Cannon X.1

First featured in Pump It Up NX ABSOLUTE, Cannon X.1 is the direct follow-up to Canon-D, carrying its spirit forward and even slipping in Pump Me Amadeus, which surfaces briefly within the arrangement. Reviewers felt it sat a notch below its predecessor in a few respects, but the broad verdict was that the song and its charts hold real originality on their own terms. At launch only USB users could play it; from Pump It Up 2010 FIESTA onward it became selectable by everyone. It was also chosen as a finals song for the KPF 2009 men's speed division.

Where the earlier entry leaned on a tender, emotional story, the BGA of Cannon X.1 swings toward action. It opens on the Tree of Life (Sephiroth) motif before a muscular, white-haired man wakes and breaks out of a lab, triggering an emergency. Armed security mobilizes while a red-haired, one-eyed man storms in on a motorbike. The escapee blocks the gunfire with a barrier, downs everyone at superhuman speed, and the clip closes on a hinted duel. The shift to a superpower-battle tone and the open-ended finish left part of the audience disappointed, though several noted its visual echoes of Evangelion.

Apart from the Normal chart, the steps specialize in twists and stay densely packed from start to finish. That density, paired with the song's length, makes it a textbook recommendation for building stamina. The S13 was once the boss of the level-10 bracket, wall-to-wall off-beat twists, later raised to 12 in XX and 13 in PHOENIX. The S20 is a fairly gentle 20 aside from its tricky closing staircases, while the S21 ramps gradually into sixteenth-note runs with nasty rotating trills. In Double, the D22 expands the S20 with a horse-riding (말타기) section that decides the break-on. Note that the felt difficulty tends to outrun the posted level.