Bullfighter's Song

Bullfighter's Song is a short reworking of the "Toreador Song" from Carmen, Georges Bizet's opera, handled by Banya Production (credited simply as Banya only in Zero Portable). It debuted in Pump It Up NX, runs at 168 BPM, and remains in the series as of PHOENIX. One quirk follows it everywhere: the song-select eyecatch reads "Bullfighting's song," while the in-game title is "Bullfighter's song." It's a situation reminiscent of X-Tream, whose name shifted from version to version, but unlike X-Tream the mismatch was never cleaned up, even by XX. The 3D BGA leans into the theme nicely: the matador starts out facing the bull with confidence, but the longer it runs the more the bull makes a fool of him. The art looks a touch childish by modern standards, yet it still beats the unrelated western-movie BGA used for Matador, which shares the same subject.

On PHOENIX the song offers Single 4, 5, 11, 15, and 17, plus Double 12, 18, and 21. Several ratings have crept upward over the years: S11 sat at 8 through Prime 2, became 9 in XX, and reached 11 in PHOENIX; S15 was added in XX V2.03 (it was a 14 until then); and D12 was only a 9 through XX. On D18 the break-on is decided in the leg-spread stream section, with a low-speed stretch beforehand that isn't really troublesome. D21 is a textbook late-section killer: through much of the chart it drains your stamina with hopping patterns, triples, sharp high-angle twists, and weight shifts, then drops into a low-speed passage. That passage isn't as tangled as Moonlight's, but it shaves the gauge with 32-beat shaking. Up to there it might pass for a 20, but the short, vicious finishing run of high-angle twists and weight shifts sinks the gauge for good. In XX it was re-evaluated as one of the tougher D21 charts.