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Saturday, March 5, 2011

Song of the Week! 5 March 2011

 

We're picking a lot of high difficulty songs for this section, aren't we? Let's switch things up a bit, and allow me to cover the easiest Anime song in Taiko!

Utabito (詠人)
Version
Allx2 (73)

x1 (73)
Taiko 2
105
none
 ???


Quite an old pick, isn't it? Very different from our usual coverage of the latest songs, to freshen things up a bit.

Though you might be tempted to run the title through a Kanji translator, it's very obviously stated that the title is not pronounced as 'Yomibito', despite the words used. Utabito is the first Anime genre song to have 1* on Oni (called Donderful back then), and was the only one up until very recently when Anpanman no March was downed from 2* to 1* on Taiko 0, and even that song is leagues harder than this one. The only other 1* Oni songs are Mura Matsuri, Tankou Bushi, Aye-Aye and Mori no Kumasan, all of which are in Children/Folk.

It comes from the manga series Ojarumaru (おじゃる丸), created by Rin Inumaru in 1993 and turned into an anime show in 1998, which won an Excellence Award in animation the following year. The cartoon tells the misadventures of Ojarumaru (Mackaroo in the English edition), a 5 year old prince of the Heiran dynasty, which travels to the present time with the magical power-stick of Enma, the king of demons. In this new time era, the prince has the opportunity to meet new friends, and to face off against the three Oni servants of Enma - Akane, Kisuke and Aobee, who want the magical wand back.

The song, featured only in the second Taiko arcade, is the opening theme of the anime series, sung by Saburō Kitajima (北島三郎). The notes are very sparsely placed and uses slight 1/12 spacing. Excluding the two drumrolls, the maximum score for Utabito is a mere 74,000 points, which is one of the lowest maximum scores in Taiko history. The only maximum scores lower than Utabito are a couple of Taiko Wii 2 dojo challenges, not even actual songs.

On the song selection menu the title is presented in both the original Kanji (詠人) and the hiragana pronunciation in brackets after that (うたびと), to emphasize that it isn't pronounced as 'yomibito'.