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Saturday, July 4, 2015

Song of the Week! 4 July 2015


In recent times, minor software updates for Taiko arcades are behaving like New Year celebrations: the exciting things that have yet to come must be contemplated alongside what we lost in the previous time period. For Taiko means, this means old songs are disappearing and new ones are rising.

This week, we're carrying on this peculiar spirit by featuring one of the lost songs, together with one among the newly-added ones.

 Yes (イエス) Acid Black Cherry
Version
Allx3 (128)x4 (177)x5 (294)x7 (430)
 Taiko 0 to 0 Mu
 108
 none
 ???


Another (quite sad) recurring theme for Taiko arcade removals seems to be the inclusion of at least one track that won't be playable anywhere else after its Taiko 0 removal; this time around, the victim is a niche J-Pop track from one of the first modern firmware build's updates.

Released on January 18th, 2012, Yes is the 15th single of composer Yasunori 'yasu' Hayashi (林保徳), former lead member and singer for the 1996 Visual Kei rock band Janne Da Arc. After that the aforementioned band went into an indefinite hiatus in late 2007, yasu has started a solo independent project under the name of Acid Black Cherry (often shortened as A.B.C.), in which he's able to continue creating and performing songs to this very day, under the Motorod music label. Yes was his first single for the year, being featured a month later in the NTV show Clean!! (スッキリ!!) as its ending theme and another month later in his 5th studio album, 2012.

The departing song from Taiko games hosted what many people believed to be the in-spirit update to Konayuki's Oni mode, featuring many tricky cluster formations under the 6* rating and a low (even if a little more upbeat) BPM speed.

 Heart Slump Futari-bocchi (ハートスランプ二人ぼっち) Detective! Knight Scoop
Version
Allx3 (97)x4 (140)x5 (295)x7 (382)
 Taiko 0 Mu
 126
 none
 ???


For one of Murasaki Version's latest additions, we go back to the land of variety shows of the last century with the opening theme of one of Japan's most popular detective series.

The series Tantei! Knight Scoop (探偵!ナイトスクープ) is being made for the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation TV and broadcasted every late Saturday/Friday night from 1988 onward, for over 25 years. The show is about a group of detectives which receive a case in each episode to crack down, highly inviting their audience's participation in the investigations with critical thinking, scene examinations and some funny skits sprinkled in. The series has seen several changes in both its cast and its theme song, but the public has proven to prefer the original 1988 opening theme for the latter subject matter, which is also the song that can now be played on Taiko arcades.

Heart Slump Futari-bocchi is composed and lyricized by Madoka Hiroshi (円広志), art name for the Koichi prefecture singer/songwriter Yoshihiko Shinohara (篠原義彦). The same artist has re-arranged the song in 1993 and 1994 in the attempt of creating a more lively version of the song for the show's opening, only to be replaced by a different opening theme titled Yume no Purpose (夢のプロポーズ) and then back to the original Heart Slump from '88 again. Both the songs can be found in a single being released on January 21st, 1994, under the name of Heart Slump Futari-bocchi.

For this classic Japanese pop-culture track, the Oni mode recipe allows players to both comforting, slow-paced patterns and a Go-Go Time array of monocolor, even-note clusters for some basic hand-practicing.