Beatmap Spotlights: May 2017

OrVid, Classic Pursuit, Chronoxia and Trigger reign supreme in the Beatmap Spotlights of May 2017, and more to boot! Come check out what's in store this month, and maybe even win an osu!supporter tag for your trouble!

Each month, a selection of volunteers work alongside the Quality Assurance Team to pick out the best of the best for each mode. We reward the top beatmap in each category by providing 1 month of supporter status to the mapper. The May 2017 spotlight rankings will conclude on the 15th July 2017.

Past Spotlights results

First of all, congratulations to the winners of the April 2017 Spotlights. They receive one month of supporter status for their efforts!

• osu!: Toy
• osu!taiko: Katdon_donKat
• osu!catch: Crystal
• osu!mania: Hestia-

osu!

RLC easily took the top spot at this month's spotlight with this beautiful marathon. Reminding us of his previous masterpieces such as Anhedonia, the music offers a lot of variety and interesting rhythms over the course of more than 10 minutes. Every track of the gapless album is mapped differently, but the map still feels coherent and polished throughout. Totally worth checking out.

sionKotori continues to impress with his newly ranked map, full of very interesting patterns which fit very well with the song and look amazing, other than giving a pretty cool sense of speed. Recommended for everyone who enjoys technical and slider-heavy maps!

Taking a spot in almost every spotlight lately, Delis has made it again. This time, combining the exceptional flow and stunning variety they are known for with an emotional song by Ito Kanako. The mapping perfectly represents the impactful changes of intensity provided by the song. This map is an experience you won't regret!

Doubles and low BPM songs are kind of rare nowadays, but fortunately we have TicClick! Providing us with a fairly simple yet effective interpretation, he manages to keep us going with the up-beat rhythm this music genre provides.

Whether you are experienced or just started out playing the game you can bet there's something for you to enjoy, thanks to the low BPM allowing you to try out various mod combinations even at lower stages. This doesn't mean you should underestimate the set either though: some passages may turn out being trickier than expected. Definitely worth giving this mapset a try if you're looking for something unusual.

This beatmap set truly stands out due to the unique spacing and patterning in both difficulties. The flow is smooth but expressive, perfectly supporting the mood of the song. 09kami's and Crystal's maps are on a similar difficulty level, but represent the song in different ways. Check out both of them, you will not regret it!

Kokoronashi is yet another great mapset created by pishifat. The Insane completely avoids circular flow and instead makes use of linear and zig-zag movements, creating a unique gameplay experience. The lower difficulties mirror the concepts of the highest one, so the spread feels very coherent. You should definitely check this one out if you haven't yet!

A calm, beautiful winter song with a very good-looking skin and a very well designed mapset by Lan Wings. While the top difficulty is quite spammy in terms of object density, the visual aspect of the map does not fall apart! Combined with great lower difficulties, this mapset deserves to be featured in the spotlights.

osu!taiko

Spooky! Just 7 months after Halloween, Hanjamon's Classic Pursuit entered the ranked section, and what a great map it is! Featuring a huge variety of Slider Velocity changes, tricky off-beat patterns, consistency (which does not equal boring) and even 1/8, this map offers a lot of things to enjoy. And if the map is too easy for you: try it with ANY mod. It's a challenge with Hidden, HardRock and DoubleTime, with the variety of Slider Velocities and complex 1/4+1/8 keeping you on your toes no matter what mod you are using.

The set also has nicely done lower diffs, including his signature "Basic" difficulty, which introduces you into the most basic structures of osu!taiko's dons and kats (the red and blue notes!).

What a high quality set brought up by tasuke912 and SKSalt this month! What made this chart get featured in the Spotlights is the management of a flawless structure, patterning and flow in each of their respective difficulties, really contrasting with some other ranked maps this month. tasuke912's pair patterns usage and rhythm changes in the Inner Oni is the signature of a very highly experienced beatmapper, representing the song extremely accurately while making it fun to play through flow and hitsounding.

This month we have something different in the chart, a gimmick map! Tired of maps with regular Slider Velocity? Do you want to play maps with constant speed changes? On the FM is your map! But hey, we are talking of the Inner Oni, right? No! You'll be challenged by the SV in all difficulties in this set, even the Kantan. Nofool made a good choice with this song as the speed changes fit pretty well and adds a lot of variety, from 1/4 patterns to nonstop 1/3 patterns. What? Too slow? HardRock will add a bit of speed and spice up the set a little for you!

A bright song and map that should be mentioned in this month, it doesn't contain any fancy patterns, but rather clean overall. Although the usage of hitsounds is decent, it still not the most decisive element to make this map perfect. The volume setting is also a important factor that integrates hitsounds and patterns cleanly with the song. To summarize, this map is made in a very interesting way, with the volume and hitsound usage strongly highlighting hikikkochan's comprehsion of the song's cadence and direction.

After having his first ever ranked map featured in the Spotlights at the start of the year, iloveyou4ever's unique mapping style continues to impress, and his latest map ELPIS certainly showcases his growing creativity and talent as a mapper. This kind of progression is exactly the kind we are looking for, and thus he has earned a rightful spot on this month's Spotlights!

The key defining feature of this map lies in its excellent choice of patterns. In particular, the placement of triplets is nothing short of beautiful, as it captures the swell and subtle nuances of the song very well. The streams throughout the map are also fairly varied, carrying good flow in spite of the fluctuating BPM. All in all another excellent addition to the ranked section, and we personally cannot wait to see more from him!

A solid mapset in this month, from Kantan to Muzukashii, Volta did a very good job by following many musical layers at once. They use the drums as main role to shape the map in its basics and then shift over to utilize the vocals and other melody layers to decorate around the used drum line. Moreover, Nardoxyribonucleic's Oni is an excellent creation with every hitsound being used in the best way possible.

Unsure how the Inner Oni could be even better than what we already have in the Oni, we were surprised by the excellence of this creation. The difficulty expands the idea of the Oni and does not just increase note density for the sake of it. The continuous 1/2 and 1/4 patterns are giving the map a fluent structure while every hitsound placed on the 1/2 notes are correctly mapped and every 1/4 pattern is placed in perfect composition to the surroundings. The increased challenge resulting from that makes it even better!

osu!catch

Our top pick is something that many osu!catch players would be familiar with due to it being selected for the osu!catch World Cup 2016's Finals mappool, and is now a fully ranked map. Both the Overdose made by Furely and the Chronos difficulty feature patterns that we don't usually see in most ranked maps - strict antiflow patterns, high overall spacing, and generally a lot of places to miss - while still making it a fun mapset of fair difficulty.

Overall, the map is quite challenging for its star rating, being harder than other mapsets people usually see in the Ranked category. It also features several mappers, providing players with different styles across all difficulties. It's quite the engaging map, and one that could surely make you wiggle from joy!

Despite this set being Myle's very first ranked beatmap set, it came out to be a really enjoyable one. The difficulty grew at a constant rate throughout the set, giving an ample challenge at every skill level. He learned how to make the rhythm to be consistent and yet still provide variable patterns in a short time. The flow of the difficulties are just splendid and perfectly executed. The Platter is really made for the targeted audience, he held back with the HyperJumps and only placed one where it should be which gives better impact in overall and feels really good. It was very enjoyable to play, and a really great piece of work overall.

osu!mania

Congratulations to Wonki for winning this month's spotlights for osu!mania with Trigger, an entertaining and fresh experience rife with some cleverly applied mapping techniques that fit the music perfectly. Scroll speed is used masterfully, lending an air of intensity to the set without it being overdone, and also keeping in line with the song's natural ebb and flow. Smart usage of minijacks at the very end and some simple long note patterning gives this map a touch of everything you'd want to see in a good osu!mania chart, and it's even artistic to boot!

This map is eye-catching for a few reasons: the most obvious being the heavy use of scroll speed variations, which are thoughtfully crafted to be intuitive and smooth. This is quite impressive given how easy it is to cross the line of being more of a distraction than a feature. However, the scroll speed variations are not the main reason this map is particularly deserving of a spotlight. Lude doesn't shy away from long note usage in their mapping of this track. Instead, they use it to add atmospheric value, complexity, and originality, which is great to see in the ranked section. These two points combined with some enjoyable jack-oriented mapping and very smooth difficulty curves makes this a suitable pick for May's spotlight.

Kawawa takes a spot in this month's charts with his extreme 7K marathon rendition of Black or White. Pleasing to the eye and full of well-designed flow, he managed to craft the map masterfully around the music, emphasizing the very melody of the track itself. An all-new style of jackhammer patterning adds a bit of flair to the map, accentuated further by some extremely well planned speed changes to spice things up.

An excellent beatmap set all around, we're confident you'll love Black and White particularly in regards to how close it follows the very consciousness and arrangement of the music. Give it a go!

For his 5th ranked map, Frim4503 offers us another 5K marathon, this time with a drum & bass Love Live OP remix!
As usual, the usage of long notes and chords play really well, making it a really fun map to try big accuracy scores. Scroll speed changes are lightly used with a quite unique style, focus on the voice before each kiai time. Without changing much of music/mapping style, he shows us one more time that anti-meta is not dead with a really accessible and catchy map.

While this beatmap set may be harder than others in the spotlights so far, its challenge is no detterent to its enjoyability, sporting some difficult but rewarding patterning in every difficulty. Guest difficulties from Evening, jakads and Lude provide some variety within the set overall, with Evening's chart in particular being somewhat light, but chock full of scroll speed changes.

Alter Ego is definitely one of the harder songs around to map, but the people behind the set have done an excellent job of patterning their charts to fit it, and it is definitely something you should try and see for yourself.

And that just about covers the Spotlights for this month. We hope you enjoy the new template graphics for each chart, and we hope you look forward to what we have in store next month as well!

—OnosakiHito