Samus's guide to FFR

[Samus Aran]

Sometimes I type out somewhat long stuff I wish I could just send out to players so they can get better and I never post it because it sounds dumb reading through it to myself. But I might as well suck it up and post it anyways!

Some beginners tips
SETUP
Stepmania and FFR are 4 arrow smash hand eye coordination reaction games. When you start out you're going to want to decide if you want to read your arrows going up, or going down. Most other rhythm games default scroll direction is downwards such as in guitar hero, pop'n, or beatmania. You're not at a dissadvantage if you decide to go downscroll, but stepmania and ffr's default scroll direction is up. After that you want to set your keybindings and scroll speed. Pick a speed that is fast enough that you're comfortable with it, but not so slow that all the arrows start to clutter the screen.

Mindset


Additionally do not focus on your skill rating, or other arbitrary numbers, only focus on yourself as a player. You'll improve as long as you know you are. And you may even surprise yourself at some skill boosts you'll get. The skill rating thing is really there just to group you into divisions for tournaments more easily. It CAN help once you start AAA'ing stuff to get you thinking what can I AAA if i really work for it? (and for epeen big numbers, for people like me that's all.)

PLAYING
From here on out you basically just want to play at least 1 hour a day picking songs that you can play that aren't overwhelming. Try your best to hit every single arrow. You know your limits better than anyone but definitely try to push yourself to improve if that's what you want.

Levels 1-50
Early on you will want to focus a lot on hitting jumps, this is any combination of 2 arrows at the same time, it's tricky on the brain so it's good to learn! It will get crazy the higher difficulty you go.

You'll also come across various combinations of 3 arrows especially on stepmania where you could be holding a freeze arrow and hitting a jump at the same time.

A good way to push your limits is to find songs with short bursts of arrows like 3 or 5 that are faster than what you would normally hit, so you can get used to playing faster. Work your way up to something like 16 arrow streams, and then you can work your way towards endless stuff from there at that speed. repeat the process everytime you hit a plateu of speed.

Go for full combos as best as you can. Improve your timing, and improve your stamina and speed.

Levels 50-70
You can be comfortable playing around this difficulty probably in 2 months or so. You'll find some very tricky songs in this range that involve a pattern called Jumpstream, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Strings of arrows that have a pattern something like jump, step, jump, step except at a higher speed than what you would see before. This is one of the core abilities to get good at on ffr and stepmania, it's fun to play, and it looks cool from a spectator standpoint.

You'll also begin to encounter a thing called jacks, this is any number of 2 or more arrows on the same arrow forcing your hand/fingers to move up and down rapidly. This is also a core skill. Additionaly you may encounter some jumpjacks where a fast series of jumps result in your hands and fingers jacking rapidly.

Keep doing your best here, a LOT of people get stuck playing around this difficulty for possibly years! You'll be able to comprehend a lot of stuff up to the 80's, but the main focus here should be working on your jumpstream and jacking skillsets.

Go for full combos as best as you can. Improve your timing, and improve your stamina and speed.

Levels 70-85
You're almost at the top of the difficulty ladder on FFR! You'll want to keep playing songs just out of your comfort zone to get better. Push your stamina at this point to where you don't burn out so easily on 80's+.

Go for full combos as best as you can. Improve your timing, and improve your stamina and speed.

AAA'ing stuff:
Up to this point if you have not been AAA'ing (getting all perfects on your songs) you've only been playing half of ffr. If you are now comfortable playing stuff in the 80's you should be ready to really work on your timing. Go back to the 40's-60's and start AAA'ing stuff. basically repeat everything you read up to this point except apply it to AAA'ing stuff. If you skipped up to this point and just want to AAA stuff off the bat, be my guest, it will not be as easy without some core skills to rely on. I only got my first AAA's after like a year of playing xD

FFR is very limited in song choice around 2000 songs or something are in the game at this point. And only like 100-150 of those are actually somewhat challenging. So if you want to keep improving your game try out Stepmania! There are something like 10,000 really good songs for practicing and just having a blast on. It's not as orginized as FFR to just pick a difficulty and play, so you'll have to download packs you think are around your skill level. But there's so many, it's just so fun to explore what's out there, and you'll basically not be bored for years xD