Faster Z

Composed by YAHPP, one of Pump It Up's marquee names, "Faster Z" reworks Pablo de Sarasate's "Zigeunerweisen," a piece famous for its atmosphere of despair. Because the original is quite long, YAHPP draws only on its opening and its very late passages. The "Z" in the title nods to the original work's name, but the BGA, widely suspected of being a StarCraft homage and featuring a character rendered as a red silhouette throughout, hints at a double meaning, that other "Z." For this reason the community jokingly nicknamed it after a unit from that game.

Within Pump It Up, the chart that cemented the song's reputation was the old Single level 8. Despite a far-from-extreme 162 BPM, it delivered an intensity of twists unthinkable at that level, plus freeze-note and short-note combinations that players in that band struggled to read, pushing the perceived difficulty close to a 12. It was treated as the final boss of the S8 tier. It was bumped to 11 in XX and adjusted again to 12 in PHOENIX, where it now sits as an intermediate chart.

The spread is broad. The S16 favors dense bursts over twists and, with fewer than 700 notes, demands as much stamina as a Super Fantasy. The S19 rebuilds those bursts as chained twists, while the S21 is a pure stamina chart that climbed from 19 to 20 in Fiesta and to 21 in PHOENIX. On the Double side, the standout is the D23, added in Fiesta EX, with bursts of 24th notes at 160 BPM. Worth a special mention is the long-gone D22: it was unlocked via a secret command in World Max's Ice Continent, but community disputes over its restricted access meant almost nobody got to play it, and it was finally removed in Fiesta 1.