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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Namco Taiko Blog (17 May 2012)- Crane City

Today's blog entry discusses the production of the fourth Mika series song, Crane City, in conjunction with its release as a downloadable song in Taiko PSP DX this month. And very very late it is; the previous blog on any Mika song was all the way back in 2009, and that was about Diet Padarise. So the Mika songs after Crane City have yet to be written about even now (Menkui Miracle, Canadea).

Mika Sato herself was absent in the interview, this time only the sound composer Masubuchi Yuuji and lyricist Sankaku were present.

Tired of using drums and bass guitar for songs, which according to Masubuchi-san would make for a very simple chart in the game, he decided to add some new instruments to it, apparently some of his favorite ones used in the 70s which make jingly, crackly noises (like the glockenspiel, which looks like a metal xylophone) and created beat signature changes throughout the song. The codename for Crane City in production was 'Neko Kujira 2', though the final product never used a swing rhythm.


As for the lyrics, Sankaku mentioned it being about the UFO crane games in Japan, where you control a claw to try and snatch a toy from inside (usually a plush doll). It's much easier than it looks; the UFO crane games have been known to be extremely difficult to win, so much so that many people who actually caught something uploaded videos of their feat to Youtube, like the Don-chan plush one we saw some time ago. Though, how he came up with the idea remains a mystery.

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