YMMV / Cytus

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • "conflict (YM2151 edit)" seems like an odd decision for the final song of Chapter R; it sounds simpler than the original version and only has a level 7 Hard chart. Subverted if you tap the "conflict" logo 13 times, which reveals the original "conflict" and its level 9 Hard chart, effectively making it the True Final Boss of the chapter.
  • Chapter K's final song (that isn't locked), "The Fallen Bloom", represents the climax of the chapter's story, consisting of Iris and Rosabel fighting to the death. Despite this, the Hard chart is only a 7.
• Awesome Music: It's a Rhythm Game, so this is a given.
• Breather Level:
  • "Masquerade" on Hard was originally level 8, but was bumped up to 9 in an update. Many players disagree over this.
  • Some players feel that not every song in Chapter M deserves to be rated a 9 on Hard difficulty. In particular "Gardenia" and "Les Parfums de Celebrez" are the biggest offenders.
  • If you're playing on a controller in α, "L" is heavily trivialized since instead of having to drag your fingers all over the screen, you can just hold down the shoulder buttons on the numerous drag notes and cheese your way to a high score. The Hard chart is actually easier because it has more drags.
• Broken Base:
  • Over hold notes (see Game-Breaker below) and the timing windows. Of course, arguing over timing mechanics is nothing new amongst Rhythm Game players.
  • The Alive songs. A wonderful Concept Album that tells the story of Cytus, or songs so long that they're total chores to play every time?
  • Long songs in general tend to be this. "Scherzo" in particular, as it's either a long, unique and overall fun song or far too easy and boring compared to other long songs such as "Vanessa" or "STORIA".
  • Chapter L:
    • Some find that the challenge is just fine and players are just whiny about it, and are not pleased that Rayark is planning to tone down the charts. Others feel that Rayark made too huge of a Difficulty Spike with it.
    • The pricing. 9.99 USD is seen by some as a ripoff, as all other DLC packs are only 4.99 USD, others don't see the problem due to all 10 songs being very long anyway and each song having four charts.
• Crosses the Line Twice: "Genesys" features Iris and Rosabell — who you may know better as the tragic best friends who fought each other to the death due to a war from Knight — casually working together as detectives to solve a dead person case. The victim? Deemo, who is Dead All Along in his own game.
• Difficulty Spike: As befitting of a chapter based on three noticably difficult tracks from Chapter VII, the whole of the chapter features fiendishly hard charts even by the standards of level 9 charts. In fact, the original charts are all rated level 9, even on Easy, and they are so difficult that Rayark released an update with easier sets of charts.
• Fake Difficulty: Depending on how bad the touch sensors are on your phone, double notes and hold notes can be your worst enemy. The two tapped areas may be read as one tap in between the two points, which can and will end hold notes prematurely, and force a miss on double notes. Especially nightmarish if you're trying to get Million Master rank.
• Fandom Rivalry: The game gets a lot of criticism from fans of other rhythm games for having loose timing windows (in spite of the TP system existing to address this), and players often get mocked for playing such an easy game. Rarely do Cytus players take potshots at other music games, though.
• Fan Nickname: "FREEDOM DiVE" is sometimes called "FREEDOM DiE" by players.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some tear-ridden players refuse to acknowledge that Chapter K's "Music. The Eternity of Us" is just an Alternate Continuity.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The hold timing glitch described below can be used to make certain parts of songs much easier, such as the latter half of "L2 ver.B" on Hard.
  • Drag notes only require you to hit the smaller notes at the right moment, not to actually follow the line. Thus, in songs such as "To Further Dream", where rapid streams of drag notes are thrown at you, it's easier to just drag in a straight line with multiple fingers. This is even required in "STORIA".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game seems to be more popular in Japan than it is in its native country of semi-neighboring Taiwan. It helps that the game features a lot of music from Japanese musicians.
• Good Bad Bugs: Hold notes do not need to be timed accurately at all. As long as you're pressing down on the note for its duration, you'll get a Perfect even if you've been holding down on the note a whole quarter-note earlier. It's even a green-splash Perfect too, so it adds the full TP points. Considering that the whole point of rhythm games is to time notes, the "Good" part is debatable. α still has this exploit...but only in touchscreen mode; if you're using a controller, attempting the same will simply result in a Miss.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Some players complain that the window for a Perfect is too wide. The "TP" system exists to compensate for this.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Chapter L. The songs are designed to have top-level challenge, and many players feel that Rayark went too far.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • 1 Good^Explanation One of the most frustrating things that can happen to a player is trying to get the Million Master rank, but getting 1 GOOD, putting a blemish on their entire run. There's a Twitter account dedicate to 1 GOOD runs, @Cytus_1Good.
  • Cytus is awesome! I got rank (rank) on (song)/(difficulty) and scored (points)!^Explanation When tweeting your score from the game's built-in tweet feature, it will post a tweet in this format using whatever account you have linked up. Some players make parodies of this format; those on third-party Twitter clients can tell which tweets are spoofs because they don't have "Cytus" as the tweet source. ^{Unfortunately...} Since the 10.0 update, score-sharing was changed from this formatted tweet to a simple screenshot, rendering this meme no longer relevant.
  • Beat Time!^Explanation A sample in "Codename : Zero" that is heard in the song's preview. "Codename : Zero" being a high-end boss song makes the sample especially memorable.
• Never Live It Down: The game got a very bad first impression amongst most rhythm gamers for its loose timing windows, and even after the introduction of the TP system, people will never let Rayark live down a game that was originally too easy for them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Timeline chapter. 2057 and 2059. The Taiwanese government turns to nuclear energy to meet the demands of the tech industry. Two years later, an earthquake strikes, resulting in a nuclear disaster that renders capital city Taipei uninhabitable. Consider that in 2011, the Fukushima power plants nearly caused this sort of incident in Japan after a major earthquake struck the country.
  • "L9: Meteo - Mourn" from Chapter L depicts child suicide on its eyecatch. Yeah, It Makes Sense in Context, but even with that (namely, Meteo is stabbing himself to destroy Viz, who has been contained within Meteo), it's not much less horrifying.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game has a plot, described on the official website. However, it has no relevance on the game itself and is not necessary to know in order to play.
• Player Punch:
  • At the end of "The Fallen Bloom" in Chapter K, there's an extended break backed by a choir followed by the game showing Iris delivering the killing blow to Rosabell. Shows, as in the background changes to show it. It becomes the new permanent eyecatch for the track, both while playing and on the song select.
  • The 10th song in the chapter, which requires completing the first nine, shows an Alternate Continuity where the two girls never went to war with each other and remained friends. It isn't just that we're shown this What If? scenario, it's that you have to see their friendship gradually break down into mortal enmity first that makes this song soul-crushingly depressing.
• Polished Port: Cytus α continues FlyhighWorks's line of solid Rayark ports for the Switch, featuring DJMAX tracks, other new unlockables, the option to play with buttons, and an online matchmaking versus mode.
• Porting Disaster: The Android version, due to timing issues on many devices, although an update fixed this by allowing the player to manually adjust the timing offset.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The difficulty scale tops out at 9 and there is a horrendously wide range of challenge amongst level 9 charts. Several tracks, including "L", both parts of "L2", and all of the now-hidden original charts for Chapter L are notorious for having level 9 Easy charts.
  • α allows you to play with a more traditional controller rather than a touchscreen. Unfortunately, you cannot access hidden tracks with buttons; you must use the touchscreen. This means if you wanna play in TV mode (on a big TV with yourself several feet from it in particular), you'll have to reach over to the Switch in its dock, do what you need to do to get to the "tap to start" screen for the hidden track, and then put the Switch back.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Alpha locks most chapters behind total score, unique tracks played, and online matches won requirements, unlike the original game where most of the game can be bought at once with only a few things locked as paid DLC. As such, a little patience is required to unlock everything.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Les Parfums de L'Amour" sounds a lot like "Miracle Paint" in some places.
• That One Attack: "Twenty One" on Hard has an abrupt cluster of notes around the 2/3 mark that doesn't really belong in a level 7 chart. The rest of the chart is fine, though.
• That One Level:
  • The song "Darkness" is only level 8 and isn't too bad, but it is the only song in the whole game to have a 4-finger note. No other song has this note, so seeing it can surprise a lot of players.
    • ...Until Chapter L is released, which features not one, but multiple 4-finger notes in almost every song. Trypophobia, anyone?
  • All versions of "Entrance"; "Precipitation at the Entrance Ver.B" on Hard can be terrifying to many players.
  • "L" is notable for being the first song to be rated a 9 on Easy. Both its Easy and Hard charts have long streams of drag notes that can be compared to ice skating with your fingers.
  • "L2 Ver.A" on Hard has a very slow scroll speed coupled with trill notes during the latter half of the chart.
  • "L2 Ver.B" has the only Easy chart with over 1,000 notes, and its Hard chart is known as one of the hardest charts in the game.
    • ...Again, all of them until Chapter L
  • "Freedom Dive" from Chapter 10 is also considered this by many, due to its insane speed.
    • The 10.0 update adds hidden charts that put the original Hard chart to shame. You can't spell "Freedom Dive" without "die"!
  • Many players view Sweetness Overload in Chapter M to be hard due to the fast tempo and beats that the song has.
  • Magnolia and Myosotis from Chapter D has absolutely ludicrous drag patterns in their dubstep sections, to say nothing of how hard the charts are even without dubstep.
  • The Alive tracks are not necessarily difficult by the game's standards, but they are quite long with "Vanessa" in particular taking 7 minutes to complete. And because they're so long, it makes it all the more frustrating to get 1 Good or 1 combo break if you're going for Million Master or Full Combo, respectively.
  • Chapter L may as well be called That One Chapter. Every song is rated a 9, not only on Hard but also on EASY, with the Easy charts having the difficulty standards of 9's from the rest of the game, and charts running at double speed ^note The Chapter L songs are actually really slow. Hard, however, just goes above and beyond everything else the game has to offer, with a single-speed scanline paving way for dense, gruesome patterns. Oh, and most songs in Chapter L are at least 5 minutes long. It's to the point where players have complained about the Hard charts being way too difficult and Rayark ended up toning down the charts. To top it all off, the chapter costs 9.99 USD to play, rather than 4.99 like all other DLC chapters. Overall, it is the ultimate challenge for Cytus players.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Despite Alpha porting tracks from the cancelled OMEGA, it only ports their Standard and Expert charts and not their Advanced charts and those charts lack flick notes, due to Alpha being an Updated Re-release of the original game and thus only having two difficulties per track with a few exceptions (Chapter L and "FREEDOM DiVE") and only three note types.