FNF Weekly [RHYTHM RALLY]: Love Groove (FC 95.39%)

a slightly scuffed FC play of love groove. the only parts of the chart i memorized were 0:42-0:43 and 3:18-3:20, i legitimately read the modchart for the rest

took me quite a lot longer than i would've liked to get this FC (~6 hours), mainly due to me being bad at 4k and also having to deal with this engine's weird hold mechanics (there's like 0 hold leniency; you can let go of a hold 0.1 seconds before it ends and it'll give you a miss, so you really have to make sure to hold it down for the entire duration and then some, which is hard when you're also trying to focus on reading a modchart)

for the most part, this modchart is actually decently playable and fair, even on a sightread (my first score was 459850 with 35 misses). there are definitely some parts that i would consider unreasonable, though, namely the parts that i had to memorize:
0:42 is way too dense of a pattern to read while spinning the playfield this fast. i would actually be a bit more fine with this part if it was just repeated rolls all the way through (e.g. 1234123412341234). this would turn it into one of those "trust exercise" types of gimmicks you sometimes see in NotITG, where you're given a repeating pattern that becomes more and more unreadable over time, and you just have to trust that the chart is still repeating that pattern as it does so. it's a really satisfying gimmick to execute on a sightread. unfortunately, this chart changes up the pattern midway through the spin (12341234124-123-), which makes it way harder
3:18 contains column swaps. i can actually imagine an experienced NotITG player with fast reaction time being able to hit those isolated jumps at the beginning of this section, but that 3:20 burst... not only is it column-swapped, the columns are also offset vertically from each other, messing up the relative vertical order of the arrows and making it basically impossible to tell what order you're supposed to hit them in

other than those two parts, there are some additional aspects of this modchart that make sightreading it feel a bit more jank than it really needed to be:
whenever the receptors are positioned at the center of the screen (e.g. 1:41), the scroll speed isn't lowered to compensate, so you basically have half the reaction time that you'd normally have to hit the notes
the playfields will often move extremely fast/teleport as a means of transitioning from one gimmick to another, which can feel quite jarring as you quickly try to find the new position of the playfields before your mental arrow buffer empties out. the effect is magnified when combined with the previous point about having very little reaction time; e.g. at 1:52, you can barely read a beat ahead of the chart before the gimmick changes, so after the transition you basically have 1 beat to adjust to the gimmick and read the next arrows in the chart before you start getting misses

aside from these issues, there are some gimmicks in this modchart that i actually quite like:
0:46-1:05 is a fun chunking exercise. in NotITG, "chunking" is the act of reading entire small chunks of chart ahead of time and storing them in short-term memory, so even if the playfield goes through some sort of hard-to-read transition, you can play the chart from memory to keep your combo going. in this chart in particular, it really helps that each repetition of the pattern is "shaped" similarly, which helps reduce mental load in reading those patterns
1:08-1:18 and 2:56-3:07 may seem completely unreasonable to someone less familiar with modcharts, but they're actually surprisingly readable. the chart going into the stuttered rotations always starts with a long jack, and during the rotations, you can figure out the next arrows by their positions relative to the long jack (e.g. if the long jack is on right, and you see an arrow that appears to be 3 columns away from the jack, you can deduce that it's a left arrow). the long jack provides a strong visual "anchor" from which you can make observations, and i just think it's a really cool gimmick to read
2:14-2:32 is a standard context-switching gimmick. it's just fun! the playfields scroll slowly enough that you don't even need to chunk that much to combo through. also probably my favorite section in terms of chart patterning, disregarding the gimmicks

tl;dr: some unfair bits but Cool File 👍

mod link: https://gamebanana.com/mods/522709