YMMV / Pump It Up

Hey! Why don't you just put these tropes in the right place, man?

Tropes

• Awesome Bosses:
  • There are some memorable boss style charts in World Max. Try playing the full version of Deja Vu where the chart can randomly change at two points.
  • The speed of NXA's boss song Final Audition 2-X hits seventeen steps per second in places.
  • "Bad Apple!! feat. nomico", full version, four-player Co-Op chart.
• Awesome Music: Many songs out there.
  • Beethoven Virus which as the title says is inspirited by Beethoven's "Pathetique".
• Breather Level: "Pumptris Quattro" S17 can be easily cleared, hell, SS'd, by sufficiently heavy players just by sitting down on all five panels throughout the entire chart due to the way hold steps are implemented.
  • Averted in XX. While many may think the S17 got a rating boost to an S18, players have to hit each hold. Therefore, no more free All Perfect World Record in Rank Mode.
• Broken Base:
  • The Pro series. Some players like it because it combines Pump gameplay with the more professional elements of In the Groove (such as a "higher than Perfect" judge rank, the removal of the "buffer hold steps" exploit, and the more extensive command menu) and welcome the addition of In The Groove musicians, but others don't like its deviation from the traditional formula or the limitations of the StepMania engine that are not present in mainline Pump (such as individual charts having separate tempos) and the removal of a large number of Korean songs.
  • The timing windows, known for being more lenient than DDR's. Some feel that they ruin the challenge of trying to get an all-Perfect run, others feel that since the charts basically make DDR charts look like baby charts (even after the Sequel Difficulty Spike brought on by DanceDanceRevolution X), the looser windows are justified. The "Very Hard" judge option in later games exists to address this.
  • Pory’s "La Cinquantaine ~Part of The Memories #2~", which is meant to be the sequel of "Canon D ~Part of The Memories #1~" is loved by some fans because they find it beautiful, has the protagonists from "Transacaglia" and their wish for the sequel of "Canon D" comes true. But others hate it due to the massive Hype Backlash and then blame Andamiro (the company who created "Pump It Up" series) for giving the visualizers only 2 weeks before the update release to make the background animation for "La Cinquantaine"^note Meanwhile, it took 2 months to make the "Canon D" background animation. The large amount of hate also comes from the artstyle which makes Clotho (the girl character from "Canon D") looks awkwardly older. The story is considered as an Excuse Plot and lacks of animations in comparison to the prequel, even the official background video of the former in YouTube has more dislikes than the opposite. Regarding this backlash, an American "Pump It Up" player ZELLOOO posted an 8-page tweet, and so does Jehezukiel, the visualizer of "La Cinquantaine".
  • Since 2010, the game has used the same scoring system, and a major point of contention is the combo bonus. Notes are worth 500 points each, and once you reach 51 combo, all notes hit with a Perfect or a Great get an additional 500 points each until the combo is broken. Proponents of this system argue that combo bonuses encourage consistency and keeping a steady flow, as well as allowing for score spreads where all the scores aren't just crammed into the 99-100% range. Opponents complain that it makes a single mistake extremely punishing and creates a system where a few evenly-distributed misses is far more damaging to the player's score than fumbling the beginning or the end of the song and where it is much harder for tournaments to arbitrate scores on "pad errors" (where the player does hit the panel but the game does not register it due to faulty sensors or it would unexpectedly give a combo-breaking bad if pads are too sensitive and registers randomly).
• Cheese Strategy: In versions prior to XX, specifically the one up until "Prime 2", "Pumptris Quattro" S17 can be easily SS'd simply by sitting on all five panels, since the game does not require you to time the beginnings of hold steps. However as of XX, you now have to actually time the holds or you will get Misses on the first tick of each hold.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Many of the Mexican speed players love to play the hardest songs over and over. This backfired spectacularly during the World Pump Festival a few years ago, when the random songs chosen for the first two rounds were two of the easiest ones, and none of the Mexican players made it past the 2nd round due to lack of practice on said songs.
• Contested Sequel: Pump It Up Phoenix. It was praised for finally changing the scoring system, bringing songs from Chrono Circle and other rhythm games, as well as rewriting a lot of the older charts that have awkward patterns to be more playable. However, it was criticized for introducing Premium Mode (which locks some charts from Normal Mode players, essentially requiring extra credit to be able to play them), changing the announcer's voice to a worse one, and removing Performance charts (with the exception of UCS steps since it was added in 1.03), among others.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The full version of "Canon-D" has a chart originally rated as an S9, which starts off easy but later decides to throw in S12-esque gameplay. The Fiesta series then decided to re-rate the chart to an S11.
  • Music Trains and Courses like to abuse this. In the Pro series, Watch Your Step gradually increases the number of mines for each chart, with the last chart being a literal minefield. Meanwhile, Don't Trust Anything starts with a chart with mislabeled difficulty, and progresses adding more gimmicks until the near-unsightreadable fourth song.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The girl and the robotic eye from the video for Canon-D are commonly depicted in fan art by fans of the game, to the extent that it was chosen to be the trope image for the game. They eventually gave her an official name, Clotho.
• Fandom Rivalry: With DanceDanceRevolution, unsurprisingly. Layout differences aside, Pump fans feel that DDR charts are too afraid to try anything risky and end up being copy-and-paste charts, while DDR fans point out that DDR charts have standards and high level Pump charts easily resort to Fake Difficulty (such as "stretch your legs across the stage" jumps and "chords" of 3 or more arrows at once).
• Franchise Original Sin: In the first installment, there is a two minute limit for the length of songs. Many fans are disappointed that this rule from the first installment is still present in current versions, because this prevents great songs that have lengths of more that 2 minutes to be in Pump It Up. If there's any song which is more than 2 minutes and 10 seconds, it will be cut, unless they also include the full version. They're also disappointed that some great original songs in Pump It Up have very short lengths.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There are many players who play both DDR and Pump.
  • Pump's playerbase has had a longtime alliance with that of In the Groove, another panel-stepping game with notoriously difficult charts. In fact, the friendship between the two bases led to Andamiro designing the In The Groove 2 dedicated cabinets and the ITG team working on the Pump It Up Pro spinoff series, which unlike ITG is lawyer-friendly for obvious reasons.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Central and South Americans love Pump It Up to the point of surpassing DDR in popularity in some of those countries. Because of this, Andamiro not only continues to release international versions despite the decline of Western arcades leading to many East Asian-developed arcade games never getting exported, but even makes Spanish- and Portugese-language versions with region-exclusive songs.
  • Pump It Up is also massively popular in South East Asia, especially Indonesia. Andamiro acknowledges the large Indonesian fanbase by adding two Indonesian pop songs in Fiesta 2 and also having some Indonesian creators such as Cashew and Mr. Weq create original tunes for the series.
• Good Bad Bugs: The game will give out all Perfects for a hold step as long as you keep it held the entire time, even if you hold down the note in advance. A song where this exploit can be put to use is "Pumptris Quattro"'s S17 chart pre-XX, which is composed entirely of hold notes, allowing a sufficiently-heavy player to sit down on the panels for the duration of the song to obtain the easiest SS ever.
• Growing the Beard: Some players believe that somehow, the series got better since Yahpp and Banya Production stopped contributing with their songs and the quality of the original songs slightly increased around the Prime era. Unless you're Latin American, where most players believe otherwise: Ever since Banya's departure Pump has been going downhill without any originality.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The entirety of Canon D ~Part of The Memories #1~" as well as a Tear Jerker, showing the friendship between a young girl (eventually officially named Clotho) and a robotic eye, as the latter protects her from its other alien eye robots, while the former rebuilds it at the end of the first video. Even more so once the video finally got a sequel, "La Cinquantaine ~Part of The Memories #2~", when even after many years later, their friendship is just friendly as ever as the eye robot provides her a cake and meets her new friends.
• Hype Backlash: the visual artist of O2Jam’s Helix, RESS’ Word of God stated that the visual art and music was supposed to show the sequel of DJMAX’s SIN BGA. So, many fans hoped and expected that RESS (the visualizer of ''SIN'' and Helix) or other animation visualizer will made the sequel based on the O2Jam visual art. Although Pump It Up is one of rhythm game that also allows background animations besides DJMAX, the BGA of ''Helix'' in PIU never shows any clear sequel story, but just generic BGA with characters from the O2Jam artwork version copy-pasted and recolored into it. It was done by YSJ, who often make Stylistic Suck yet characterless BGAs
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!:
  • NX1 brought Chimera. Not many songs, if any at all, are harder than that one (going by Arcade Station).
  • The timing windows as a whole are criticized by DDR players for being noticably looser than that of the game's four-panel rival.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Doubles charts are criticized by some rhythm game players due to forcing the player to make unusual and/or potentially painful motions, such as the infamous stage-wide split (one of 1P's left panels and one of 2P's right panels), leading some players to believe that while DDR charts may not reach the level of Pump It Up's challenge, at least they have standards.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: In every year, Andamiro announced a Contents Creation Contest (in both music and character design category). Some high quality (especially electronic or Japan-made) original songs which are suitable for dance game (despite the small fan base) gets defeated by low-quality songs (and some of them are Worse Than It Sounds) made by countries which has bigger fan base, because the final results are based on votes by Pump fans who also have Facebook accounts after the devs have chosen the TOP 20 songs in semi-final.(Japanese fans who use this social networking are fewer than some countries, instead they often use Twitter to socialize, so it’s kinda imbalance.)
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some people who aren’t hardcore players play this game, just for some K-Pop songs, a few rearranged Classical pieces like Beethoven Virus (based on Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 3rd Movement “Pathétique”) and Sorceress Elise (based on Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor “Für Elise” by the same composer), and (sometimes) the song "Follow Me" again, again, and again.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "Buttsex groove!" ^ExplanationA Mondegreen of the lyric "Bust that groove!" from NX/Pro's "Chopstix".
  • "Roberto" or "summoning Roberto" is a slang term for having an all-Perfect full combo be botched with a single non-perfect (similarly to the "black flag" terminology used by DDR players) — in reference to a Mexican player known for being prone to doing so regularly. Gained a Meme Acknowledgement in "Mawaru Infinity" on Infinity.
  • I don't always play dance games, but when I do, I play XX.
  • O-oooooooooo AAAAE-A-A-I-A-U- JO-oooooooooooo AAE-O-A-A-U-U-A- E-eee-ee-eee AAAAE-A-E-I-E-A- JO-ooo-oo-oo-oo EEEEO-A-AAA-AAAA. ^ExplanationBrain Power, a song by NOMA from infinite infection, has gained massive popularity from Internet users in early 2016, leading its long version to become the most viewed BEMANI song on YouTube. This song finally makes it to Pump it Up XX on January 2021's update with its own original BGA and censorship of the word "cocaine".
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Rivals In the Groove for the most challenging game involving stepping on panels. While the arcade style charts do not have mines in them (except on Pro, where the charts are done in a more In The Groove-like style, and thus can contain mines and rolls), some mission mode charts have them, and can actually require the player to hit the mines in order to pass the mission.
  • Takes this to a whole new level if the arcade machine's owner has enabled stage break, where the player gets an instant Game Over if the lifebar depletes, and it drains much more quickly than ITG does. In this case anything you pass will have a grade of A or higher. Fortunately stage break does not affect the first song of the credit.
  • In DDR, doubles charts are designed so that the widest jump you ever have to make is a vertical arrow on one side and the other side's inner horizontal arrow. No such mercy exists in Pump It Up, where doubles charts can feature jumps and rolls that require your feet to be on extreme opposite sides of the stage. Don't pull a muscle!
  • That said, Pump has looser timing windows than DDR, making it easier to get a perfect run on a Pump chart than it is to get a Perfect Full Combo on a DDR chart of the same difficulty. However, this often comes at the cost of Pump having a larger density of "boss" charts than DDR. That said, the Hard Judge and Very Hard Judge options exist for players who think that Pump's usual timing windows are too easy.
• Nightmare Fuel: See here.
• Obvious Beta:
  • Hot Issue D26. This chart was meant as a joke during development by a former step artist, but was accidentally released.
  • The latest Pump It Up XX 2.08 patch have missing original animations for the regular songs replaced with a default Pump It Up animation used for filler. The filler animations are often used for many long songs and extras intentionally. For regular songs, this is a first. These songs would later receive original BGAs in Phoenix except for Cygnus, which still uses the XX generic BGA.
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic: Pump It Up Phoenix finally addresses the longstanding complaint of the game's scoring system being biased strongly in favor of big combos (by adding points equal to a Perfect for every combo increment starting at 50), something that can absolutely make or break one's standing in a tournament or other competitive environment. Now it's based 99.5% on accuracy and 0.5% on maximum combo, making it much less likely that a player with worse accuracy and a bunch of misses at the very end will outscore someone with much better accuracy and a single miss in the middle.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • A number of higher-end Double charts require you to hit panels on completely opposite sides of the stage (such as 1P down-left and 2P down-right), in a form of Fake Difficulty that can be extremely painful for players who aren't very tall or very flexible.
  • One of the longstanding complaints with the game particularly from the competitive scene was the scoring system up through XX. Okay, so you get a fixed number of points based on step judgement with Perfects giving 1000 points, no problem. However, the game throws a combo bonus on top of that: you get 1000 more points on a Perfect or Great if your combo is 51 or more which means you lose 1000 potential points on a Good and 50000 on a combo break, in a game where scores typically reach into the low millions by the end of the chart. In a tournament, a player who is significantly ahead in terms of accuracy can lose the entire round to their opponent simply because they missed once and their opponent got a full combo even if said opponent has relatively lousy accuracy. This video by current U.S. Champion (Speed Division) happyf333tz goes into further details.
    happyf333tz: Let's say two players both get one Miss literally one note apart from each other in a song. You would expect a draw, since both players missed one note, right? Wrong. Because of the fact that the score system relies heavily on combo, the player with one higher Combo would be the winner in this situation. And this begs the question: What makes that one different note more valuable than the other? ^note In the example he cites, the judge counts of both players are identical, but Player 1 has a 50 max combo and 66500 points, and Player 2 has a 51 max combo and 67500 points.
  • In order to get the highest possible scores, you need to enable Rank Mode, which gives you a Score Multiplier in exchange for forcing on features that make the game more difficult. This wouldn't be too bad, if not for several forms of Fake Difficulty: background videos are set at full brightness, stage break is on (meaning you can not only fail by draining the lifebar, this also voids your remaining hearts), and timing windows are set to Very Hard Judge; that last point isn't problematic in and of itself, but Pump has a non-negligible number of charts that are not synced correctly, and using Hard or Very Hard judge makes incorrect sync stand out even more.
  • Introduced in update 2.05 of XX, Brain Power requires a set number of plays to unlock. It is however noted that the set number of plays is per machine and not per account. Adding insult to the injury is that when the song first came out, arcades in several countries/territories are closed given the pandemic situation.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Playing charts without the arrows appearing at all. The Eraser mission in NX2's World Max acts like said example.
  • A common challenge for experienced players is doing Don't Bother Me Freestyle with their own moves and game mods.
  • "Freestyling", or coming up with full-fledged dance routines for the charts. Acknowledged by Andamiro; the World Pump Festival has freestyle divisions alongside the speed (i.e. score attack) divisions.
  • Rank Mode. Yes, this means playing on Very Hard Judgment, Stage Break On, and BGA on. Good luck breaking records.
  • Playing a 15+ without using the bar. Good luck with not destroying your body in the process.
  • Using hands on 3 or 4 arrows at the same time on songs that repeat those patterns a lot. Andamiro encourages "bracketing" (using 1 foot to hit 2 arrows).
• Signature Song: "Beethoven Virus" is easily one of the most recognizable songs in the series, and just about every longtime Pump player has played or at least heard it once. Going hand in hand with Signature Move, it's also known for the "Beethoven Virus" spin, a step pattern in which the player spins around using the center panel as the pivot.
• Surprise Difficulty: In other rhythm games, licensed big-label songs tend not to be very difficult compared to songs made specifically for rhythm games or BMS songs. Here, however, there are (K-)pop songs with boss charts that easily put many of DDR's to shame, with "Get This Party Started" and 'Hot Issue' being two of the most notorious examples.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "Mr. Larpus" is one of like The Surfaris' "Wipe Out".
  • "My Dreams" from NXA is based off of "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz.
  • According to Andamiro, "Robot Battle" by CYO Style sound too similar to Doin's Napalm, which is why it was rejected when it was first considered for Fiesta EX. It later appeared in Prime.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Oh! Rosa" from 3rd: SE. A man falls in love with the titular secret agent, despite being well aware of the danger he's in. The kicker comes at the very end when the man is revealed to be a rival agent himself, and is forced to put a bullet in his lover's head to complete his mission. The final shot of Rosa shedding tears as she falls dead absolutely doesn't help.
  • "Canon-D" from Exceed, as mentioned above - doubly so in the full version. A robotic eye in an air fortress tries its hardest to protect a little girl from its evil counterparts, and ultimately sacrifices itself getting its friend to safety. The frame story of this BGA reveals that the girl kept the robotic eye's core, and she goes back to the wreck site to try and revive it. The ending reveals that she was successful; the core starts blinking back to life.
  • "Violet Perfume" from Prime narrates the story of the affair between Queen Marie Antoinette and who seems to be Count Axel von Fersen. You can guess how well that ends for both of them.
• That One Attack: The bracketing stretch jumps in Superman D23, which if missed, will gain 51 miss counts and immediately show the game over screen.
• That One Boss: Has its own page.
• That One Level: Some World Max missions. While many of them can be skipped after failing enough times, the Boss Songs can't be.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Pump It Up Pro uses the StepMania engine instead of Andamiro's engine, and is designed to be more of a Spiritual Successor to In the Groove in terms of charting and features. While most of the basic features are in, including counting combos on holds (however, it doesn't do it the same way the main series does however, by counting every 8th note instead of using arbitrary "tickcounts"), one thing missing is Split BPM, or the ability to have two simultaneously playing charts for the same song have different BPM changes and stops. An example can be found with Phantom Hard and Crazy.
    • The current StepMania 5.x versions (Pro was based off the earlier builds of 5.x, known as 4.0, from before it was scrapped and replaced by a slight update to 3.9) have an extended ".ssc" file format which supports split BPM and arbitrary tickcounts. Infinity (the spiritual successor to Pro) was built atop it, and its overall gameplay and user experience is a bit more reminiscent of the main games of the era (though still a bit different) than Pro was.
  • When the songlist of XX was first revealed, many players were shocked that most of the classic K-Pop licenses were gone for good. This included fan-favourites like "Funky Tonight", "Don't Bother Me", and "Deja Vu". Cue the backlash from veteran players, who tend to prefer classic K-Pop songs over the new ones. XX also removed some of the Pro crossover songs, which is also met with criticism, although not as heavy as the removal of the K-Pops.
  • The many changes done in Phoenix was met with rather harsh criticism.
    • Premium Mode. Oh, Premium Mode. With one extra credit, it allows you to play up to 4, 5, or 6 songs in a single session (Normal Mode only allows up to 3), and also gives access to charts and songs that aren't present in Normal Mode. The problem is, those charts and songs happen to be the co-op charts and certain boss songs, such as "Etude Op. 10-4", "KUGUTSU", "Chaos Again", and "Neo Catharsis". Some Pump players stated that Premium Mode is basically some PIU features behind a paywall, and locks out the players from enjoying the full game.
    • Then, there's also the new announcer, which replaced the iconic sound effects for inserting a credit ("Ignition"), starting a game session ("Hit Me!") and game over ("Hey! Why don't you just get up and dance man?") that have never changed from 1st Dance Floor to XX. The new announcer sounds more feminine, which many players disliked the sound of as the voicelines weren't as memorable as the old ones or do not sound good at all.
    • The removal of the freestyle/performance charts are also massively criticized. This means that freestylers would have to pick harder charts to make dance routines to, as well as removing a chance for newbies at Doubles to play easier charts. Currently, the minimum level for Doubles charts are 5 (with the exception of "Wedding Crashers - Short Cut - Double 4"), while in XX there was a Double Performance 1 (although Phoenix still have Double Performance UCS steps).
    • Finally, the chart overhaul that rewrites a lot of the older charts removed gimmicks from certain charts, with an example being the harder single charts for Loki (which was just introduced in XX). Many players disliked this change, saying that the gimmicks are what make these charts unique and special in the first place, and sometimes serves as an extra challenge.

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