Blindfolded Pump It Up
I swear it's not as insane as it sounds.
Background
I'd been meaning to do this for a while now and I finally got around to doing it. My memory has notoriously not been that great (lie), so this seemed like a fun challenge. But unlike typical memorization challenges, you can't really wait for the info to come to you from your mind palace or whatever. Hesitate ever so slightly and you're already missing notes.
What I did was more akin to loading each short section of the song into working memory, then just trusting my feet with the rest. It's quite the trippy experience once you get the hang of it.
I studied the chart across 3 days (10 hours total is probably a generous upper bound). I practiced a lot before hitting the arcade, so I was reasonably confident I'd knock it out after a handful of sessions. I luckily only needed one, but it still took like 20 tries or so. That being said, most of those attempts were cut short because I missed some hold note, which made my health bar run out immediately.
Why Yeo Rae A S13 in particular? No reason. I just play that chart disproportionately more often than the others. I like the song, and the slow-moving gimmick makes the chart seem harder than it actually is, which is always a plus.
My god-tier pop off was genuine btw. I was only expecting a Full Combo at best, so I was pleasantly surprised by the Perfect Game. I got stupid lucky.
Tips and Tricks
Here are some of the methods I used while learning. You can of course use these for any rhythm game chart.
Chunking
By far the easiest thing you can do is to spot when a certain sequence of notes is repeated multiple times across the song.
For example, this sequence appears 4 times, twice in the intro and twice in the outro:
17593
X...X
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..X..
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...X.
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.X...
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..X..
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X....
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.X...
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..X..
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...X.
(Each column is an arrow on the dance pad. 1 is down-left, 3 is down-right, 5 is center, 7 is up-left, 9 is up-right, like a keyboard numpad. Steps flow downward through time.)
So instead of memorizing 36 steps, you only have to remember 9. This is the key thing that'll help you stay sane throughout the whole endeavor.
You can extend this by recognizing sequences that are mirror images of each other.
For example, this sequence appears in the intro:
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.X.X.
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..X..
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....X
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X....
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..X..
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.X...
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X....
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..X..
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....X
and its mirror image appears in the outro:
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.X.X.
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..X..
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X....
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....X
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..X..
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...X.
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....X
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..X..
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X....
There's really only one drawback to this. If you're an idiot like me who confuses left and right all the time, your feet might execute the outro sequence during the intro, or vice versa. An embarrassing number of my attempts failed because of this.
Tracing
Chunking can only get you so far. You'll probably have to do more complicated stuff.
Consider this sequence at the start of the first verse:
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.X...
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..X..
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M....
H....
H....
H....
W....
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..M..
..H..
..H..
..H..
..W..
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.X...
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...X.
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..X..
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....X
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..X..
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...X.
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.X...
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..X..
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X....
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..X..
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.X...
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...M.
...H.
...H.
...H.
...W.
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..X..
(M, H, and W indicate the start, middle, and end of a hold note.)
Try following along right now, wherever you're sitting. Your feet should move clockwise around the center, then anticlockwise, then clockwise again. They start on the west side (1 and 7), move to the north, then east, then north again, then west, and finally north, with your left foot resting on 5 and your right foot resting on 9.
(See this video if my subpar textual description isn't convincing enough for you.)
Tracing out the paths and remembering their "shapes" visually is much more helpful than trying to memorize raw sequences of notes, and it's especially useful for this chart because there are no crossovers at all, barring the intro and outro.
Inferring
This is more of a heuristic than anything, but it's quite powerful.
Suppose you don't know the notes marked as ????? below:
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..X..
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.X...
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...X.
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..X..
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?????
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?????
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?????
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.X...
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...X.
The least awkward way to bridge the gap (i.e., no crossovers, no double-stepping, and each step moves your foot to a new arrow) is if right foot hits 3, left foot hits 1, and right foot hits 5, in that order. You can see for yourself that there really is no other way, and that is indeed what the actual chart does:
17593
..X..
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.X...
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...X.
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..X..
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....X
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X....
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..X..
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.X...
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...X.
We're only saving 3 steps here, but it adds up over time, so you'll actually end up saving a lot of bandwidth.
Of course, I cherry-picked an example where there's only one reasonable answer. But after several playthroughs, you can get a feel for the step artist's style and have a pretty good sense of which combinations of notes are more likely than others.
Practicing
Last but not least: you just have to practice.
All the advice so far is moot if you don't actually put the time and effort into learning the darn chart. So just practice. Tap out the patterns on your desk with your hands, use your chair as a makeshift bar, whatever floats your boat. You will naturally come up with approaches that work best for you.
For me, I played a PC version of Pump It Up on my laptop using the numpad, just to make sure that I could actually Full Combo the chart on invisible mode and I wasn't subconsciously learning something incorrect. If your brain can control your hands, it can control your feet too, and when you're blindfolded, you can just manifest a pair of hands on the numpad anyway. That's what the mental math pros do, right? With their invisible abacuses and all.
I know people rave about storyboarding or mind palaces or whatever, and I would perhaps be an advocate of that on any other occasion. But given that the song itself is already distinctive enough, I didn't really need anything else. I could just map each part of the song to its respective sequence of notes.
Final Thoughts
You know, whenever a project of mine fulfills its purpose, I usually don't touch it anymore. But this is so low-maintenance and I think it'd be a waste if I, uh, forgot, so I definitely see myself playing this chart at least once per Pump session from now on. Maybe just on invisible mode and not with the blindfold, though. The blindfold unsurprisingly introduces other challenges like not being able to easily orient yourself on the pad, which made things a bit more frustrating than fun.
Still, the final video looks cool as hell, and I'm happy with it. A neat party trick for sure.
That's all from me for now, and I'll leave you with what I said the last time I did one of my wacky challenges:
Of all the things I've accomplished in this game, this was certainly one of them.