YMMV / Guitar Hero

• Awesome Music:
  • Kinda the whole point. Out of the box you get "Welcome to the Jungle", "Cult of Personality" (both in GH3), "Livin' on a Prayer", "Today" (World Tour), "Take Me Out" (GH1), "Woman" (GH2; both these were in Smash Hits too), "Du Hast" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" (GH5), "Bat Country" and "Children of the Grave" (Warriors of Rock) as just a taste of the tracks. Want more? Download "Sister Christian", "Stricken" (which also was in GH3 already), or themes for James Bond and Top Gun.
  • Band specific games (Metallica, Aerosmith, and Van Halen) give you each band's famous, best, and significant tracks, particularly those that launched/boosted the bands' careers or were chart toppers/bestsellers.
    • Examples from Van Halen: "Jump", "Panama", "Running With The Devil", "Dance The Night Away", "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love", and "Eruption"
    • Examples from Metallica: "Battery", "Master of Puppets", "Creeping Death", "Fade to Black", "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "Seek and Destroy", "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", "Orion", "One", "Dyers Eve", "Enter Sandman", "Sad But True", "The Unforgiven", "Fuel", "Mercyful Fate", "Cyanide", "My Apocalypse"... in fact, practically all the songs.
    • There's also many awesome songs by other artists on Metallica, including "Ace of Spades", "Hell Bent for Leather", "Stone Cold Crazy", "The Boys Are Back in Town", "No Excuses", "Evil", "War Ensemble" and "Toxicity" to name a few.
  • The first few DLC packs for the Xbox 360 version of GH2 had songs from the first game, many of which were classics in their own right. That was as close to a dream soundtrack one could get before Rock Band came along and introduced its ever-expanding catalog, which GH eventually followed.
• Breather Boss:
  • In the final 7-song gigs in World Tour, there's a song in the middle to give you a break from all the insanely hard ones; for example, "Overkill" on guitar.
  • "Number of the Beast" and "Cliffs of Dover" are nowhere near as hard as the other final-tier songs in GH3.
• Broken Base:
  • The announcement of Live didn't amuse former fans due to the fact that it requires new guitars because of the new game structure, and DLC won't be transferred from a generation to another, unlike Rock Band 4 (justifiably though, as unlike RB4, the gameplay in Live is very different from the previous entries). Many fans were also displeased that the 3D rendered venues and the ability to create your own character of previous titles will not be included.
  • The inclusion of non-rock songs on the Live soundtrack, featuring the like of Calvin Harris, Skrillex, Bruno Mars, and Charli XCX, is seen by some as a cheap attempt to appeal to the pop crowd. To be fair, rock songs still make up the vast majority of the soundtrack, there being roughly 20 rock songs for every one that isn't.
  • The ability to use avatars of real musicians to perform any song, often falling into Narm territory. This is especially egregious when it comes to deceased musicians with little say on licensing their image, like Kurt Cobain, a critic of the commercialization of music, being allowed to perform YMCA. Both Dave Grohl and Courtney Love expressed distaste over the feature. The estate of Jimi Hendrix was aware of this and requested that his avatar be only allowed to perform his own songs.
• Cheese Strategy: While under any other circumstance Lou is That One Boss, there's one particular thing you can do to invalidate him instantly, though it requires a bit of luck on the player's part: If you manage to grab the first power-up available and it's a Whammy, wait until Lou reaches the Green tremolo-picking section of the song, then immediately fire at him. 99% of the time, he'll immediately fail and you'll get the chance to finish him off. This video here shows exactly what this strategy ends up looking like.
• Condemned by History: At the time of its release, Guitar Hero III was almost universally seen as an Even Better Sequel to II, with its sales records being by far the highest of any Guitar Hero game and its online customs community remaining strong for years. As time has gone on, however, better substitutes for custom charts (most notably Clone Hero) have come out, and more people have begun to turn on Guitar Hero III due to its sharp Difficulty Spike in the last two venues and its overcharting of some songs.
• Contested Sequel: The further you get in the series, the more each and every game becomes this. III started out strong only to be Condemned by History as above, and World Tour is commonly seen as a disappointing follow-up. This isn't even getting into the individual band-focused standalone releases, where Aerosmith and Metallica were held as solid entries but Van Halen and Encore were contested, and some people disregard them entirely just for their very nature.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Guitar Hero 5 features avatars based on famous musicians and gives them the ability to sing any song in the game. As seen below under Narm, this can be pretty funny.
• Cult Classic: Even today, as it's forgotten, the series still has its hardcore fans. The game was this in the beginning as well, being a 2005 Sleeper Hit whose good reviews made Activision take notice of it and publish the sequel.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The last set of III is far, far, FAR harder than anything that came before it and generally set a brick wall at the end of Expert difficulty that only the most hardcore players would have even a chance of clearing. When the easiest song in a set is The Number of the Beast you know you're not gonna have a good time. And this is before you meet Lou. Several reviews (including Yahtzee) cited it as by far the biggest flaw in the game.
  • Tier 7 in III is a rather nasty spike in and of itself: Before I Forget and Stricken in particular are notorious for being overcharted to the point of Fake Difficulty (As is 3's and 7's, though it's not nearly as difficult as everything else in the tier) and Knights of Cydonia, while not nearly as egregious in this regard, is full of long strings of tremolo picking that are sure to tire any player out, and to top it all off, you have to deal with Cult of Personality's minute-long sweeping solo as an encore.
• Ending Fatigue:
  • Some songs that are over 6 minutes long tend to get repetitive after a while, provided they are not Epic Rocking. The worst offender however is the live version of "Do You Feel Like We Do?", which lasts about 14 minutes, in Guitar Hero 5. At least five minutes of that song lack any notable guitar (though they try to make up for it by letting you play Bob Mayo's electric piano solo, which eats up a bit of the gap). Thankfully, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock adds a meter alongside your score to show you how far into the song you are, which does avert this trope considerably.
  • People who first started the series on III, Legends of Rock, had as one of their choices for starting out was "Story of My Life" by Social Distortion. This song is almost five minutes long and there's very little change in tone to inform someone unfamiliar with the song when it's going to end.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Midori. She's the only female character who doesn't look gothic or tough and has a unique, appealing design, plus some pretty cool bonus costumes. In fact, Danny Johnson (world record holder of "Through The Fire and Flames" on Expert of Guitar Hero 3) used her to break the record he didn't hold at the time!
• Even Better Sequel:
  • Guitar Hero II improved Hammer On/Pull Off Notes (They can be tapped), added Bass and Rhythm guitars, added Pro-Face off and Co-Op Modes in multiplayer, and a Practice option either during a song, or in Training Mode. The Xbox 360 version goes the extra mile by adding 10 exclusive songs and some of the best songs of the first game as DLC. It's to the point that no one talks about the first game but those that managed to start with it, only ever talking of the sequel.
  • Some reviews have ranked Guitar Hero: Metallica as the best title in the GH franchise, giving praise to its impressive setlist (most songs translate well to playing with a plastic guitar), the introduction of the Expert+ difficulty for drums, a revised career progression system that allows players to complete career mode without beating every single song, and nifty special features such as behind-the-scenes videos and MetalliFacts. The band being involved with the game definitely helped. While difficult on higher difficulties, the charts are fair. It helps that the setlist was heavy on the rock/metal side true to the older titles after hardcore fans were disappointed by the eclectic musical variety in the previous World Tour and Band Hero.
• Fan Nickname: The guitar chart for "Free Bird" that appeared as DLC for the Wii version of Guitar Hero 5 is referred to as "Wii Bird" due to said chart being exclusive to the console, as the other versions of the game simply had the Smash Hits chart ported over.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Accusing players who use Hyperspeed of cheating. In older games, it was more of a Broken Base, since Hyperspeed was activated via a cheat code, but Guitar Hero 5 and onward explicitly put it in a different menu.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • During the series' heyday, there was a rather large one with Rock Band, with Guitar Hero generally attracting the more hardcore fans who wanted more difficult charts while Rock Band was more appealing to casual players who wanted to play with as many of their friends and/or family as possible. Though nowadays with the fandom for both games being significantly smaller than in the past, you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn’t play both.
  • On top of the Rock Band rivalry, there seems to be a number of rather incensed Occidental Otaku who insist that these games are not "real" rhythm games as they are American-made.
  • With GuitarFreaks, at least initially. You had GF players who saw Hero as a shameless ripoff with watered down mechanics and Hero players who saw Freaks as Fake Difficulty with nonsensical note charting and a relic of arcades. This mentality has largely fallen by the wayside and it's since been accepted that both games are valid, just simply designed for different audiences.
  • For a while, there was a one-sided rivalry from players of actual music instruments towards GH players, believing that those people should stop playing and go take up playing a real instrument instead. Some GH players feel that these musicians miss the entire point of the games (it would be like telling a Call of Duty player to join the military or a Grand Theft Auto player to commit actual violent crimes). Of course, as noted on the trivia page, some people did become interested in playing real electric guitar after playing the game.
  • The GH Community managed to start a Fandom Rivalry within themselves over which is the better way to experience the game in the modern PC era. While FASTGH3, II Deluxe and World Tour Definitive Edition are more authentic (using an emulated version of II for Deluxe and the original PC versions of III and World Tour as a base), they are also a bit harder to set up and lack some of the more modern features like Chord HOPOs and progression indicators. Clone Hero is easier to set up and has all the bells and whistles of Warriors of Rock, but the engine being built from the ground up can lead to some pretty jarring gameplay inaccuracies that can even make the rightfully difficult official songs too easy, on top of accusations that people only play it for the "meme songs" and that most of its challenging songs are tap-note spam-heavy chiptunes that are so far removed from the franchise's rock roots while also being needlessly difficult due to a lack of general design philosophy between charters, especially once conflicting mechanics are brought in. Almost no one brings up Frets On Fire anymore due to it being a relic of its time, and Phase Shifter lost all of its edge once it went commercial on Steam (on top of it being more of a Rock Band clone than a Guitar Hero one).
• Fan Nickname: The unnamed bassist in III seen during single player mode. He wears a Zildjian shirt (which had no logo in his previous appearances in the two first games), jeans, and has a face completely covered by long, shaggy hair, a thick mustache and massive beard. And thus, "Hairpile" was born!
• Franchise Original Sin: 2007 saw both Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, a poorly-received Contractual Obligation Project by Harmonix, and III with Track Packs that were tolerated due to being explicitly marketed as handy DLC bundles rather than full games. But Activision went hard on the Cash-Cow Franchise, ultimately killing the series for saturating the market in Mission Pack Sequels.
• Gateway Series: If the reaction wasn't older fans of most of the artists used getting pissed off and musicians seeing them as shameless posers, the games have been praised for introducing several classic rock n' roll bands and songs to people who'd otherwise have never heard of them and even encouraging some players to actually learn how to play music. Some of the bands featured even went back to recording in the styles that made them famous after long stretches without new material when the games brought them renewed exposure.
• Goddamned Boss: In the form of a song: "Because it's Midnite" is infamous for a hair-raising solo out of nowhere in the middle of an otherwise very easy song. It's only 12 seconds long, but has a blistering 174 notes (keep in mind the song as a whole is 540 notes). Even the "unbeatable joke songs" like "Jordan" don't have such density. The only reason most players can finish the song is the very generous star power right before the solo.
• Good Bad Bugs: Occasionally, a song where the instrumental part ends before the vocals will have the last bit of the song cut off. If this happens with the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Suck My Kiss" in Guitar Hero III (which triggers the end-of-song flag shortly after the last guitar note), the song will end with simply "Your mouth was made to suck my—"
• Heartwarming Moments: The placement of "Cliffs of Dover" in III's tracklist is both this and a Hope Spot. Played after your character is literally dragged to Hell, surrounded on either side by harsh, growling heavy metal, this tune's sound is soaring and hopeful. It could even be played to show Lou that the band hasn't given up on the idea of escaping his clutches.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Band Hero, you can play and sing "Honky Tonk Women". The singer will do some wonderfully hammy hip sways and arm gestures during the song. And one of the characters you can use as your singer is Adam Levine, so he literally can have the moves like Jagger.
  • Guitar Hero: Metallica was originally going to feature "Angel of Death" by Slayer but it was pulled late in development due to the song being about Josef Mengele's experiments, so they added "War Ensemble" in its place to keep Slayer in the game. Come ten years later, and "Angel of Death" would be featured as DLC for Rock Band 4, while the Guitar Hero series would still be dormant. The kicker? The lyrics in the song's appearance in Rock Band 4 are kept intact. This is extra ironic in that Activision had previously allowed the song to be part of the soundtrack of Tony Hawk's Project 8.
  • Guitar Hero II had a loading screen that says "Remember, NO STAIRWAY!!!", which gave an assumption that "Stairway to Heaven" or perhaps any Led Zeppelin would not make it into a Guitar Hero game. While "Stairway to Heaven" never appeared, a live version of another song that appeared on the same album, "Black Dog", was revealed to be a Dummied Out song in Guitar Hero 5, complete with charts for all instruments.
  • This commercial for World Tour has Tony Hawk play the drums alongside other sports icons. Since Neversoft took over production of Guitar Hero from the third game onwards, the engine used—which was a fork of the one used in later Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games—was variously described as a "rhythm game engine taped onto a skating game".
• Improved Second Attempt: On the occasion a Guitar Hero game brings back a song associated with an older title (whether intentionally, or by chance as an on-disc inclusion or DLC), the re-charted versions will always be considered superior due to them either dialing back the Fake Difficulty (as in the case with many, many songs from III) or including more modern mechanics that makes them feel more natural or fun to play. The only major exception to this is Disturbed's "Stricken", which the 5 DLC version somehow manages to be worse than the chart in III.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • You'll frequently hear people declaring they liked the first two entries in the series (developed by Harmonix) far more than the ones that follow (developed by Neversoft, Vicarious Visions, and whoever else Activision can scrounge up), though the latter entries in the series have sold more units and raked in far more money. Granted, in some cases this may actually be a justified complaint, given the developer and publisher switch and Activision's handling of the series.
  • One aspect: the second game had a mix of popular and lesser-known songs chosen for how dynamically interesting and complex they were to play. Lots of riffs and fills to spice things up. But III, the first self-consciously "popular" entry, had far more party standards, resulting in a lot of songs that were just jamming the same power chord over, and over, and over...
  • Although most people agree that this trope is Justified in Band Hero. Considering that a good chunk of the artists featured (such as Duffy, Nelly Furtado, the Spice Girls) are neither known for their drumming, guitar or bass skills.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The biggest complaint about every practically entry since Metallica, which contributed to the series' fall from grace. In particular, Band Hero was essentially a Mission-Pack Sequel of GH5 with more pop songs.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Guitar Hero 3 famously attracted a sizable amount of Metallica fans because of the fact that it included uncompressed stems for Death Magnetic, an album that was a notorious victim of the Loudness War on both CD and vinyl.
• Memetic Mutation: FC Closer^Explanation"Closer" by Lacuna Coil is widely considered to be the easiest song to full-combo in Guitar Hero III thanks to the chart consisting of mostly chords with little variation and the song being relatively slow. Its low difficulty spawned numerous jokes within the Guitar Hero community about it being impossible to the point where someone made a custom "underchart" of the song that is actually very difficult to play.
  • But can you FC Slow Ride on Easy?^ExplanationThis is the very first song of Guitar Hero III, on the easiest difficulty. While it's of course super easy to pass, with so many of the notes missing from the chart, and the slow speed of the song, it's actually pretty common to drop your combo with an overstrum if you normally play higher difficulties.
  • Groove Battle^ExplanationThis video set to the Tom Morello guitar battle song from Guitar Hero III has led to many remixes and shitposts...mostly on the Chinese internet. Here is a version themed after Counter-Strike, and here is a silent movie version.
  • This video of Ozzy Osbourne singing "La Bamba" by Los Lobos. Knowing his countless outrageous antics over the past few decades, this may not be surprising but it's still hilarious nonetheless.
  • World Tour received renewed attention in 2022 with the release of the "Definitive Edition" Game Mod for the PC port that, among other things, enables player to install further mods of various different characters or people as performers in the game. You can have such visual treats as the cast of Breaking Bad performing "Free Bird", Houkago Tea Time singing Mastodon, or any other wacky combination your heart desires.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Play Bohemian Rhapsody on GH: Warriors of Rock. The band members will imitate part of the videoclip and will sing all the harmonies. It's kind of unrealistic how the guitar keeps playing while the guitarist is singing, but that's Rule of Cool and/or Rule of Funny.
  • How about when the drummer somehow manages to beat the bassdrum rapidly without flinching with just one leg (even if you equip him with a double bassdrum kit) when performing Motorhead's "Overkill", which runs at about 276 beats per minute (so the bass drum is played at over 550 kicks per minute!)?
• Narm:
  • If you unlock Times Square in guitar Career, up to 3 of the licensed characters in World Tour will take the stage with you in the final set. This final set includes Los Lobos' "La Bamba". The singer is... Ozzy Osbourne. (At least the final set contains songs by artists sung by male vocalists.)
  • The "La Bamba" scenario above happens if you play as Lead Guitarist solo in Career mode. Try playing as Bassist instead and make it to the Times Square gig, and watch Ozzy sing the other Latin track in the game, "L'Via L'Viaquez". Yep, he seems to know his Spanish quite well. And what's more, the bassist you pick will sing along in the Spanish lines as well, and since the game would normally assign Sting as bassist if the player doesn't take the position... Also, the lead guitarist in this case is... Zakk Wylde, and if you have a keen eye, it turns out he sings along too.
  • Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash being able to sing any song in GH5 is also these. They're probably rolling in their graves anyways. (That former example actually pissed off a lot of people close to Cobain; see here for more info on that.)
    • In fact, since you can assemble the line-up any way you want, you can have pretty much any freaky thing, from Carlos Santana playing drums to Shirley Manson singing "Sweating Bullets" with Dave Mustaine's voice. Yep.
  • Back to World Tour, play "Beat It" with Zakk Wylde as your vocalist. The image of Zakk Wylde moonwalking (not just that; he dances just like Michael Jackson during the final chorus) will haunt you FOREVER.
    • Also, Taylor Swift doing the YMCA; just select Taylor as your character when you play vocals. You'll probably fail the song due to laughing so much, but it's possible. Also, try exporting the song to Guitar Hero 5 and picking Kurt FREAKING Cobain doing the dance. And people think it's bad when he can sing other people's songs.
    • Heh, try performing Jackson 5's "ABC" (whose lead singer is Michael Jackson when he as a child), and try not to laugh at whoever male singer gets assigned to do the (high pitched and kiddie) vocals, especially if it's Adam Levine! In fact chances are the only one who wouldn't look so ridiculous in that role would be Midori in her tomboyish outfit.
    • While the lead vocalist normally gets locked into the appropriate gender of the song in Band Hero (there are quite a few exceptions actually), the backing vocalists (if the song has any) definitely don't. Try having a male guitarist while performing the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" (which has the lead guitarist sing/rap some of the lyrics in solo, including one lengthy passage) Try to keep your composure when watching this video of Johnny Napalm singing/rapping Ginger Spice's lines in "Wannabe" (never mind the short, big headed male lead vocalist singing the lines of all the other Spice Girls, or even the voice of the actual male player singing the song for real).
  • "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" (both as lead vocalist, and when reciting the "Give it to me baby!" line as a result of being assigned either as lead guitarist or bassist), and more so when they were doing the "vocalizations" (AaaaaaaaAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!) of Tenacious D's "Master Exploder". And it got cranked up to eleven when Eddie was practically screaming in Judas Priest's "Painkiller".
  • One that's more like Narm: watch your singer interpretation in "21st Century Schizoid Man" in GH5 while he sings the first verse. Hoo boy, what an actor.
  • Apparently, in Warriors of Rock, Lars' followers are LOYAL TO HIM LIKE DOGS.
  • The Demigod of Rock, played by Gene Simmons, who sounds like he's having a ball with lines like "When this is over, I'm gonna ride you like a pony!"
  • Speaking of making any character sing any song, Warriors of Rock can take the Narm up to eleven since it can import all exportable songs from GH5, World Tour, Smash Hits, and Band Hero, and it comes with its own motely crew of characters. And now that the new cast includes a Minotaur, the Demigod of Rock, and Prince Arthas, you can get them to do almost any of the crazy antics mentioned above. Imagine getting any of them to do the "YMCA" dance, sing "L'Via L'Viaquez" or "ABC", or sing any song with female vocals. Now that would be fun.
    • Imagine no more - watch Arthas take the stage and do the YMCA here!
  • On the subject of dance moves, there are times when a character will robot dance. For example, the singer will do it when playing Electro Rock on World Tour (but not 5, Band Hero or Warriors of Rock), playing Mr. Roboto on Band Hero or playing Symphony of Destruction (on the line "Acting like a robot" no less!) in 5 onwards. You can also make your own characters robot dance by choosing the "Rockubot Hustle" option when choosing your stage presence in World Tour and its spinoff games.
  • The fact that, in Metallica, your cover band apparently couldn't think of a better name than "Metallica Jr."
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Warrior transformations, while awesome, can be pretty creepy with the exception of Pandora. Here's an overview:
    • Johnny becomes a grinning blue skinned lunatic who randomly teleports and crawls up walls.
    • Echo is literally Strapped to an Operating Table with a look of genuine fear on her face as she is risen on a pedestal to be struck by lightning.
    • Judy is attacked by a column of hellfire and turns into a demon with a horrifying if kinda cute face and a single battered bat wing.
    • Austin has his head removed by ghostly bats as he screams in pain, fully conscious.
    • Lars clutches his chest suddenly as if having a heart attack and falls to the floor, clawing desperately before becoming a werepig.
    • Casey peels off her own skin in front of a live audience and becomes a snake hybrid.
    • Axel ages a million years in a tomb and bursts out as a mummy with an exposed ribcage.
  • The song "Red Lottery".
• Not-So-Cheap Imitation: Guitar Hero looks an awful lot like GuitarFreaks before it, due to having the same core gameplay: Both games give the player a guitar controller and they must tilt the strum bar while holding down the corresponding fret buttons to hit notes that scroll vertically. But it soon became the catalyst for Rhythm Games as a mainstream genre in the West, featuring a lot of nuances to make the game appeal to a wide range of Western fans such as popular licensed songs, vivid background animations and characters, and full-length songs. While GuitarFreaks is by no means a crappy game, it's clear that both games are designed for different audiences.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: A significant number of Guitar Hero fans only liked Harmonix's titles (barring the Contractual Obligation Project Rocks the 80s), and later jumped ship to Rock Band.
  • For those who liked Neversoft's efforts, Van Halen and Smash Hits are despised due to being developed by different developers with poorer grasp of charts.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero on PS2. Why did they even try? It lacked many of the new and innovative features from the other versions (i.e. Party Play, the improved multiplayer), and even visibly looks like it was built on World Tour's engine.
  • The PC port of Neversoft's first episode (III) has been criticized too, due to very high required specs and frequent slowdown, which makes playing at higher difficulties impossible. World Tour does a fairly better job, although it's still rather hard to play if you don't have a good machine (i.e. one of the best computers available around 2008-09) - and the worst is, word has been around after release for a patch to address performance issues, but Aspyr never cared to do it (III at least had one). Thankfully, The Definitive Edition mod fixes a lot of issues with the native PC port, while adding more features of its own.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: While both the Aerosmith and Metallica games were praised, Guitar Hero: Van Halen was lambasted (poor graphics and extras, lack of Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar, and the fact that only 25 of the 45 songs are by Van Halen themselves).
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Midori. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with her, it's just that a lot of people weren't happy that she replaced Pandora.
  • And to a lesser extent, the male lead singer. They took a generally attractive, or at least normal looking, singer, and replaced him with a shaggy-haired, beady-eyed, needle toothed...thing... And pray to God you never see his eyes... (unfortunately, the game seems to love showing his terrifying gaze on "Rock And Roll All Night").
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The guitar battles were so despised by players that they were removed following Guitar Hero World Tour.
  • And even in World Tour, the guitar battles were simply like the Face-Off Multiplayer in previous games. Alternating phrases, no gimmicks, whoever can get the meter more to their side wins.
  • The touch slider. Whenever anyone even attempted to use this thing, they were essentially guaranteed to lose their streak due to the freakishly high sensitivity and the inexcusably far distance down the neck their hand has to travel. Adding on to that, it frequently got in the way of more experienced players trying to tap frets with the strumming hand. It was such a bother that many regular players just turned it off; predictably, touch slider support was scrapped entirely in Warriors of Rock. This is mitigated, though, by using a Rock Band controller, since you can use the solo buttons in those sections like in its original game.
    • By extension, slider notes, especially in World Tour. Experienced players almost unanimously hated this mechanic due to the underlying mechanical differences compared to hammer-ons/pull-offs, involving anchoring, timing, etc. Slider notes went on to be more similar to HOPO's until Warriors of Rock, where they were outright replaced with "tap notes" (which function identically to HOPO's, only with no initial strum).
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Enforced from World Tour onwards, since Neversoft wanted the franchise to be more accessible.
  • Guitar Hero II dumbed down the hammer-ons and pull-offs a bit by no longer requiring players to hold both frets at the same time as they move up or down (as one would in real life). The Xbox 360 port took this even further by widening the gap allowed between frets just enough to mean the difference between beating "Woman" (which was also moved from the first tier to the second) on Hard or not. The added songs also meant that players could now pick a song from each set list to skip and still complete the full campaign.
  • While 3 is considered a spike overall, particularly concerning the last few songs on Expert, it is a drop in regards to the timing window, as Neversoft's new engine has more lenience in timing than the old games.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Warriors of Rock is much harder than the previous Guitar Hero games, with many considering it the hardest GH game, with songs such as "Sudden Death", "If You Want Peace...Prepare for War", "Chemical Warfare", "Black Widow of La Porte", and "Fury of the Storm" being considered the hardest songs to play and FC in the entire franchise.
• Sequelitis: One of the factors that killed the series, coupled with the late 2000s economic crisis. At one point six GH games were released in one year (2009, which had Metallica, Smash Hits - both of which use the World Tour engine - , 5, Band Hero, Van Halen - these three sharing a common engine - and Modern Hits on the DS), not counting the DJ Hero spinoff.
• Spiritual Licensee: It's basically an American GuitarFreaks. This game was, in fact, what inspired Kai and Charles Huang to develop a Westernized version with its own peripheral.
• That One Level: several examples of this: "Bark at the Moon", "Jordan", and "Through the Fire and Flames" all come to mind, not to mention "Cowboys From Hell", "Free Bird", "Raining Blood", "One", and many, many others, especially among the bonus songs.
  • Superboss song "Jordan" was, allegedly, originally included as an "unbeatable" joke. Ditto "TTFAF" and the downloadable version of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia". TTFAF, which plays over the end credits after the main game is beaten, is commonly regarded as the most difficult song to perform in the history of the Guitar Hero series, and completion of the GH 3 version of the song is one of the hardest things to do in any video game; the band behind it, Dragonforce, never completed the game version of it successfully on Hard. You only get a "good luck" comment on the harder difficulties, and completion gets you the "Inhuman" achievement Xbox 360 (The PlayStation Network didn't have Trophy support when III launched).
  • While "Jordan" and "TTFAF" are at least optional, the final set in Guitar Hero 3 (where you're in Hell) was considered such a sudden and unreasonably hard Difficulty Spike ("The Number of the Beast", "Raining Blood", "One" AND Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover" all in one set, climaxing with the boss battle against Devil Lou) that it was actually considered the game's biggest misstep.
  Yahtzee: No. Stop. Do not reach for your email client, I do not want to hear about how you five-starred Blood Rain (sic) on Expert, because if you did you are a fucking freak! A freak with either three arms, or a trained pet spider working the buttons for you.
  • In the previous tier, "Before I Forget", and, to a decidedly lesser degree, "Stricken" were massive pains in the ass thanks to some absolutely atrocious overcharting that did not reflect how they were played on a real guitar. The former was a hand-cramping extraordinaire with an extreme overabundance of three-note chords, plus a brutal bridge with nonstop two-note chord transfers, while the latter made up for its easy verses with tons of equally unnecessary three-note chords, annoying chord transfers, and a nasty (and heavily overcharted) solo.
  • The tool "gig" in GHWT, which features three songs by the band, is That One Boss when it comes to Drum career. Good thing it's optional.
  • "Do You Feel Like We Do (LIVE)" on Guitar Hero 5. There's an achievement for making it past the 95% mark, no matter if you pass or fail after that point.
  • "Done With Everything, Die For Nothing" by Children of Bodom, from the same game, however, is power chord hell, and a prime example of Fake Difficulty. Activision loves overdosing on chords, it seems.
    • "DWE, DFN" is also frequently failed on Drums-Expert - more so than Expert+ - due to a bug the developers insist is not there. Sure, you can clear the whole chart with 92% notes hit, but try and full-combo some of those fast bass runs on Expert and you'll tear your hair out.
    • Guitar Hero 5 also gives us the pure, unadulterated vocal cord annihilator that is "Under Pressure".
    • Iron Maiden's "2 Minutes to Midnight" is no slouch on vocals, either.
  • Ignoring the obvious songs/solos ("Eruption" for guitar and "Hot for Teacher" for drums), We have "I'm The One" on Guitar, with what is most likely the fastest strumming run in GHVH (second being the much longer strumming run in the opening solo of "Little Guitars", which is much easier overall). It might be a good idea to save whatever star power you can accumulate for that specific part.
    • Speaking of "Eruption", someone already full comboed it on Expert.
  • Lou in Guitar Hero 3. No attacks at all during the first third of the song, so there's a 1-2 minute delay on every attempt before the actual battling begins. Then Lou obtains an attack before you can pick up one. On Hard and Expert, almost all the attack phrases are at least somewhat difficult to hit. Not to mention fast solos that are hard enough just to stay alive on normally, let alone when Lou throws an attack at you. Then finally a choke-able "finish him" part — especially if your rock meter was red when Lou failed.
    • On Expert, That One Attack from Lou that can make you fail from a fully green rock meter is Double Notes. Take a very fast solo. Then turn them all into chords! That's what happens.
  • "Psychobilly Freakout" in GH2 has notes going all over the place and is ridiculously fast for the amount of notes you need to hit, not to mention the chorus which just as quickly constantly switches between two note chords. And it's not even in the final tier! On top of that, the cover that appears in GH2 is simplified; the Smash Hits chart is just as ludicrous as the song itself.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Franken Rocker from GH5 is pretty sweet looking for a tin-man with bolts sticking out of his head.
  • Some of the warriors may count, especially Judy.
  • The kaiju thing appearing in the encore for Harajuku. (Band Hero)
• Unexpected Character:
  • The DS version of Band Hero has a secret character: Cthulhu. Who'd have expected that in a kid-friendly rhythm game?
  • Guitar Hero Live features Alter Bridge, The Black Keys, Royal Blood, Disturbed, System of a Down among others, including... Ed Sheeran, Skrillex, Calvin Harris, Bruno Mars, and Charli XCX?

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