Sunday, November 5, 2017

Feature: Hiding the Staff, a Sympho-Neighbours Story


While yes, we are fully aware of our nature on this corner of the Internet of being a Taiko no Tatsujin-oriented news blog, we've been subjected to a particular episode earlier this week that is gradually turning out to be one of the many jigsaw pieces in a particular frame, picturing quite the worry-some scenario for Bemani series fans and music game players in general.

With this situation coming out fresh on many fronts and (almost) nothing but a sea of undocumented/unverifiable facts surrounding the problems of artist mentions' disappearance, this blend between our usual Taiko-centric trivia sources and the Sympho-Neighbours family of features is here to have a look at how is the stage being set for this peculiar situation. Take this as a 'starting point' look for the events that are unfolding during these very days, as we won't make of this a step-by-step episodic series to follow up...

 For the user-input piece of media you're about to see, we'd like to thank the people contributing to the "Konami/Bemani and Artist conflicts." forum board on rhythm game website Zenius -i- vanisher, as well as Twitter users @p6p, @MILI216, @acTroopers and the plurk thread that gave us the picture on the top of this page, among others.

For starters, let's address the actual issue that is being discussed on this feature. In short, the identities/aliases of the in-house Bemani artists for all the most recently-made tracks are being progressively removed from all their newest creations' "artist mention" areas, with a generic 'BEMANI Sound Team' label being displayed instead. This phenomenon has been occurring in many of Bemani's music game series in the last few weeks, with more than one factor pointing the most dedicated fans of those series to worry for the future of Konami's music game branch.

Longtime Taiko fans are pretty much used at this point to see a vast majority of Namco Original songs being uncredited in the games' song list, a syndrome that has affected the series since the very beginning that is still kicking strong to this day (to an extent); for that reason, this situation would not seem that much troublesome from "our side" of the music game fanbase. This, however, is quite the opposite case when considering the history of Bemani games, well versed since its inception into crediting each and every artist that composes original music for one of its many series of both past and present times.

This aspect acquires another layer of relevance when this emerging story is being compared to another heated debacle that has involved Konami as a whole in recent times, with the credit removal and successive firing of videogame creator (and one-time vice-president of Konami) Hideo Kojima. Many debates and horror stories have been shared on the Internet about the 'A Hideo Kojima Game' line removal from the later trailers/box art of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but while we're not here to seek out the whole truth for any of these scenarios (as, sadly, rock-hard evidence for most of behind-the-scenes conversations/happenings between the staff working at Konami is still really close to zero), it's interesting to share one of the many rumors that were floating by during these times:


skip at ~1:40

Many anonymous sources, such as the ones that have been involved in the making of the video above were starting to claim that, as a result of the company's apparent shift to different gaming markets, many game-developing team were being merged into macro-groups that all worked together for a multiple amount of projects at the same time. According to the video above's inquired sources, for example, the team behind the DanceDanceRevolution games have been supposedly merged with all the other audio teams of the music game branches, as part of a plan that sees the unification of all the individual teams working for a specific game/series into a super unit that would work on all series at the same time.

As also the creator of the video above stresses out in the same clip, the report sources (as well as many others like these on the Internet) about both the Konami-related cases have to be considered as mere speculation talk at this point, due to the lack of accountability that anonymous sources suffer of. When future events, however, chime back to the time-proven partial and end results, the worries for certain outcomes may start up to rise up again from the grave...

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, the BEMANI Fan Site has started to undergo a number of different changes that altered its core content in a number of ways that have cast some concern for the return of the MGS-like credits-out scenario. First of all, the entire Artists section of the site, formerly including short bios for all the current in-house Bemani artists, has been emptied as of July of this year, only leaving there the profile of the Konami-enrolled professional Bemani games player Dolce. For some references about those changes, we have a couple of archived web links with the help of the WayBackMachine website: Link 1 (dated March '17) shows the Artists section before said changes, while Link 2 (dated July '17) displays the currently-ongoing situation. All the former page version's sub-pages for the individual artists' bios have been removed from the website as well.

Following up that incident, future Top 10 song roll videos that were included in the most recent Bemani-hosted livestreams have started to feature songs whose imprinted artist credit mentions were removed. This time around, the comparison for 4 of those tracks have been documented by one user over Twitter:

Act 3 of this increasingly-troublesome story is the one we've witnessed this very week, with the artist credit for in-house contributors being replaced with the 'BEMANI Sound Team' label. For the SOUND VOLTEX track of the 4th Tenkaichi Otogesai, the song GERBERA in its original song listing on the Otogesai website had its creator, the nicknamed TAG, referenced in the Artist section, only to be redacted from the page a few hours later. Once again, for a quick comparison we forward you to the Plurk-shared screenshot that opened up this feature with the one below, snapped a few hours later.

This event has not been limited to the Tenkaichi-spawn song either, as other freshly-updated arcade series are starting to crank out the BEMANI Sound Team tune for some of the other new releases. The tweets below, for example, have documented how a couple of the newest songs made for the pop'n music series had their artist mentions made more generic-looking...


As of now, to figure out what is actually behind the scenes to ignite such changes is anyone's guess, but opinionated pieces and allegedly-recovered witnessing that address the situation have been circulating for a while. One of the most shared quotes comes from the nick-named AIJ, reporting one of the end products of a dialogue between several people working inside and around Konami and the bemani division:

"Things are a total mess right now. A few months ago there was a conflict over the artists wanting control over their own works while Konami wants total control since the content was made for Konami. Internal strife and conflict as the company divided into even more subdivisions, the CEO is rapidly losing his mind (anyone that has dealt with Kagemasa [the current Konami CEO] in recent times says he's different, and not in a good way), and the usual fun. It feels like the exec are using the company lawyers against their own staff right now."

While, again, reports like this one can't be accounted as factual evidence due to their weak accountability, the circulation of such voices around the Web is certainly proof per se that the fears of the Bemani division steadily being torn apart and put to an end have become alive once again. It doesn't help either that from the public relation-related side of Konami, the answer that was given to the Bemani Fan Site followers has been as generic as a PR can be. Below is one of official statements that was sent as an answer to the Fan Site's changes, cropped out and embed in tweet form; the following English translation has been provided by Ziv forum user Pie-kun.

"Thank you for always supporting BEMANI. Regarding your concern about the BEMANI fan site that you wrote us about, we are currently not publishing artist pages because of circumstances at the company. Please forgive us that we are not able to give you more detailed information.

 Thank you for sharing your valuable opinion about our contents with us, we will share your feedback with the company. Thank you for your continued support of BEMANI."

...so there you have it; much like the MGS situation, here we have an equal to the music game scenario of Konami where hints of disaster are appearing on a quite alarming rate while what's actually going on in the background is still a mystery to (almost) everyone. As devoted music game fans, we truly hope that the whole accolade will have a happy epilogue...
Posted by Nintendo 5-Star at 1:28 PM
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