Lux Phantasma -Hard just feels punishing for the sake of it

[D.D]

I believe that for most players who want to complete this high-difficulty stage, the badge reward represents a sense of achievement — a trophy that proves their dedication to the game. They want to take the game seriously, and that’s exactly why they care about earning it.

But what did we actually get? The devs put in a rhythm mini-game that’s extremely difficult — even by rhythm game standards — into an action game. For players who aren't into rhythm games (which is likely the vast majority), the difficulty is absurd and completely unreasonable.

Who on earth plays a hardcore action game expecting to be forced into a high-difficulty rhythm challenge? It’s like asking Dark Souls players to beat an insane rhythm game to unlock an achievement. It makes no sense.

I’ve spent 3 hours practicing — from barely hitting 50k to managing 300k — and all I’ve felt during that time is frustration and what honestly feels like developer malice. It doesn’t feel like a challenge. It feels like punishment.

My honest guess is: someone on the dev team is a rhythm game enthusiast, and they turned this event into their own little playground — with zero regard for the experience of the majority of players.

Please do better. If you want to put in rhythm content, fine — but gatekeeping achievements behind this level of difficulty in a completely different genre is just bad game design.

[Pathetic]

I think the issue is that you're coming at it with a perfectionist's mindset which is always unhealthy to have in any gacha game, because it strengthens the idea that you aren't allowed to miss anything at all, and leads to scenarios where you miss a day of a gacha and just quit because you've built this idea that absolutely everything needs to be done or your account is ruined or bricked. It's a really negative mindset to have and makes you prone to see any possibility that you cannot get absolutely everything as disrespect from the developer.

All i'd advise is that you are never getting 90% of the medals currently available in the game. Dozens of them will require you to purposefully play the same characters and play only a certain way for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, for a SINGLE medal. These medals are a thousand times harder to obtain than the Lux Gold medal, but you can shove that fact to the back of your mind even though you will never ever own those medals because of that idea of FOMO, even though you admit you don't care about beating it because in your mind missing absolutely anything is a signal that you should drop the game.

All that said, you don't have to worry. The devs are almost certainly making the game mode permanent as per the latest dev letter, so just like all the other medals you'll almost certainly never obtain, you can ignore this one too because it'll always be possible to get.

They are not gatekeeping an achievement, they set a challenge, and anyone who can beat it can get the medal, as soon as it's not a FOMO medal, you will completely forget about it's existence just like all the aforementioned medals.

[D.D]

Originally posted by Pathetic:

I think the issue is that you're coming at it with a perfectionist's mindset which is always unhealthy to have in any gacha game, because it strengthens the idea that you aren't allowed to miss anything at all, and leads to scenarios where you miss a day of a gacha and just quit because you've built this idea that absolutely everything needs to be done or your account is ruined or bricked. It's a really negative mindset to have and makes you prone to see any possibility that you cannot get absolutely everything as disrespect from the developer.

All i'd advise is that you are never getting 90% of the medals currently available in the game. Dozens of them will require you to purposefully play the same characters and play only a certain way for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, for a SINGLE medal. These medals are a thousand times harder to obtain than the Lux Gold medal, but you can shove that fact to the back of your mind even though you will never ever own those medals because of that idea of FOMO, even though you admit you don't care about beating it because in your mind missing absolutely anything is a signal that you should drop the game.

All that said, you don't have to worry. The devs are almost certainly making the game mode permanent as per the latest dev letter, so just like all the other medals you'll almost certainly never obtain, you can ignore this one too because it'll always be possible to get.

They are not gatekeeping an achievement, they set a challenge, and anyone who can beat it can get the medal, as soon as it's not a FOMO medal, you will completely forget about it's existence just like all the aforementioned medals.

I admit my mindset isn’t the healthiest — when I care about something, I tend to get fixated, whether it’s in work or entertainment.
What really frustrates me, though, is not the challenge itself, but the unreasonable difficulty of this mini-game and how disconnected it feels from the core gameplay.
Everything should have priorities. In an ARPG that prides itself on combat difficulty, does it make sense for the hardest challenge to be... a rhythm mini-game?
If this is the design direction, what's next — Ikaruga?
In a game where the core experience is combat and character building, mini-games should serve to complement the pacing — not hijack the difficulty curve entirely.
Let’s be honest: these high-difficulty mini-games don’t fulfill any real player demand. People who want rhythm challenges will go play actual rhythm games. The only ones who truly enjoy this are probably those who already excel at them.
So why are these things even here? It honestly just feels like a reflection of the devs’ own niche interests.

[Pathetic]

Originally posted by D.D:

Originally posted by Pathetic:

I think the issue is that you're coming at it with a perfectionist's mindset which is always unhealthy to have in any gacha game, because it strengthens the idea that you aren't allowed to miss anything at all, and leads to scenarios where you miss a day of a gacha and just quit because you've built this idea that absolutely everything needs to be done or your account is ruined or bricked. It's a really negative mindset to have and makes you prone to see any possibility that you cannot get absolutely everything as disrespect from the developer.

All i'd advise is that you are never getting 90% of the medals currently available in the game. Dozens of them will require you to purposefully play the same characters and play only a certain way for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, for a SINGLE medal. These medals are a thousand times harder to obtain than the Lux Gold medal, but you can shove that fact to the back of your mind even though you will never ever own those medals because of that idea of FOMO, even though you admit you don't care about beating it because in your mind missing absolutely anything is a signal that you should drop the game.

All that said, you don't have to worry. The devs are almost certainly making the game mode permanent as per the latest dev letter, so just like all the other medals you'll almost certainly never obtain, you can ignore this one too because it'll always be possible to get.

They are not gatekeeping an achievement, they set a challenge, and anyone who can beat it can get the medal, as soon as it's not a FOMO medal, you will completely forget about it's existence just like all the aforementioned medals.

I admit my mindset isn’t the healthiest — when I care about something, I tend to get fixated, whether it’s in work or entertainment.
What really frustrates me, though, is not the challenge itself, but the unreasonable difficulty of this mini-game and how disconnected it feels from the core gameplay.
Everything should have priorities. In an ARPG that prides itself on combat difficulty, does it make sense for the hardest challenge to be... a rhythm mini-game?
If this is the design direction, what's next — Ikaruga?
In a game where the core experience is combat and character building, mini-games should serve to complement the pacing — not hijack the difficulty curve entirely.
Let’s be honest: these high-difficulty mini-games don’t fulfill any real player demand. People who want rhythm challenges will go play actual rhythm games. The only ones who truly enjoy this are probably those who already excel at them.
So why are these things even here? It honestly just feels like a reflection of the devs’ own niche interests.

I do understand this perspective on it. But the reason I brought up the other medals, is because the only difference between the Rhythm game medal and those medals is that one is currently FOMO (soon not to be I would assume) and the others aren't.

As an example, there is a gold medal for every single character in the game right now to use their ultimate 10,000 times. If you did absolutely nothing but attempt this achievement, it would take over 100 hours if your character has a tension 2 ultimate, or hundreds of hours if it's a tension 3 ultimate, and that's a hundred of hours of no sleep, no doing anything else and with the instant kill mechanic you would intentionally have to remove tension cards to reduce your overall level low enough to actually start fights at tension 2 and not skip them. I think we can both agree no one is going to get any of those medals outside maybe someone obsessed with one character doing it over the course of hundreds of hours for just that character. and spamming ultimates for hundreds of hours has nothing to do with the rest of the game, has nothing to do with skill or with what the game presents etc. Those aren't even the worst ones, Every Boss also has medals for defeating them 2000 times for bronze scaling up, generic enemies also have medals, including the gold mice.

So then my question again becomes... what makes this event medal so important? I'd wager if it was easy to obtain you'd maybe equip it for a week, then replace it as soon as you get something better because the medal itself isn't very striking. The only answer is that you feel this way because you could lose out on having it, even though you don't deem the challenge it presents as valid or something you'd want to do. So why don't you just not do it?

I personally am not very good at rhythm games, but when presented the challenge I spent time practising until I could do it and when I did beat it, it was because I defeated the boss, rather than because I had a medal. In fact I would honestly not care if the devs changed the requirements right this second to something like beating a hard stage once or even just seeing the whole story because I know i'm almost certainly going to replace the medal within a month.

With all that in mind I'd contemplate why it's so important that you find it to be an insult for it to even be a minigame in the game. Rather than seeing it as the devs saying "hey here's a really hard challenge that has nothing to do with the core gameplay, if you want to do it you get this medal that proves nothing except you beat it but nothing else".

The game isn't presenting Lux Phantasma as it's core gameplay, it's a side event that got heavily extended because they had to delay 1.1 and do tons of changes for it so Lux went from maybe a 2-3 week event to 50+ days. I would seriously disagree with the notion that Lux is supposed to be seen as an integral part of any other part of the game. It's side content. I appreciate the devs trying to add variance, though I agree more battle related minigames would have been preferable this early into the game's launch.

[D.D]

Originally posted by Pathetic:

Originally posted by D.D:

I admit my mindset isn’t the healthiest — when I care about something, I tend to get fixated, whether it’s in work or entertainment.
What really frustrates me, though, is not the challenge itself, but the unreasonable difficulty of this mini-game and how disconnected it feels from the core gameplay.
Everything should have priorities. In an ARPG that prides itself on combat difficulty, does it make sense for the hardest challenge to be... a rhythm mini-game?
If this is the design direction, what's next — Ikaruga?
In a game where the core experience is combat and character building, mini-games should serve to complement the pacing — not hijack the difficulty curve entirely.
Let’s be honest: these high-difficulty mini-games don’t fulfill any real player demand. People who want rhythm challenges will go play actual rhythm games. The only ones who truly enjoy this are probably those who already excel at them.
So why are these things even here? It honestly just feels like a reflection of the devs’ own niche interests.

I do understand this perspective on it. But the reason I brought up the other medals, is because the only difference between the Rhythm game medal and those medals is that one is currently FOMO (soon not to be I would assume) and the others aren't.

As an example, there is a gold medal for every single character in the game right now to use their ultimate 10,000 times. If you did absolutely nothing but attempt this achievement, it would take over 100 hours if your character has a tension 2 ultimate, or hundreds of hours if it's a tension 3 ultimate, and that's a hundred of hours of no sleep, no doing anything else and with the instant kill mechanic you would intentionally have to remove tension cards to reduce your overall level low enough to actually start fights at tension 2 and not skip them. I think we can both agree no one is going to get any of those medals outside maybe someone obsessed with one character doing it over the course of hundreds of hours for just that character. and spamming ultimates for hundreds of hours has nothing to do with the rest of the game, has nothing to do with skill or with what the game presents etc. Those aren't even the worst ones, Every Boss also has medals for defeating them 2000 times for bronze scaling up, generic enemies also have medals, including the gold mice.

So then my question again becomes... what makes this event medal so important? I'd wager if it was easy to obtain you'd maybe equip it for a week, then replace it as soon as you get something better because the medal itself isn't very striking. The only answer is that you feel this way because you could lose out on having it, even though you don't deem the challenge it presents as valid or something you'd want to do. So why don't you just not do it?

I personally am not very good at rhythm games, but when presented the challenge I spent time practising until I could do it and when I did beat it, it was because I defeated the boss, rather than because I had a medal. In fact I would honestly not care if the devs changed the requirements right this second to something like beating a hard stage once or even just seeing the whole story because I know i'm almost certainly going to replace the medal within a month.

With all that in mind I'd contemplate why it's so important that you find it to be an insult for it to even be a minigame in the game. Rather than seeing it as the devs saying "hey here's a really hard challenge that has nothing to do with the core gameplay, if you want to do it you get this medal that proves nothing except you beat it but nothing else".

The game isn't presenting Lux Phantasma as it's core gameplay, it's a side event that got heavily extended because they had to delay 1.1 and do tons of changes for it so Lux went from maybe a 2-3 week event to 50+ days. I would seriously disagree with the notion that Lux is supposed to be seen as an integral part of any other part of the game. It's side content. I appreciate the devs trying to add variance, though I agree more battle related minigames would have been preferable this early into the game's launch.

Regarding the other medals, the purpose of medals or achievements should be to show players that these are things that most people can achieve with effort. That’s why I don’t have an issue with the other medals, since trying to obtain them usually just makes me feel bored. I don’t plan to complete them quickly, and I think this mindset is quite normal for most players.

As for the Rhythm Game Medal, the main issue is that its existence pushes more players to intentionally challenge this difficult mini-game. However, trying to get the Rhythm Game Medal would cause hours of frustration for most players. And as you mentioned, it's just a side event, so I don’t see the benefit of having such content cause so much frustration for players.

If the majority of players’ response to this challenge is to either skip it or feel frustrated, and the medal reward just encourages more players to take on the challenge and experience that frustration, I really don’t think these design choices are wise. I’m not saying challenging content is bad — in fact, challenging battles are exactly what makes this game stand out and what draws me to it. But I believe the developers should focus on making frustration part of the core gameplay, rather than turning every side event into a high-difficulty challenge. For most players, this isn’t a good experience.

Lastly, I think you can’t impose your playstyle on others. Just because you choose to skip content you’re not good at doesn’t mean other players won’t choose to try it, especially when we are discussing whether this content is reasonable for the majority of players.

[Vesperion]

Sadly this is some sort of common in any gacha game that when they come with events that at some point those events feel like devs try to force players into some sort of meta/setup that is the only way to beat it.

Surely for a rhytm-game it is kinda hard to bring such a thing but tbh i did attempt the last stage 5 times or so but due of the chaos that starts at some point in combination with the 5 different "note types" (Crystal; Mice; Rocket; Drone and opposite note) i simply get to overwhelmed if in short section those types mix and in combination with the sheer amount of notes it gets even more difficult.

But tbemh i think even if it would only give 2 note types i would not be able to beat the last stage just because of the number of notes around the middle(?) of the track.

In the end i only tried the last stage 5 times and then simply said to myself that i will not be able to beat it at all and so moved on.

If we now think on "common events" with fightings and all we come into the "meta territory" where mostly you will need a certain char or combination for your team and expectation of having certain gear and stuff (mostly newest char + his signature + number of dupes + certain stats) and i see only a lazy attempt of the devs to try and convince players to spend money just to reach this point.

If now take additional mutators that change stats of chars and/or mechanics you are used to into the mix you have the perfect situation that i absolutely hate in every Gacha game as i simply does neither have the money nor the patience to hunt for hours; days; weeks; months just to get the relic; artifact; patimon; you name it with the right/perfect stats that are mostly needed as well just so you can beat in an event all stages with perfect score to get all the rewards.

Imo events should be build so that all type of players can enjoy and get the rewards from them no matter how "useless" they may be instead of going the lazy route of making the last stages way to hard just for the sake of it.

[Memento]

Wonder how the Op will feel when they find out next patch includes optional side content with increasing difficulty which has medals locked behind clearing said difficulty

Personally not a fan of the "I showed up so I should get a trophy" medals. They mean nothing to me and will be replaced the moment I get a better looking medal.

[D.D]

Originally posted by Memento:

Wonder how the Op will feel when they find out next patch includes optional side content with increasing difficulty which has medals locked behind clearing said difficulty :muvluv_marimo:

Personally not a fan of the "I showed up so I should get a trophy" medals. They mean nothing to me and will be replaced the moment I get a better looking medal.

Then I think it's time to give up, because I already know how difficult it is.

[記憶の果て]

Regarding to the games content begin hard or not, you should not ever aim for 100% mindset in any gacha games.

Can't pass certain content? Just move on.

[PewPew]

Plenty of gacha has this, like epic seven in recent memory. I know genshin keeps having them but pretty sure you get nothing but bragging rights for doing legendary.

Anyways you can either git gud, git over it, or pass it to a friend and let them clear it for you.

[ichi ni san nya arigato]

Originally posted by D.D:

Let’s be honest: these high-difficulty mini-games don’t fulfill any real player demand. People who want rhythm challenges will go play actual rhythm games. The only ones who truly enjoy this are probably those who already excel at them.

I want to give you a bit of my perspective as a complete rhythm game degen for 13+ years, even I hate the song lmao.

It's horribly overmapped. Guitar solo section have random notes added to it where there shouldn't be. Slow part have random notes thrown in it that emphasize wrong sounds and the song is boring as heck.

I think I cleared it like a day after it came out, while I didn't put much time into it (only an hour+ total), It also involves things like recording the track and trying to practice muscle memory for hard part off-game. I can't even begin to fathom what average players who have no experience in rhythm game would do.

For the record I don't like this one bit. If anything I enjoy the hard/normal circuit stage better because the songs are fun and the notes placement are significantly better and more suitable.

While I don't think its mere existence is gonna make the game less enjoyable for most people because they can't get a random medal in a side event, it's just one more bad optics for the game that already had too many of it. Inaccessible, is the word I like to describe it. The devs know this to an extent that they at least didn't put an all perfect/full combo medal on it.

I wouldn't mind it one bit if they make it at least interesting. Instead of just notes vomit have it be visual gimmick with note speed changing or obscuring screen to have you memorize short section instead would be way better than just force player to be mechanic god or die. I had this funny idea where like if i were the dev for this event I'd make it so that if you press the ult button at max tension, it plays the ult animation and it transition into a regular combat (as tsuruko solo ofc) so you can beat up the boss yourself for the medal.

[D.D]

Doesn't matter anymore — I’ve cleared the stage. Took me about 6 hours of practice in total. Now it’s time for a shower, a cheeseburger, and a little prayer that they won’t add something like this again in the future. But my opinion on this content hasn’t changed — for the majority of players, it brings nothing positive.

[fofo808]

Originally posted by Pathetic:

Originally posted by D.D:

I admit my mindset isn’t the healthiest — when I care about something, I tend to get fixated, whether it’s in work or entertainment.
What really frustrates me, though, is not the challenge itself, but the unreasonable difficulty of this mini-game and how disconnected it feels from the core gameplay.
Everything should have priorities. In an ARPG that prides itself on combat difficulty, does it make sense for the hardest challenge to be... a rhythm mini-game?
If this is the design direction, what's next — Ikaruga?
In a game where the core experience is combat and character building, mini-games should serve to complement the pacing — not hijack the difficulty curve entirely.
Let’s be honest: these high-difficulty mini-games don’t fulfill any real player demand. People who want rhythm challenges will go play actual rhythm games. The only ones who truly enjoy this are probably those who already excel at them.
So why are these things even here? It honestly just feels like a reflection of the devs’ own niche interests.

I do understand this perspective on it. But the reason I brought up the other medals, is because the only difference between the Rhythm game medal and those medals is that one is currently FOMO (soon not to be I would assume) and the others aren't.

As an example, there is a gold medal for every single character in the game right now to use their ultimate 10,000 times. If you did absolutely nothing but attempt this achievement, it would take over 100 hours if your character has a tension 2 ultimate, or hundreds of hours if it's a tension 3 ultimate, and that's a hundred of hours of no sleep, no doing anything else and with the instant kill mechanic you would intentionally have to remove tension cards to reduce your overall level low enough to actually start fights at tension 2 and not skip them. I think we can both agree no one is going to get any of those medals outside maybe someone obsessed with one character doing it over the course of hundreds of hours for just that character. and spamming ultimates for hundreds of hours has nothing to do with the rest of the game, has nothing to do with skill or with what the game presents etc. Those aren't even the worst ones, Every Boss also has medals for defeating them 2000 times for bronze scaling up, generic enemies also have medals, including the gold mice.

So then my question again becomes... what makes this event medal so important? I'd wager if it was easy to obtain you'd maybe equip it for a week, then replace it as soon as you get something better because the medal itself isn't very striking. The only answer is that you feel this way because you could lose out on having it, even though you don't deem the challenge it presents as valid or something you'd want to do. So why don't you just not do it?

I personally am not very good at rhythm games, but when presented the challenge I spent time practising until I could do it and when I did beat it, it was because I defeated the boss, rather than because I had a medal. In fact I would honestly not care if the devs changed the requirements right this second to something like beating a hard stage once or even just seeing the whole story because I know i'm almost certainly going to replace the medal within a month.

With all that in mind I'd contemplate why it's so important that you find it to be an insult for it to even be a minigame in the game. Rather than seeing it as the devs saying "hey here's a really hard challenge that has nothing to do with the core gameplay, if you want to do it you get this medal that proves nothing except you beat it but nothing else".

The game isn't presenting Lux Phantasma as it's core gameplay, it's a side event that got heavily extended because they had to delay 1.1 and do tons of changes for it so Lux went from maybe a 2-3 week event to 50+ days. I would seriously disagree with the notion that Lux is supposed to be seen as an integral part of any other part of the game. It's side content. I appreciate the devs trying to add variance, though I agree more battle related minigames would have been preferable this early into the game's launch.

Where are you seeing all these medals? Been looking for a proper list for ages, and would appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!

[76561198009711308]

Originally posted by D.D:

Originally posted by Memento:

Wonder how the Op will feel when they find out next patch includes optional side content with increasing difficulty which has medals locked behind clearing said difficulty :muvluv_marimo:

Personally not a fan of the "I showed up so I should get a trophy" medals. They mean nothing to me and will be replaced the moment I get a better looking medal.

Then I think it's time to give up, because I already know how difficult it is.

as long as those events are not into "rythm stages" im good then, i came to fight some stuff, not play piano

[「ANGER」]

I will like to say 2 simple things:

1. Rude. It is rude to assume that a person like me who has 100% achievements on DS1, DS2, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, etcetera, doesn't like rythm games. People aren't one trick ponies about games ffs. You can be Grand Master in LoL, CS:GO and still enjoy and be tryhard on Overcooked.

2. I beat the stage with my gf. We both had been strugglin at the middle to end part of the song so we tried together and voilá. If anyone is strugglin, try with a friend.

Bye bye~~

[LordDioBrando]

Every time some crybaby whines over a completely optional mini game that doesn't effect their game play in the slightest I spend real life money to crack a 10 pull in hopes that the devs keep adding this kinda content

And I don't even plan to get the medal