Bee

Bee reworks "Flight of the Bumblebee" by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov into a frantic 160 BPM Pump It Up arrangement. It first appeared in Pump it Up: The Premiere 3 and left enough of a mark that it was later blended with Chimera to create Bemera, which showed up in NX1. The dizzying melody, built to mimic an insect buzzing in mid-flight, sets the tone for charts that are every bit as restless.

If Bee is manageable in Single, it earns its reputation in Double. The Double charts chain together wild twists and constant weight shifts, slip in double-clicks that chew through the life gauge, and finish with broken (tooth-gapped) staircases or sprawling big staircases as a closing ambush. For that reason it long held the top spot in each level bracket and was even branded underrated. The D23, added in EXCEED, was one of the era's infamous "do not play" charts; the D24 packs an opening killer, a midsection killer and a finisher killer with no rest. In PHOENIX, clearing the D24 at SSS rank or above grants the Twist Lv.10 title, while clearing the D20 at SS or above grants the Run Lv.6 title.

Single is the gentler side of Bee, though not without lore. During the Exceed through Zero eras the S12 was a notorious case of misjudged rating, treated as far harder than its number before later corrections. The S17 is built on drill patterns that punish anyone weak at trilling, and it ends on a note that cannot be hit normally. The S19, introduced in NX1, plays like a "folded" version of a Double 22: it opens accessibly but saves a closing staircase and a double-click as its break-on test.

Bee's most famous quirk is an Another Nightmare chart that existed only in NX1 and vanished in NX2. It was never meant to be stepped on at all: it was literally the NX1 staff roll. The notes spell out, letter by letter, the development team's nicknames (YAHPP, MSGOON, BPM, JKD, EHNE and more), ending on the frozen text "NX," which players were not supposed to hit. Nearly eleven years passed before, in March 2018, Vietnam's BOSS_PIUVN team pulled off a break-on via a seven-person UCS co-op, assigning each rapid-tap panel to a separate player, and they did it in just three attempts.