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Saturday, February 29, 2020

Song of the Week! 29 February 2020


For such a rare occason as a SotW feature in a leap year's extra day of February, here's a little something that is sure to take us all to the ancient peaks of the Egyptian times of yore!

 Jotei ~Imbiratuula~ (女帝 ~インバラトゥーラ~)
Version
Allx4 (165)x7 (272)x8 (503)x9 (648)
 Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko PS Vita, Taiko NSwitch, CD CC-8
 200-304
 none
 invara


In a similar manner of Azu♪'s dragon-related Namco Originals, this unlockable-affine composition has a title that repeats itself twice, only this time in two different languages rather than two kinds of text formating. Both the Japanese word Jotei and the Arabic Imbiratuula word in-between the wavy elipses stand for 'Empress', as the song's lyrics make abundantly clear not only to an Egyptian setting but also to the identiy of said empress being Cleopatra, due to the 'last empress' blurb among the lines and the poison/asphid references to the pharaoh's ultimate cause of death.

To this day, this is the latest Taiko vocal song from Saori Terai (寺井沙織; Twitter) alongside Megamina Sekai I, with both ProductionGIW talents (the duo GIW/Yura Hatsuki) and Tsukuyomi Records's Hisui (翡翠) contributing for the song's creation, respectively as the lyrics-penning couple and its composer. As adverted before, Jotei ~Imbiratuula~ has been a song that has made the rounds of Taiko gaming as an unlockable song, time and time again; starting on V Version as one of the game's Story boss themes, it made the arcade jump with a V Version-related unlock campaign and later on, it became unlockable once again for the Nintendo Switch game. No matter the game of choice, you'll have to work hard in order to please your pharaoh!

Taiko series veteran Yuji Masubuchi (増渕裕二) charted the song with many an irregular-length time stanza, while also interlocking multiple BPM/scrolling shifts to bear the illusion of a slow-flowing BPM song for great part of the play. On the Oni notechart side of things, this has translated with several quick, mono-color clusters that are spliced in your usual 1/16 charting ways. That is, of course, until that very last note cluster, whose notes sport an individual and gradual scrolling speed increase each!