RB3: "Phantom of the Opera" Expert Vocals FC (DLC)

For as much as I like to make fun of Harmonix from time to time about questionable decisions they have made over the years, they actually are pretty smart. When playing "Phantom of the Opera" on vocals, I had one of those moments where I had to appreciate the level of thought that went into even a niche gameplay mechanic here that very few casual players would ever notice. This song has only twenty phrases, which for a track this length is pretty low. Most of the phrases skew long and have several measures of space in between. The phrase length itself was probably on purpose. A lot of the melodies are jumpy and erratic, so splitting the phrases in half would make maintaining a combo pretty challenging for most people. It doesn't help that a lot of phrases' final note extends on and on, exacerbating the issue. And as for the dead air in between, well, blame Iron Maiden for that one. I can't fault HMX for not charting anything where there's nothing to chart. The downside to this longer phrase length is that a lot of activations are only going to cover a single phrase, if that. There just aren't many extra points to be had when activating on this song. We've already seen a handful of cases where attaining gold stars, even with an FC, can be a tight squeeze (if not outright impossible), so when there aren't a ton of points to spare, this could present an issue. Luckily, I have to assume HMX thought of this, because "Phantom of the Opera" doesn't have a broken cutoff or any disappointing oversight like that. On this run, I gold-starred the chart without incident and with a couple of phrases to spare. Out of the twenty phrases in this chart, eight of them are overdrive phrases. It's super noticeable during the first half of the song where they show up with really high frequency, slowing down a bit later on. But in case showering the player with overdrive wasn't enough, they also made sure to pad out the instrumental sections with four long tap sections to salvage some more points. In some songs with really long individual tap sections, the cutoff can still get screwy if you miss just one or two notes, but having them split up here means there is still some wiggle room. Onyx shows the GS cutoff here at 93,829, so you don't need to FC any of the taps to gold this one because of the smart overdrive charting, but it will still behoove you to do so. I think why I love this so much is it's not something most people would ever think about. Probably, most people wouldn't even notice. Here's the thing, though: if they didn't do it this way, everyone would notice. If the chart had an impossible GS cutoff, we would deride it until the end of time. I recognize that it's maybe counter-intuitive to focus in so heavily on something so trivial, but having played as many of these as I have, I really appreciate the subtle details that make the gameplay experience feel natural and polished. There's a level of brilliance that comes from designing the game so well that in circumventing a potential problem, it takes intense scrutiny from some douchebag over a decade later to even point out there could have been an issue in the first place.