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Saturday, August 8, 2015

Song of the Week! 8 August 2015


Today we are taking a look at two elusive-to-record licensed songs! If the videos for the songs below sound really weird, there's a specific reason for that behavior...

 Dragon Night SEKAI NO OWARI
Version
Allx3 (115)x4 (151)x6 (271)x8 (535/388/328)
 Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko 3DS 2
 122.99~125.03
 none
 skodrg


Taiko games have always been popular to the general public thanks to its huge licensed songs library that has been acquired in its 15 (and counting!) years of both arcade and console releases. This also includes original version of many licensed songs, which are easily subjected to silence/removal when these are generally featured in online videos coming from channels who are not directly affiliated with the artists involved.

Taiko gameplay footage is no exception to the rule, and so people had to adapt to the restrictions put by either silencing the master audio or distorting the copyrighted song's audio source, such is the case for today's two featured tracks! The first of which is one of 2014's singles from rock band SEKAI NO OWARI, which we already featured in this corner last year.

Dragon Night made its debut on October 15th, 2014, in the namesake single (Sekai no Owari's 3rd one for 2014 and 7th overall),  produced by Dutch DJ Nicky Romero. Summoning pirate-ish vibes to encapsulate life's most beautiful and sad moments, the song is a result of experimentation from ideas that have been brewed during the creation of the song Honoo to Mori no Carnival (also on Taiko games) and the 2014 documentary film TOKYO FANTASY, about the band itself. Dragon Night managed to reach high peaks in 2014's Oricon charts, hitting 4th/7th/57th peak places in the weekly, monthly and yearly charts respectively. The track managed to become the second theme song for the Fuji TV series Mezamashi (めざましテレビ ) and was also planned at some point to be the main theme for the 2014 movie of animated series Kuragahime (海月姫) before being switched off with Mermaid Rhapsody (マーメイドラプソディー), also from Sekai no Owari.

With minor BPM shifts throughout the song, Dragon Night's main feature on Taiko games is the inclusion of forked-paths gameplay in a J-Pop song, over six years after the last Oni forked path challenge (DANCE2 feat. Sy Sauce) and three years after the last forked path notechart in general (Heavy Rotation's Muzukashii chart)! Kuboken's patterns on Oni mode feature six main route-changing point with averagely-tough branching condition, as to enter the first Master route portion is easy but to keep it with its aggressive 1/24 clusters can be really tough! Between the latter two routes there's a minor note difference, as Master Route's devilish 1/24 clusters are replaced with drumrolls/hitballoons.

 Chikyuu o Mawase! (地球を回せっ!) Inazuma Eleven GO Galaxy
Version
Allx3 (81)x4 (153)x5 (274)x6 (334)
 Taiko 0 M to 0 W
 142
 none
 ???


Another copyright juggernaut in Taiko games' licensed songs department comes from the lucky Anime transposition of the Manga stories based on the Inazuma Eleven (イナズマイレブン) franchise, Level-5's RPG-Sports videogame series about football.

The games of the series have players delve in the game's story with two variations of gameplay: RPG-styled exploration for items and random battles with football team members and actual football matches with other teams, played with team members recruited from the RPG-like portion and touch-screen controls for controlling the characters' actions during the matches. From 2008, mangaka Tenya Yabuno (やぶのてんや) started the serialization of the game-related manga series Inazuma Eleven GO (イナズマイレブン GO), starting ten years after the events of the videogames and featuring a brand new cast of characters. In 2011, thanks to the manga's success, Level-5 produced an Anime transposition of Yabuno's manga series with TV Tokyo and animation studio OLM. Both the manga and the Anime series continue to this day, counting -as of now- three series: the original Inazuma Eleven GO and its two sequels, GO: Chrono Stone and GO: Galaxy.

Chikyuu o Mawase! is the second opening theme of the GO: Galaxy. Much like many of the previous themes for the show, this one has been made by the pop band T-Pistonz+KMC (ティーピストンズプラスケムシ), associated to the Level-5 label FRAME and -as such- joint venture of the company who made the Inazuma Eleven games (think of it like the band Strawberry Flowers is to Nintendo and the Pikmin series). The band currently consists of lead vocalist Ton-Nino, his younger brother Hiroshi Dot as dancer/side singer, rapper KMC and dancer/choreographer In-Chiquita.

There isn't that much to talk about Chikyuu o Mawase's Oni mode patterns as they follow the average flow of a 6* Anime song with (mostly) 3-note mono-color clusters and sparse drumrolls under the familiar 1/16 tempo division.