This game has been with me for a long time. After I had made my start like many others playing osu!mania, I decided to transition to a more competently designed game in order to improve my skills further, and Etterna is the game I jumped to. It’s a 4 button (4K) rhythm game with a reasonably diverse skill range, but a massive skill cieling.
Etterna is a fork of Stepmania which has been stripped down to optimise it for higher level spread play, where spread means you assign each column to a single finger so that your 4 buttons are in a row, as opposed to Pad, where your 4 buttons are in a + configuration. Stepmania is a clone of Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, so that should give you an indication for how the game works.
When you download the game for the first time, you’ll need to get some songs, but unlike most Stepmania clients, this game has a built in pack downloader. Select “Pack Downloads” on the main menu, and you can search for the Novice and Beginner bundles, which will give you a good starting point for learning 4K patterns. The difficulty of each chart is calculated from the contents of the chart itself, and broken down into multiple different categories, but at lower levels, the breakdown doesn’t really make a difference, so you can just use the overall difficulty number, which is the big green number at the bottom of the screen.
And the last tip for beginners, when you select a song, double tap the enter button. This will bring up the settings menu where you can set the scroll speed to something you’re comfortable with. Start off with a speed between C80 and C160, play a bit, and adjust it faster or slower until it’s comfortable to read.
Watching high or even medium level gameplay of this game may feel mesmorising, but I promise you’ll be able to learn and pick up on how to read and play charts and patterns, so just have fun with it!
Official Website: https://etternaonline.com/ Free to play.
Leave a Reply