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Saturday, December 7, 2019

Song of the Week! 7 December 2019


Today's song on the spotlight sure is a topical one... no doubt about it!

 NO DOUBT IDOLiSH7
Version
Allx1 (44)x2 (69)x4 (118)x7 (411)
 Taiko 0 B
 128
 none
 ???


Ever since the 2nd arcade generation, Bandai Namco has pushed their idol-oriented content to the Taiko-playing audience on both arcade and console fronts with the iDOLM@STER multi-media franchise, only opening to their female-catering audience share in recent years with the Side-M spinoff's songs. More prominently with the past few firmwares, however, another male idol franchise from the same company is to take the arcade center stage in a more flashy fashion!

The IDOLiSH7 (アイドリッシュセブン) franchise started out in 2015 from the eponymous mobile music game, starring artists and songs produced with music publisher Lantis' affiliated artists and featuring mangaka Arina Tanemura (種村有菜) for the game's overall art direction. The game is a blend between one of your typical marker-hitting music games and a visual novel adventure, as players fill in the shoes of producer Tsumugi Takanashi (小鳥遊紡) in order to lead her father's talent agency to fame by training its seven affiliated idols, dealing between the performers' training and the industry's many obstacles towards the road of success. The original game's world is further expanded by multiple types of media, including an IDOLiSH7 manga (currently in serialization on publisher Hakusensha's Hana LaLa Online since 2015), 2018's IDOLiSH7 Twelve Fantasia! videogame for the PlayStation Vita, an Anime series in the same year made by Troyca (which is getting a 2nd season from April 2020!) and a Youtube-exclusive spin-off, freely available on Bandai Visual's channel, by the name of Idolish7: Vibrato.

Before this ending week's returning collaborative wind with this franchise, the IDOLiSH7 crew had their collaborative buzz up and running since last year, with a Blue Version campaign that ultimately brought to the table three different songs, each starring -for the first time in custom dancers set memory- only the performing idols for each individual song as their custom dancers. In the case of NO DOUBT, we have the two idols that make up the Re:vale rival act: Momose 'Momo' Sunohara (春原百瀬) and Yukito 'Yuki' Orikasa (折笠千斗), voiced respectively by Soichiro Hoshi (保志総一朗) and Shinnosuke Tachibana (立花慎之介).

The song premiered in the mobile game on May 2017, with a namesake single release dated January 10th of the following year, including both vocal and instrumental versions oif it and Taiyou no Esperanza, another Re:vale unit song. The Lantis-affiliated artists involved for NO DOUBT's creation are lyricist Aira Yuuki (結城アイラ), composer/arranger Kotaro Odaka (小高光太郎) and co-composer UiNA, with the latter two sharing separate works for the iDOLM@STER SideM spinoff in their portfolio.

With note-light charts for the KFM mode trio, the backbeat-based Oni notechart is up to set notecount values par to course, with the addition of long mono-color clusters and a DDDKKKDDDKKKD finisher that may or may not wink to the finishing passage of Kurenai's Oni chart.