Final Audition

Final Audition is the first entry in the Final Audition series, one of Pump It Up's most enduring recurring franchises. It first appeared in The 2nd Dance Floor. For its era, its charts mixed eighth-note runs with sixteenth-note bursts and two-step sections, an unfamiliar and brutal style that quickly earned it notoriety. The 2nd's infamous tick-count judgment bug, which threw off timing, made it even harder to pass, so much so that clearing it placed a player among the elite. Although Extravaganza was technically the hidden arcade boss, its unlock conditions were so obscure that many treated Final Audition as the real boss song.

The song was cut in 3rd during a mass purge of older tracks. It returned in The Collection, but was overshadowed by other songs' Crazy charts and by the sequel Final Audition 2, then was removed again in Extra. After several years away it came back in Prex 3 with new Crazy and Nightmare charts pitched at a difficulty comparable to the legendary SLAM. Zero then introduced its most infamous version: the Another Crazy.

Zero's Another Crazy (S19 in PHOENIX) is one of the most extreme charts in Pump It Up history. It is nicknamed the sewing-machine chart because it demands stomping the center panel dozens of times in a row at sixteenth-note speed. Players who meet it cold almost always die on the spot, and the repetitive pattern punishes judgment hard: a string of BADs drains the gauge instantly. Its rating climbed gradually to S19 in PHOENIX. On the Double side, the D19 (Crazy) leans on weight shifts and twists, while the D17 offers a solid low-BPM sixteenth-note run with almost no rest. As a piece of trivia, the scratch-mix sample in the intro is the same one used by the group H.O.T in one of their songs.