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Saturday, October 22, 2016

Song of the Week! 22 October 2016


For today's feature, the tone is slightly different than usual.

As a personal rule for this corner, I seldom let my choices for this corner to be affected by personal tastes, but upon having fully experienced the series from which the couple of songs of today's feature are spawned, I won't delay this pet-peeve of mine once again to the "another couple of months later" status and put this up today. I'll try not to make of this a personal habit in the future...

...anyway, Assassination Classroom time!

 Jiriki Hongan Revolution (自力本願レボリューション) Assassination Classroom
Version
Allx4 (101)x6 (108)x6 (182)x7 (418)
 Taiko Wii U 3, Taiko PS Vita
 180
 none
 ansa22


The Taiko no Tatsujin series is no stranger to having some stronger-than-usual bonds with selected Anime series for collaboration means, and one of the latest exponents to this trend is the now-concluded Ansatsu Kyoshitsu (暗殺教室) series, of which we already talked about last year with our Seishun Satsubatsu-Ron SotW feature. For this double-header, we're instead taking a look at some of the series' surrounding aspects and what it came to be of its lore after its closure.

Mangaka Yusei Matsui (松井優征)'s second serialized series has gathered a lot of attentions to it, an aspect which was also reflected into the high rankings the series as a whole managed to score among the years; in 2013 alone, it was ranked 2nd in the bookstore-recommended Zenkoku Shotenin ga Eranda Osusume Comic 2013 selection, hit 2nd place in publisher Media Factory's "Book of the Year" top list and elected the best book choice by Nippon Shuppan Hanbai's Recommended Comic Books Across the Country Clerk's Choice, scoring high grades in reader-driven polls and even some nominees for the Manga Taisho and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize.

All this talk of the series' reception has a point, as this lead to multiple external parties offering collaboration deals of any sorts. The series' creator himself has been really positive towards these events, as he also stated in one of his postfactions included in the 21-volume tanbokon series of Assassination Classroom, while also adding that the series' simple design has lead him multiple times to think of new collaboration ideas every time he saw some round objects in everyday life! The spark in popularity has also made possible the realization of an Original Video Animation in 2013 by animation studio Brain's Base, as well as a couple of live-action movies based on the manga's events: Assassination Classroom (2015) and Assassination Classroom: Graduation (2016).

One of the aforementioned collaboration deals was with the Taiko no Tatsujin series, as the tentacled yellow teacher Korosensei has had multiple occasions to invade the Taiko no Tatsujin universe, be it with a 2-parter campaign on Taiko Plus or with custom outfits in both the arcade and console fronts, also featured special support techniques from the invader himself in both PS Vita and 3DS titles!

Following up Seishun Satsubatsu-Ron's trail, the second Assassination Classroom-related song in Taiko comes from the 2nd half of the series's first Anime series, realized by Lerche and later on released in English-speaking countries by FUNimation (America) and Anime Limited (United Kingdom). Much like all of the series' opening themes, Jiriki Hongan Revolution (lit. 'Self-Reliance Revolution') is performed by the 3-E Utatan (3年E組うた担) ensemble, which in actuality is the act involving five of the Anime show's main dubbers among AC's 3-E students of the Kunugigaoka Junior High School institute.

For the Taiko housing of this song, newcomer notecharter Kirakira☆ Sakamoto (きらきら☆さかもと) has been at the helm of his modes' creation, after his previous efforts with Seishun Satsubatsu-Ron from the very same series. The final result consists of a lower-rated Oni challenge with mono-colored clusters which managed to become a console-exclusive track between its base-songlist debut with the third Wii U game and its DLC release for V Version.


 QUESTION Assassination Classroom
Version
Allx3 (96)x5 (140)x6 (313)x7 (450)
 Taiko 0 W, Taiko 3DS 3, Taiko +
 177
 none
 ansa23


Following the logical continuation from the previously-released AC songs in Taiko, QUESTION is the first theme of the so-called 'Season 2' of the Anime series (which half-away turned its label into a 'FINAL SEASON' wording), which put a close to the series in animated form on June 2015. As for any popular media in its homelands, there have been begged the same (forgive this line) questions, mostly oriented about how would this brand come to be after its ending...

For Assassination Classroom's case, the most immediate post-ending work has been the creation of a spin-off manga titled Korosensei Q (殺せんせーQ), in which the titular professor is a demon overlord in an alternate reality, and it's up to the re-classed 3-E students to kill him as RPG-inspired characters under this new setting. Created and illustrated by manga artists Kizuku Watanabe (渡邉築) and Jo Aoto, this spin-off series is currently being serialized in the bi-monthly Saikyo Jump magazine.

Other animated media projects have also been issued for the series with a couple of movies concerning the Assassination universe, both made by Lerche; the first movie is titled Assassination Classroom the Movie: 365 Days and is based on the two Anime seasons with a few extras, while the other one is actually about the Korosensei Q universe! Both works will be released in Japanese theaters on November 2016.

With yet another punny SongID label attached to the song and its notecharts (with the returning ansa2 standing for 'ansa-tsu', as in the number 2 in Japanese), QUESTION comes to Taiko gaming as yet another 7* Oni notechart, this time with a blend featuring slightly more notes than the former AC songs and 5-note clusters, with mixed color rhythms no less!