That One Attack/Video Games/Rhythm Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Rhythm Games in general have fixed "charts", so you know when That One Attack is coming, and have time to say This Is Gonna Suck before it comes.

  • Max300 and Maxx Unlimited both have crazy sections after the big pause in the middle. In fact, DDR has a metric, called Voltage, which basically just measures how difficult That One Attack is for the selected song.
    • Battle mode of the PlayStation 2 games can also throw modifiers at you in the middle of a song. One popular tactic for the computer to wield is putting 2 of the 4 arrows on Sudden, or putting every other beat on double speed. These are MUCH harder to read than they sound.
    • Healing-D-Vision has a 5-second run of 12th notes at 360 BPM. Have fun trying to Triple-A the song. Oh, and the run goes LDRDLDRD; normally these are handled by using the same foot for the L and R panels ("cross-overs"), but at this speed, that's a write-off; instead, the only hope is to exploit the design of the pad and brush the panels using the heel and toe from the same foot on different panels. Fun.
    • The streams in Horatio on Challenge, mainly because of the absurd amounts of Fake Difficulty in it. Especially egregious in the PS2 version, where the shock arrows are on EVERY GODDAMN BEAT OF THE STREAM.
    • Valkyrie Dimension has a slowdown near the end...which then becomes a massive stream at 400 BPM. Is it any wonder that it took months for someone to clear it?
      • The Challenge chart throws down another nearly impossible stream; this one goes at 480 BPM. To put this into perspective, Determinator below has 14.7 notes per second; this is 16. It doesn't help that, while In The Groove has a lot of really tough charts to get one used to runs like the one Determinator, DDR has very very few such runs, so when one does come along, it's an absurd Difficulty Spike that can only be completed by people who have played other games.
    • Sakura, even though it's widely acknowledged as the easiest 10 in the series, still has one, in the form of a slowdown to about 20 BPM. This is very, very slow and makes the incoming notes very hard to hit. And there's a second one at the end of the song, too!
  • Determinator is a fairly difficult but manageable song. Except for one little part that makes you move around the pad at the rate of 14.7 stomps per second. If you're not sure how fast that is, it is very, very fast. (Example here; the fast part starts at 1:16.)
  • Caprici Di Diablo's third guitar solo is even faster than the rest of the song. Dozens of other songs in Rock Band and Guitar Hero have their own That One Attack, but many can be faked through using star power. Unless it's at the start, like in Foreplay\Long Time, or a long "attack", like the drumming climax of most The Who songs, or there are two such attacks, like Green Grass and High Tides on guitar (like in many RPG examples, except you're guaranteed to get hit with it twice in a row).
    • Green Grass and High Tides's snake patterns are actually easy to full-combo on a Rock Band guitar if you use a technique that flat-out should not work: holding down the middle fret for the entire duration and pulling off from the outside frets to the middle fret, using the shredboard all the way. I'll repeat that once again: you PULL OFF FROM A LOWER FRET TO A HIGHER FRET. This only works during solos, and only works on a Rock Band guitar.
    • Playing Free Bird in Guitar Hero II, one of the loading screens is "you're looking for "Gtr solo i" in Practice Mode."
    • Guitar Hero III had the infamous battle mode. You're in trouble if the boss hits you with Lefty mode, which mirrors the display of the notes. Lefties don't get off easy, they get hit with Righty mode instead.
      • For those who play on lower difficulties, Difficulty Up is a nasty one. If you get hit with it during one of the harder songs- especially the solo of "One" by Metallica- you will die fast.
    • The zig-zagging in Green Grass and High Tides is nothing compared to Satch Boogie on GHWT and RB [as DLC]. To borrow Guitar Hero 2's loading screen joke for Freebird, "You're looking for "Surf Solo" or "Guitar Solo 2A" in Practice Mode."
    • While we can't mention every DLC that belongs here, the song According to You is very, very this on guitar.
      • Can't Be Tamed is a pain on guitar as well, don't get fooled by the fact that it's a Miley Cyrus song, it's on the "Nightmare" tier for a reason. It's a particularly egregious example, because the song itself has no actual guitar parts(Harmonix charted the solo just for the game) and it starts off really easy, so you're most likely not going to expect to get nailed with a nasty solo section that gives "Tornado Of Souls" a run for it's money.
    • Walk up to any drummer that has seen the drums-expert chart to all of Coheed and Cambria's DLC and start singing "Cold as winter's guns of summer point and watch them run".
    • We cannot talk about this without mentioning the guitar solo from "Constant Motion". The first half is fairly easy. Then you get hit with the practically random strings of notes followed by a bunch of 23-note-per-second triplets. Eagh.
    • One of many keyboard charts with this is Roundabout by Yes. The whole thing is hard, but where does the shit really hit the fan? Why, in Subdued Section of course!
  • It is possible for BMS charts (and their derivatives) to have some degree of randomness, meaning that a cruel charter can have an easy section at one point on one run and then on another run have the same section be replaced with a really difficult section, and which one gets used being determined by a random number generator.
  • Many of the bits from Bit.Trip qualify, but some of the worst are the bits that change back and forth from black to white from Void. If you don't get the timing down quickly, you will lose points both from missing black bits and collecting white bits, and you will fail ridiculously fast.
  • Beatmania IIDX uses a special Life Meter system in which you must have at least 80% of your life intact when the song finishes. So how do some charts get Fake Difficulty? By having ridiculous patterns at the very end after a only moderately hard or an outright breather section, often forcing the gauge down to a dreaded 78%. Charts with such BS endings lead to many cases of getting the highest grade on the song and STILL failing it.
  • DJMAX Technika: Son of Sun (SP)'s end segment. GO GO GO GO GO--GAME OVER. Some people have even made montages of fellow players failing the song.
    • Also on SP difficulty: Your Own Miracle Bullshit. Go on (Go on) / Pick those beautiful feet up off the--GAME OVER.
    • A.I. (TP)'s ending. It say something about how awkward the ending is when people who have cleared the Challenger Set still "spam" that segment. By the way, notice that all of the examples thus far involve gratuitous repeat notes?
  • Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents have their fair share of examples: the last section of "Shanghai Honey" on Insane (notes spread out all over the place and designed to mess up those who assumed Insane was just a mirrored Hard chart), "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and its infamous third verse (ridiculous clusters of notes with spinners interspersed), and, of course, the last 14 notes of "Countdown" (be prepared to go from full-health to fail in 2 seconds!).
    • If not the third verse of Jumpin' Jack Flash, the fourth and final verse is. A brutal segment where the game throws every beat trick it can think of, along with a weakened life bar (From the third section) that is dropping faster than ever. Miss any one of the notes haemorrhaged to you on Hard Rock and you are DEAD. Failing here is downright heartbreaking.
    • The Anthem in EBA has the final spinner for people trying to S Rank the song. The thing is 'Damn near impossible without spinning as fast as humanly possible.
  • From Space Channel 5:
    • When it reverses your controls.
    • In the beginning of level 2 of part 1? Up down up down up down up down updown.
      • And later, rightleftchu, leftleftrightrightchuchu. Notice that there are no spaces - they come at you THAT fast.
    • One part of Part 2 gives you twenty two step commands to repeat.
    • Up!
      • The last sequence for the final boss battle in both games are a Kaizo Trap; failure to complete the last "chu chu chu" sequence as the boss is about to be defeated will cause an instant Game Over and you have to restart the stage all over again.
  • Push It vs. I Want Your Soul has a nasty stream of 16th taps all on the same track. And it's one of the faster mixes. Planet Rock vs. Busy Child also does the same thing, but it's shorter and makes up for it by having you hold a note at the same time.
    • Pretty much any time that pattern happens.
    • On Expert, Move For Me has a BRUTAL section with about 160 actions in 15 seconds (starts around 2:21 in the video).
  • The final song in Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Second ("The Singing Passion of Hatsune Miku"). At first, you get a long stream of constant Os that feels like That One Attack, seeing as you're even greeted by an easier section directly after. Five seconds later, the game gets serious and you have to hit O eight times per second, doing it too fast gets you killed. This is still the easy part. And then when you finally feel like it's over... Well... Words really can't describe this. this is something you have to see. As pretty much standard, this is harder than it looks.
    • The first game has the similarly difficult "Disappearance of Hatsune Miku", which was clearly the predecessor for the way Singing Passion is played in the sequel.
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