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Saturday, July 21, 2018

Song of the Week! 21 July 2018


With the latest console Taiko game finally out in the (Japanese) stores, let's take a look at what I believe to be the most interesting pick among the Nintendo Switch game's newcomers...

 void setup
Version
Allx4 (199)x5 (335)x6 (526)x8 (885)
 Taiko Switch
 140
 none
 voidse


One of the new Namco Original additions to the new Taiko title's starting song roster, void setup sees the return of a composer/singer duo that wasn't seen together since Shoujo no Kami no Ryuushi from Momoiro Version: NAMCO SOUNDS veteran Yuji Masubuchi (増渕裕二) and ProductionGIW artist Kaori Aihara (愛原圭織). The recurring independent artist GIW (祇羽) is the lyricist for this track, but perhaps 'lyricist' is not the accurate term to credit his contribution for this song...

You see, what makes void setup a truly unique song is its... rather peculiar choice of lyrics for the base track itself. While it may sound a random series of words and numbers at a first hearing, the lyrics body of the song is actually an ordered sequence of strings in programming language, whose final output is none other than a silly Taiko-related loop animation. The programming instructions in void setup's lyrics body follow the Java-based Processing open-source language, and the final result of the resulting sequence of commands being typed out was already shared on the Internet in video form. See void setup's magic in action for yourself!

Void setup's Oni mode is one of the more note-generous trials in the 8-star tier, filled to the brim with clusters of many kinds and shapes. Every time a bracket [ '(' and ')'] is mentioned by the singer, you can be sure that there are notemarkers of the corresponding colors/types to both "open" and "close" them! Whenever possible, the furikana are also manipulated to show カッコ (kakko, lit. bracket) instead of the normal カッドン (kat-don), a gimmick already similarly seen in Toy Symphony.