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Saturday, March 4, 2017

Song of the Week! 4 March 2017


Our Road to Yellow Version has brought us to our last two stops before the next firmware's release with White and Red.

As both firmware colors have been translated for their Taiko HD label in a Japanese wording that points to their English naming (like for the incoming Yellow firmware), here are a couple of songs with English titles!

 Eternal bond Ryuitti feat. GUMI
Version
Allx5 (306)x6 (368)x8 (487)x8 (635)
 Taiko 0 S, Taiko Wii U 2, Taiko +
 170
 none
 etbond


While the ongoing Vocaloid production ratio in Taiko might feel stagnant in the last few years, let's not forget that its rise to relevance peaked in the ongoing arcade generation, with the branding of a dedicated song genre for Vocaloid songs from Sorairo Version! Always under the same firmware, we've also seen the publishing of the 2013 CreoFUGA song winners batch as playable Taiko tunes, with Eternal bond filling the ranks as one of that contest's synthesized voice-powered tracks.

Coming back after his past contest victories with Namco Original Kaze no Kuni no Ryu to Kishi and the also-sung-by-GUMI track Juukinzoku Fugitive, Ryuitti scored his contest-winning turkey streak with a song that was inspired by the kinship between the composer himself and his dog. The final outcome has been praised by judge Kawagen Collagen for being a song light-hearted at the point of it being fully enjoyable both with and without a drum-based accompaniment; later on, it also was one of the three songs whose Oni notecharts were made with the help of the audience of one of 2013's Taiko Team livestreams! Unlike for the cases of D's Adventure Note and Hurtling Boys, however, the multiple-hand chart wasn't fully finished during said broadcast, leading Etou to finish the remaining 2%-ish uncharted portion.

Cluster, clusters and even more clusters await the daring donders who dare to stand up to the challenge of this upbeat-sounding track, for a challenge degree that even Etou himself admitted on Twitter to be considered as an high-tier 8-star Oni! ... by the time of that CreoFUGA contest, sure, but it still does hold some water to most of the modern 8* charts, does it?

 Evidence of evil AJURIKA
Version
Allx5 (317)x7 (391)x8 (564)x10 (814)
 Taiko 0 K, Taiko 3DS 2, Taiko Wii U 3, Taiko PS Vita, Taiko +
 180
 none
 evievi


One big background trend that has been surrounding the 3rd-generation Taiko arcade gaming's journey is the tendency of crafting Namco Original sequel songs, starting with the inception of the Don Challenge monthly feature. One of the latest song debuts through this course of action has also marked the return of an in-house artist that we're going to see it back on Yellow Version, too!

Evidence of evil, in fact, happens to be a spiritual successor to The Carnivorous Carnival, the Namco Original that was originally supposed to be the demonic counterpart of Angel Dream. The former NO classic's composer, Akitaka Toyama (遠山明孝), is also back for the task, only that this time his contribution is being directly referenced in the song's subtitle with the inclusion of his nickname, AJURIKA. Much like The Carnivorous Carnival, this song's title is elegible of alliteration trickery that refers to edible crustaceans, as the Ebiebi (エビエビ) abbreviation/nickname calls back to fried shrimps (in contrast to TCC's crab callbacks).

This fated song sequel that has traveled across all the modern console gaming outlets was charted by Kuboken, who specifically aimed for its Oni chart to pack in the first 400 notes so that a whole note stanza was left empty after the 400th note! With almost every note of the chart packed inside a cluster that is part of even longer and more aggressive chart sections, the high note density (outside the blank note stanzas) has been more than enough to warrant a full-difficulty rating for all of Evidence of evil's modes.