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Saturday, September 3, 2016

Song of the Week! 3 September 2016


Earlier this week, we've had a peculiar song suggestion by chatbox user kathy for this corner... which we're eager to spotlight today!

 Don-chan Sekai Ryokou (どんちゃん 世界旅行)
Version
Allx4 (154)x4 (229)x6 (474)x7 (573/521/493)
 Taiko PS2 4, Taiko PSP 1, 2, CD Donderful
 138
 none
 bko1


Piling up to the other advancements on the console front in terms of both gameplay and graphic presentation, the 4th PlayStation 2 Taiko game is also well known not only for being one of the few titles whose opening theme features a male vocalist, but also for accomplishing the same feat with the ending theme as well! Don-Chan Sekai Ryokou (lit. 'Don-chan World Travel')'s theme is as simple as it gets, with the Taiko sibling's dream travel across the world while peppering the description with puns to the many locations he wants to visit between the Japanese wording and the nations' English names.

The song is composed by MONACA no Okabedesu member Keiichi Okabe (岡部啓一) and as such it warranted for itself a bko SongID (with 'bko' being a shortened reversed naming of Okabe himself); however, despite the 1 tackled at the back, this is not the artist's very first song contribution in Taiko, as that merit is held by Namco Original Hello! Don-chan from the very first arcade. With the lyrics penned by the nick-named Yasukawa Shogo (ヤスカワショウゴ ), Don-chan Sekai Ryokou is sung by Kenji Kai (甲斐健司), already the singer of Dodododo-donderful! of Taiko 4 fame. While this song is currently a playable exclusivity to Japanese Taiko games on Sony devices, a shorter lyric-less cut of Don-chan Sekai Ryokou was used as the ending theme for both the US and JP versions of Taiko Drum Master (link).

Being a song based on traveling and puns, it's currently debated among fans whether or not the song's Max Note count on the Master route (573) was a goroawase to Konami specifically intended by the notecharter or not; regardless those speculations, the Oni charts tend to follow the easier side of making forked paths by taking an easier 'basic' notechart path and then adding/recoloring a few notes along the way to round the difficulty up with more 3-note clusters overall.