Header Menu

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Song of the Week! 7 March 2020


Around this time of the year, the preparation for the Spring season in the Northern hemisphere is more than often brought by rainfalls of varying incidence... a topic that is no stranger to the movie housing today's double header!

 Ai ni Dekiru-koto wa Mada Aru Kai Weathering with You
Version
Allx3 (73)x4 (102)x6 (190)x8 (296)
 Taiko N (promo only), Taiko NSwitch
 71
 none
 tnkai2


With today, we're finally starting to talk about songs whose arcade debut is slated on the fourth generation's release day! Thanks to the Nintendo Switch title getting a dedicated mono-thematic DLC pack, we are also able to talk about the song in action, safe from the filming restrictions of JAEPO 2020, where the song was available as one of Nijiiro Version's preview tracks.

Weathering With You is the latest animated film from mangaka/director Makoto Shinkai (新海誠), already director of 2016's smash hit Your Name. which already was a SotW topic for us in the past (link). The movie shares the same romantic fantasy genre categorization as Shinkai's previous movie, seeing how the story focuses on an overly-rainy Tokyo where runaway teenager -Hodaka Morishima- befriends a young girl named Hina, wielder of a mysterious power that lets her manipulate the weather. Weathering With You was released worldwide on July 19th, 2019, with the original Japanese release being titled Tenki no Ko (天気の子; lit. 'Children of Weather') and also referenced with the 'tnk' SongID root for the movie's tracks that made it into Taiko gaming. Managing to become the third Anime movie after Spirited Away and Millennium Actress to get four Annie award nominations, the flick managed to get over 1.6 billion Yen at the 3-day box office revenue, topping Your Name. under the same time span and ultimately grossing over 100 million dollars worldwide, with light novel and manga pubblications from the original mangaka himself being in progress, alongside an official English localization for both.

Just like how director Paul W.S. Anderson has a habit of hiring his wife to star in his videogame-based movies (usually when Capcom rings by), Makoto Shinkai once again tasked the Kanagawa-based rock band RADWIMPS for this movie's score after Your Name's release, trusting the unit to the point of sending a full copy of the movie script to lead vocalist Yojiro Noda (野田洋次郎) even before the band could have sent him the demo of what would eventually become said movie's main theme! That song turned out to be Ai ni Dekiru-koto wa Mada Aru Kai (lit. 'Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do?'), a track which also got an English version from RADWIMPS themselves for the Western release of the film. This song, alongside the rest of the movie's score, was included in their 11th studio album -Weathering With You- which was released in the same day of the eponymous movie's worldwide launch, with the song's English version being included in the International edition of the 6-tracks 'Complete Version' of the same album, released on November 27th of the same year.

With the feeble value of base BPM 71, Weathering With You's main theme, as of today, bears the lowest base BPM ever recorded for an Anime song in Taiko gaming, a fact that is slightly diminished by the fact of it being playable as a cover version.The easy-going scrolling speed also provides the ideal grounds to tackle simple 1/16 cluster formations in an easy-going manner.

  Ai ni Dekiru-koto wa Mada Aru Kai Weathering with You
Version
All---x8 (429)
 Taiko N (promo only), Taiko NSwitch
 71
 none
 tnkai2


The march-like connotations of such a slow-paced songs are enhanced further upon with its Ura Oni difficulty, which splices in more dense 1/16 cluster passages alongside a gradual scrolling speed increase, from x1.5 to x2 and up to triple the speed for the final stanzas. Watch out for that subtle 1/12 cluster in between the pre-Go-Go Time portion, though!

 Grand Escape (グランドエスケープ) Weathering With You
Version
Allx3 (99)x4 (159)x6 (305)x8 (554)
 Taiko NSwitch
 146
 none
 tnkgrd


 Getting the upper-hand over the future arcade gen's release, the Nintendo Switch got a 3-piece pack of Weathering With You songs, among whose picks are the previous song as well as console-exclusive (for the time being, at least) as Grand Escape, composed and lyricized by RADWIMPS's Yojiro Noda (野田洋次郎) the same but starring a different vocalist: Toko Miura (三浦透子). Just like Ai ni Dekiru-koto wa Mada Aru Kai, this song was featured in both editions of the movie's album, albeit only in Japanese.

Taking a page out of the Ura Oni of the movie's theme song, Grand Escape is charted with the same scrolling-speed-rising, only starting from an initial x0.5 modifier and slowly rising up to x1 as the song's pace picks by. Half-length note sanzas and simple, repeating 1/16 charting dictate Grand Escape's Oni mode, one whose stamina requirement might tire newbie players to the 8-star difficulty tier.