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Saturday, March 9, 2019

Song of the Week! 9 March 2019


Here we go again: since our blog's inception, today is the second time that one of our Saturday features falls under the Internet fan-dubbed 'Miku Day', with the '39' goroawase number identifying respectively its month and day.

As in our first outing we didn't feature a proper Hatsune Miku Vocaloid song, have two of them for this entry instead!

 Dance Robot Dance (ダンスロボットダンス) NayutalieN feat. Hatsune Miku/#C.O.M.P.A.S.S.
Version
Allx3 (135)x4 (223)x4 (377)x9 (876)
 Taiko 0 B, Taiko Switch, Taiko +
 190
 none
 mikudd



Premiered in Taiko gaming during the Blue Version life span, Dance Robot Dance (as well as the following song) has been featured as an image song for a peculiar mobile game. Seeing as said game has been the focus of some music gaming collaborations, it's good custom to spend some words about it first!

Released in 2016 on November 16th under the full title of Combat Providence Analysis System #C.O.M.P.A.S.S. (戦闘摂理解析システム#コンパス), this is a mobile videogame made by NHN PlayArt and DWANGO/Nico Nico Douga, with heavy focus on its PvP team-based gameplay. In each match, two teams of 3 player each will struggle in order to be the ones to capture and hold possession of the most capture points -the Portal Keys- in the playing field, by taking advantage of the playable characters and combats carts of both the player and the other team mates. Both heroes and cards can be acquired through gacha mechanics ingame, including both original heroes as well as collaboration characters from other popular franchises. The Nico Nico Douga stretch of the game lies on its soundtrack, as each one of the original characters is attached to a Vocaloid-powered image song as its own theme song. The Sprinter-class hero robot Voidoll, voiced by Tange Sakura (丹下桜), happens to be associated this way with Dance Robot Dance, a song whose insertion into #Compass predates its own public release!

The song made its debut on video-sharing websites on December 6th by the hands of NayutalieN/Nayutan Seijin (ナユタン星人), a Vocaloid producer who made of himself out of his space-related creations, starring Hatsunme Miku as their sole singer. Dance Robot Dance is one of the many NayutalieN creation to prominently feature in the official video his "Andromedako" character, a dual-antennae alien who has been the star in paper-printed publications that were supervised by his father producer himself: the 2016 Weekly Shonen serialized manga Medako-san's Invasion Plan To Love (メダ子さんの恋スル侵略計画) and 2017's light novel Archive of the Nayutan Stars (ナユタン星からのアーカイヴ). Piling over 4.8 million views on Niconico alone, this is one of Nayutan Seijin's most popular Hall of Legend songs.

Dance Robot Dance's venture into Taiko gaming was made possible by a collaboration event in 2018 between #Compass and Bandai Namco's two arcade music games (Taiko and Synchronica), with different picks from the PvP mobile game gracing both franchises. Getting a longer playable cut in comparison to the one used for Synchronica (link), its Oni mode's Kat-predominant notechart is punctuated by a barrage of small cluster that involve a huge toll on handswitching skills for some busy times. Luckily for newcomers, there's a quite long portion of the song with less inputs to hit to catch a break mid-performance!

The same cut of Dance Robot Dance is also featured in Taito's Groove Coaster series (link) as a result of another #Compass collaboration event... one that actually predated the Bandai Namco-related one of a few months! In comparison to the Synchronica BG storyboard, visual references to #Compass are displayed instead of the song's original MV.

 Violence Trigger (バイオレンストリガー) Hachioji-P feat. Hatsune Miku/#C.O.M.P.A.S.S.
Version
Allx3 (65)x4 (91)x6 (194)x9 (520)
 Taiko 0 G, Taiko +
 196
 none
 ???


The #Compass collaboration has also seen the coming of selected Vocaloid tunes to the mobile-friendly Taiko + games as either tied-in with arcade releases or game-exclusive inclusions. That scenarios is about to change for the Miku-powered Violence Trigger, as it's about to be playable on arcades as well with Green Version's venture!

This is the latest (33rd as of now) Vocaloid song from Hachioji-P (八王子P), an electropop-based composer who also bolsters quite the music gaming inbluence under a different alias! Also known in the Vocaloid scene as 8#Prince, this producer's works do include other female Vocaloid voices from time to time (mainly Luka and GUMI) and has professional experiences as a DJK and on different music genres (mainly freeform and happy/UK hardcore). Under the alias of P*Light, the artist has been a recurring contributor to Bemani music games in recent memory, from beatmania IIDX (STARLIGHT DANCEHALL and HAT TRICK among others) to REFLEC BEAT (Gale Rider; Storm Buster) and SOUND VOLTEX, among which we remember his Tenkaichi Otogesai contribution for the in-house series: Gekka Ranbu (月光乱舞). P*Light is nowadays regarded as a member of illustrious labels in the music game-related scene, including HARDCORE TANO*C and beatnation Records.

Violence Trigger was another of the #Compass-first tracks, publicly uploaded only in recent date on December 23rd in 2018, thus making its Taiko-playable debut predate even its video-sharing entrance! Still, the song has quickly managed to achieve the Hall of Fame status with over 2 million views to date between Niconico and YouTube combined. In #Compass, Violence Trigger is the image song of the Gunner-class human hero Megumegu, voiced by Sakura Ayane (佐倉綾音).

It's easy to draw Oni mode comparisons between this song and Children Record's hardest charts, seeing how both sport a speed-based notechart with tiresome hi-note-density portions with interlocking note clusters that, however, don't pile up that big of a final note count in the end due to the chosen song cut for the series.