J3

Since the game Osu! is quite simple, there is really only one system that the player interacts with, namely the notes that appear on screen. There are 4 types of notes that the player has to respond to while playing the game. The first type is a standard note that the player just has to hit. The second type is a hold note that player has to click and drag while following the note. The third one is like the second, but it will bounce back along the path. The fourth type of note is a spinner that the user must click and make a certain number of circles on the screen before the spinner disappears.

The game itself then emerges from this system rather unexpectedly. Despite each note being simple and not to hard to hit correctly, when notes are put in sequences to the beat of a song, the game comes to life and the challenge emerges. Even though all the elements of the game are very simple, the different beatmaps that users have made make the game complex and challenging.

While I don't think that the game elements would have been tuned too much, I'm sure that users who create beatmaps tune them extensively to modify the difficulty and ensure that beats match the music. To make the beatmaps, users would have to experiment with the different types of notes, when each note appears, and where each note appears on the screen. Placing notes too close together temporally or too far apart on the screen can make the song too difficult, but the opposite could make it too easy and boring.

To add a formal element, you could add an "endless" game mode in which the player would complete multiple songs in a row (as opposed to going back to the select screen between each song). This would increase difficulty and the excitement of playing for multiple songs because players would not have a rest between songs to recover themselves.

Adding a dramatic element would be difficult I think, but you could expand an element that is already included in a number of the beatmaps. Some of the beatmaps have a video that plays in the background and is somehow related to the song, but many of these are not very involved and some of the songs simply have a still photo, so I think there is lots of room for improvement here. This could make the game busier (and a little harder to follow the notes), but it would make it much more exciting for people spectating the game.