Monkey Fingers 2

First featured in Pump It Up NX2, this is the follow-up to Monkey Fingers. Its BGA reuses patterns and symbols very close to the original, but flips the palette entirely. Where the first song was bright, bouncy and lighthearted with a red warning light spinning overhead, here a blue warning light dominates as a deliberate contrast to that red, giving off a heavy, gloomy, underground-world feeling. The BPM also drops compared with its predecessor, and the charts as a whole come across as either tame or outright easier than those of the first installment.

S4 (formerly S6) is built almost entirely on steady on-beats, with no off-beats and not even any jumps; until XX it was rated level 6. S8 (formerly S10) leans heavily on 8-beat runs but asks for little twisting, and what twisting does appear lasts only a few measures. Before XX it carried a 10 label and felt far harder than the original song's S8; from XX on, the original S8 became S9 and this chart was retuned down to S8. S17 introduces a long-note chart that feels weaker than the S15 of Monkey Fingers, yet it adds ticks on the holds and noticeably strengthens the twisting and trills, while still sitting comfortably for a level 17.

D8 looks like an S4 "opened up" across both pads, riding the steady beat. It was level 9 until XX, dropped to 7 in XX, and PHOENIX settled it at 8. D19 mixes long-note passages with recovery stretches, which makes it as manageable as the single overall, except for a nasty low-speed gimmick right at the start followed by patterns that are awkward to read with the feet. PHOENIX removed that speed change, so the opening no longer catches players off guard, though the repeated hits and held notes remain tricky in Double. The trill laced with stray notes near the end can't be solved with simple twisting, so watching a video clear first is recommended.