Repentance

Composed by Abel, "Repentance" placed second in The 3rd PIU Creation Contest. It got an early release in Pump It Up M, then flashed briefly at the end of the Pump It Up XX 2.06 update teaser before its inclusion was confirmed in the 2.07 update. The presentation pairs illustration work by VARD with graphics by ZHIN ~The Virtuoso~. One nice touch: the closing line of the BGA is written in Esperanto, and translated it tells the player that the girl has died and the story ends there.

Every chart, across Single (S6/S10/S16/S19/S22) and Double (D13/D17/D20/D23/D26), was designed by WINDFORCE. The D13, bumped from level 12 in XX to 13 in PHOENIX, is a clean place to practice simple sixteenth-note stepping. The D17 is a wide-stride, eighth-note twist chart with fairly low density, putting it at the entry end of its level. The D20 spreads out the S19 and fills the offbeat sections with twelfth-note drills, plus a rarely seen half red bracket passage that deserves caution.

The D23 sits as an exact midpoint between the D20 and D26, dealing out the S22 and only sharply reinforcing the S19 in the closing stretch, where a syncopated sixteenth-note pattern lands as the finisher, tougher to push through than the one in Clematis Rhapsodia's D23. PHOENIX removed the mid-song slowdown. The headline D26 transcribes the piano part directly: right-hand-only passages become single-foot notes, while two-hand passages become full bracket steps, and the repeated-note runs and final sixteenth burst are reproduced just as faithfully. After the slow potion rest, a fixed two-note repeated pattern drains your stamina, then a sixteenth-note drill and a wall of twelfth-note weight shifts and big staircases close it out. Its clear sits at the D26 average, though the wide stride creates large player-to-player variance. In PHOENIX it was left essentially unchanged.

Abel is the same person credited as Gabriel, composer of "Tenebris," and as Rave Cyanide, one of the composers behind "Lost in the nowhere."