cool level that i just beat rn and was light work for me but i remove 2 points because

1. its first half heavy

2. creator is a mysterious one hit wonder, their account is 100% completely empty apart from this level and nothing else. and it seems like elder mods updated the song to the music library, but they didn't delete the description which still says that it's a nong and links to a dead discord invite. that's dumb

7.5 .

Not sure if this pioneered the "effect layout" concept, but it certainly is the best one of all of them. Everything that came out after Aleph 0 desperately tried to replicate the charm of this level.

Aleph 0 stands out because of how decomposed it feels. I'm pretty sure it would also get its deserving praise, but something about the 1.0 designs makes it feel even more corrupted, like a classic GD level where you're not supposed to be. The minimal gameplay effects are incredible (seriously, you can't tell me that the first wave part isn't the coolest thing ever) and not abused at all. Every sound in the song feels connected to the level in some interesting way, producing very iconic parts such as the last stretch or the pause/resume cube before the halfway mark. I however find the second half to be slightly less interesting, as well as weaker gameplay wise too (why is it like 10 times easier than the first 50% ?? ????).

Still, this is probably the closest an effect layout will ever come to perfection, and credit for that must be given to LeaF, author of the song. There's a reason both this level and Marenol were huge at their time, even though only one of them stood the test of time. It's a shame the concept of an effect layout became overused (see the GD Layout tournament results) to the point where every layout nowadays uses effects, not understanding why the effects made this level special in the first place.

this level mastered the "effect layout" concept and nothing has ever come close to it. oozes aura from everywhere