Etterna's site is bloated and pretty slow to use (probably because of it being made in a framework)
• Some UI elements are basically direct carry overs from Stepmania and thus aren't optimized for a mouse and keyboard
• No built-in simfile editor. This is pretty unfortunate as it adds a relatively large barrier of entry to getting into charting. I myself only got into charting for 4K VSRGs thanks to osu!'s map editor making it really easy to start dicking around with charts, and so I find it pretty unfortunate that Etterna doesn't provide the same level of accessibility for getting into charting

Project SEKAI

The first Vocaloid rhythm game I've played regularly. I gave

What I like

• its miiiiikuuuuu miiiiikuuuuu oooeeeooo the mobiel rhythm game
• Gameplay is pretty solid
• Has a nice wizard for offset and scroll speed adjustment
• The art style and presentation is great, even if the shows can be pretty intensive on resources. Luckily, they do allow you to choose between 3D, 2D and "Lite" shows. I usually pick Lite to improve performance and to help me stay focused on the charts
• Append charts are a nice addition to the roster of difficulties the game has to offer. These charts are quite a bit more interesting to play, since the charters for them were given the freedom to use up to 4 fingers instead of just 2.
• Tons of songs
• Story seems pretty cool but I haven't bothered playing it LOL

What I don't like

• Your grade and HP drain being determined by your team or whatever is complete bullshit and completely steps over the point of ranks. They're supposed to be a simple, concise indicator of your performance, not of how deep your wallet or how much play time you have. Ignoring that, the
• It takes like 5 million years to go from opening the game to being in gameplay, especially when you have to upwards of like 150 MB of data just to be able to start a show. It takes so long that I sometimes just can't bother to start the game
• Gacha mechanics are annoying but I guess that's just how modern freemium games work nowadays
• You have to unlock Master difficulties by getting 7 or fewer GOOD or lower judgements. This makes progression (in skill) more difficult since you have to play charts within your comfort zone just to unlock the charts that actually challenge you. It really feels like an archaic way to force more playtime out of a game with limited content. On top of that, charts with a higher note density will be harder to clear with these requirements, regardless of how
• HP is only lost when you break your combo, and can only be restored with a character skill. It's beyond me as to why they didn't just implement something similar to what basically every VSRG does, where better judgements restore HP, and bad judgements reduce HP

bonus video or something