Cygnus

Cygnus debuted in Pump It Up XX with update 2.08.0 as an original nato composition at 188 BPM. For a long time its most talked-about trait was not the music but the missing BGA. At launch it shipped without any animation, as did the original Tropicanic and the freshly ported ULTIMATUM and Cross†Ray. FuseBox, the visual artist, explained on social media that there had not been enough time to finish them and promised to add them in a later patch.

The other songs got their BGAs when PHOENIX launched, yet Cygnus stayed animation-less through the entire 2023 PHOENIX run. The BGA, made by FuseBox, was finally previewed at PlayX4 2024 alongside the v.2.00 teaser, but update-size constraints meant it only shipped officially in v.2.01. The finished animation shows Earth tinted blue from the very opening, a detail that fed running jokes in the Korean community about the song's title matching what plays on screen.

Across the board these are comfortable charts for their levels, in both Single and Double; the Double charts were even recommended as entry points to each tier, at least up through XX. On S17 the crux is surviving the sixteenth-note run just before the final chorus and the closing trill. S21 began life as S22 in XX, was judged the weakest of its tier, and was dropped to 21 in PHOENIX, where it is now oddly regarded as one of the harder picks. Double 23, formerly D24, hides more bite than its old bottom-of-tier reputation suggested: being a SUNNY chart, it leans on twisted, low-readability placements that cause stray misses, and after dropping to 23 in PHOENIX it is treated as one of the tough ones at that level.