Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.
i feel like i'd be better at rhythm games if i had a tail. you know, like, tapping a foot to the music is a really useful and good way of staying on time and i think that it would be even more effective if i could wag my tail to the music too. you understand
this post brought to you by me playing this chart again and feeling such joy that my brain for some reason decides that i should have a tail. i mean what
You could have a tail in your mind... in your heart. And then you could just say "yeah i got a psychic tail from rhythm gaming" and people would either be baffled or Get It and then you could also do tail things in your mind
this does appear, though only partially, approximately, not completely, to be what has happened
Practice! Mostly it's being able to recognise patterns and being able to read ahead. DDR has subtle rules for how arrows are laid out that make perfect sense if you're playing on a physical dance mat; these lead to all sorts of common arrow patterns you can spot amongst the noise and read all as one chunk, and if you emulate the dance pad style by playing on keyboard in a certain way you can subconsciously be led to correct arrows because wrong ones become impossible to input comfortably. Reading ahead is making a conscious effort to look further up the stream of arrows; it gives you more time to react and parse any weird nonsense they're doing, and harder charts like this one will often take the arrows away momentarily (or scramble them significantly) to force you to play from what you just saw coming (and hopefully memorised).
You get better at those things slowly by practicing them. NotITG has charts much easier than this to get you started with the basic principles! Practicing on a specific chart helps too; it's generally impossible to memorise the actual sequence of arrows, but you learn where to look when, what the timing is like, how to parse any particular unique nonsense the chart pulls, and other any aspects of it that are particularly surprising or unusual (like the section towards the beginning of this one where the up arrow goes away: if you're not paying attention on your first play, you won't know whether that middle column is an up or a down).
