Congratulations of finding this page! Here lies Lokamp's rant from April Fools 2018, which was originally put in place of the content of a regular Song of the Week feature.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions being reported here don't represent the beliefs of all the Taiko Time staff members, only Lokamp's (unless otherwise specified).
...yeah, it's just a regular song. Expecting something fancier for today? I've already put up another mono-theme feature month to boot for 4 weeks in a row, ALL with one Ura Oni feature each; give me some slack, okay? I mean, it's not like the actual people working on the Taiko no Tatsujin series are putting that much effort either these days...
I mean really, this whole Blue Version launch window period has to be one of the most pitiful and pathetic events to chronicle in the series for the Bandai Namco PR side of things since quite a long time, and considering how the people behind the series are un-talkative about its progression, that's really saying something. A new arcade version for your almost-20-years-running arcade household is about to come out and what did you ever do to advertise it, huh? One official blog entry about the songs coming in advance to the JAEPO'18 fair and that's it? Even the fucking Twitter handle got dormant without saying a single thing afterwards, to the point of leaving out upcoming features undocumented until the launch day, like if they're nothing. You did your obligatory recycled blog post about the 2-3 things that would be carried over and the latest round of song removals, but for the rest you act all like "Have fun finding out what else is new for yourselves at launch day, assholes!"? You're not exempted to do your fucking PR business because there are nerds all around the Internet like myself doing the legwork- you STILL have to prove to your audience that the series is still worth a damn playing for new and exciting stuff that you may have in store, but if you buckle up in yourselves by either saying nothing new of regurgitating old news through tweets, you can't assume that people would just come on your way. For fuck's sake, I would have gone checking their "oh-so-precious-and-verified" Twitter handle for vitals if it wasn't for the late-March tweets teasing their next April Fools stunts. And whaddayaknow, it has all been for old songs/tropes being recycled. AGAIN.
Do you want to have a scope of the entity on the lack of care that the people behind the official Taiko stuff (yes, I'm gonna call 'em like that now, as there's little left to be talking about a 'Taiko Team' anymore these days) have put on the series as of late?, Here, take a seat- there's quite a lot talk about!
Without that much effort on the Internet, it's easy to see on face-value how their interest of keeping a good chunk of their audience engaged is disappearing, day after day. We've seen on these very pages how overseas arcade Taiko players have been treated with varying degrees of nonchalance, ignoring the pleas of those who band together to demand a service that is in-par with the Japanese counterpart up to getting their personal interaction outlets get silenced; as a non-arcade-goer I don't feel this issue that close to home, but I do sympathize for their situation regardless. Then we get, again, to how un-involved the people behind Taiko games are getting the general fans on the news spectrum and that ever-lasting problem that is a less-impactful production of Original songs (which, granted, it has risen up since the 3rd arcade generation's inception, but it still feels like a distant 2nd-place towards most of the competition). These two last problems were somehow less pressing by the fact that the people constituting the Taiko Team have tried to become more engaged with their audience between the official blog's side stories and one of the first Twitter accounts for Japanese music game series; once that this kind of interaction is gone, however, all the issues addressed beforehand come back full force with little to no reasons to justify either such behavior or excitement for the next thing Taiko to come. I don't even need to go that much far to spot an example of a competitor doing a far more egregious job in getting its fans involved! Take for example the social media campaign that the Taito people behind the Groove Coaster Twitter handle has conducted to build up the launch of the latest Groove Coaster arcade.
Starting from the JAEPO '18 feature reveal (and thus, from a similar position to Taiko Blue Version), Groove Coaster 4 Starlight Road has been plugged in since the very last event for the then-active GC3EX Dream Party version, with one boss song unlock that would have been carried over to the new firmware for the most hardcore of fans. Together with that, the week preceding GC4's launch has seen daily song reveals and some early new event notices from Wednesday to Saturday in the penultimate week of March, each time spotlighting different tune representatives from different genres. Then it comes the Tuesday of the week after and BOOM, the Twitter feed drops a mutual collaboration bomb with another music game and the good will is carried over up until that release day, two days later. the best that the Taiko no Tatsujin Twitter reps have done is shove down some repeated PS4 DLC notices and an iOS campaign. The result? Blue Version was advertised so fucking bad that song announcement notices for some launch songs came out... during the very same version launch day! Tell me what kind of fucking use has to announce an un-revealed track the same day that everyone can just go out to the arcades to find them out by themselves, and we're not talking about song licenses alone, but Namco Originals as well. Not to mention that the Groove Coaster Twitter people have the wit to retweet an artist's tweets when they talk about their latest songs' coming on Taito's music game series, or even anything else that is related to the series, so that's another way to further spread the message. The new Taiko management is not cool that way, there's only space for collaboration-related PR statements and nothing more.
Hell, you can even show the care for your own series with some effort in your own game's packaging/mode structure/song list combo, with many factors that make each and every subsequent installment more of the same sludge, and it's not just for one factor or two either. Once again, I'd like to build upon this point by bringing up a recent music game series that shows how care to your own brand can be carried over both for the series as a whole and the single product, but if you want to experience by yourself the story of the game I'm going to briefly talk about, Cytus 2, beware! There's going to be some spoilers to the story, so I'll leave the next few paragraphs written in white. If you want to read them, just drag your mouse over the area between these two lines, as I don't want to ruin the fun for those who are on the fence about getting the game... after all, who do you think I am, your average plot-spoiling Final Fantasy VII/Doki Doki Literature Club memester shitlord?
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For starters, I do believe that the story-telling approach of Cytus 2 is far more engaging than the one featured in the first game, which I'd find more suitable for a short movie with some animated imagery rather than a few static/animated screens while you play the 10 secret chapter Cytus songs. The sequel's messaging system is an interesting idea for conveying the plot points by the point of view of a variety of characters that may or may not be knowing more than it appears, but to make this kind of approach truly unique is the integration of this aspect with some occasional game sequences, ranging to locked song plays to cut-scenes and perception-distorting phenomena that may or may not be related to the mysterious Æsir composer that it's in everybody's mouth.
And then, the game hits you hard with this song. Not only is the level of care put into inserting this track in plot-crucial moments makes the player feel more engaged in the world's atmosphere, but the song itself is made as a loving letter to fans of the original Cytus, remixing pieces of the first game's most popular tracks into an original work. Not only this is fan-service for the more keen listeners, but it's also linked in itself to the plot's succession, as the cut-scene being played right after the first performance puts focus into the character of Vanessa for the first game, and thus letting the just-finished song's composition from older tracks gain another layer of relevance.
(Now, this point is an extra that is not related to the part above, but by reading the Twitter feed of ngitrox, I'm kinda questioning his skepticism on the English translation's poignancy in the game. Sure, I'm still the staff member who can't read moonrunes and there might be some lost-in-translation messages in the original language for the game, but I still found the English version to be really solid, maaaybe except for some "Current Year(TM)" expression/memes that I came across in the paid standalone character packs, but that's just stretching it)
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Granted, that's no secret that Taiko games have had similar examples of care into either their games or songs (or both altogether), but the modern state of affairs of the staff members releasing as little buzz on their games as possible has led to titles that feel more like "Here's your new most-updated container of Taiko songs, please buy it" rather than mini-arcade machines with actual motifs in their song selection and features (that are NOT bringing back old/similar content back from the grave in a new fashion). It's sad to state it, but it appears that modern Taiko gaming is more being based on the good credentials that the series as a whole has gained along the years, with more seasoned fans (such as myself, I know) following this wild ride for the past good times and the "I want to see where it ends up" kind of mentality and the occasional players being drawn in by the cool collaboration of the moment or that one recent song that blew up in popularity all of a sudden.
Speaking of the exploitation of an IP's good cred, I find it really sad that this kind of line of thinking doesn't stop to our niche Japanese series alone... and to get straight to the point, can Hollywood fucking stop remaking and/or rebooting every single movie or franchise/character that has already been done in the past 20-or-so years?!? I'm getting fucking sick to see more than often old movies getting redone with a lick of paint, just because "the original was such a classic, so let's remake it exactly the same to get the same amount of cash back!". This mentality eats and will continue to do so if the persons being put in charge of these waste of resources do it for anything else that veers outside artistic reasons, something that would make up for an unique spin to the story that goes beyond the modern eye-candy. And more to the point, as an average movie-goer, I'm most likely to have already fucking seen the originals, so what's the point for someone like me seeing them again outside the free cable TV broadcasting?
It's not like these, I don't know, 5 years of movie reboots/remakes have been stellar achievements of entertainment, after all. If for some reason you still doubt it, here's a sample primer:
Robocop remake? Bleah.
Total Recall remake? Bleah.
Poltergeist remake? Bleah.
Point Break remake? Bleah.
Ghostbusters remake? Double bleah.
Eli Roth's Death Wish remake? TRIPLE bleah!
Each of these modern remakes (and many more, I'm sure of that) are as pointless individually as any of the others, with their plots mostly being carbon copies of the originals but with 'extra' elements that in the end are not as effective in making an audience engaged. And it's not that the formula is flawed to begin with; I do believe that if you put the right people in charge with the right ideas, proposing a new version of an old flick can still be memorable for its own merits rather than being a mere cashgrab; from the top of my head I can think of The Thing and The Nutty Professor for the 'good remakes' category, but I'm sure that many more beyond these do exist.
(and for fuck's sake, mr. Roth, you can't even do competent remakes of your own actual movies; why the flying fuck do you think that you're qualified to handle the remake of someone else's stuff?!?)
Even modern sequels to old properties don't feel right to an ever-increasing audience pool, whether or not they've seen the original movie that inspired it! For me, that movie quota for last year was filled up by Blade Runner 2049, a flick so impactful to me that it only took a night's good rest to forget more than half of it, from a plot that if it doesn't bore to death it's summed up anyways by exposition-loaded sequences to a score that doesn't feel the need to buckle up such modern-day stereotyped like the Hans Zimmern horns (that belongs to Inception for a reason, you can't just copy/paste it in sci-fi movies and expect to work the same). Even the scenery background setting is more akin to your average videogame CGI cutscene, and this movie still managed to get an Oscar for Special Effects? I'm usually not the guy who likes to rain praise on already-over-awarded movies, but give that title to a flick that actually merits it in 2017, like The Shape of Water (then again, in 2016 the Oscars have awarded Suicide Squad for the Best Costume category, so their aesthetic judgement might already be skewed)! So far, I've never seen the original Blade Runner movie, but if it's even an inkling like this snoozefest, I'm avoiding it like the plague.
While we're in the subject of movie sequels, one aspect that I can relate-from-afar in the same way to non-Japanese arcade Taiko goers has been the general reception of the most recent Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi. I went and came back as I was watching a popcorn movie since I didn't see any of the firms in my childhood (and thus not having any kind of emotional attachment to the franchise), but when I went online to see many people's stance on this movie after my viewing, I've seen the same kind of 'sense of abandon' that the movie has left them when weighting in the first two movie trilogies that were released beforehand. I've seen many topics being discussed with different approaches and lines of reasoning (some arguable more/less plausible and effective than others), but what I believe has moved their opinions to be expressed online is their genuine appreciation of the series as a whole, with this latest entry mostly ending up by betraying what the series could and/or should pursue to carry the story forward while in the same time making the new elements and plot lines coherent to the 8-movies foundation that was built beforehand. That's what I saw in the non-Japanese arcade goers and I can highly sympathize to that, mainly to the fact that if I were in the same boat of 'long-time fan being discharged in the most egregious of ways', I wager I'd be as vocal on my opinion on this topic... Man, I'm on a roll today! Might as well keep on the the most annoying thing to ever happen two years ago.
The year 2016 has meant a wide variety of things for many different people, but I believe that the worst objective thing to come out of that year was all the annoying people complaining online or on the news worldwide of how much they felt that 2016 was one of the worst, if not the worst year ever in a long while. The personal reason of why I do find this incredibly insulting comes out of the principle that have birthed a lot of this "WORST YEAR EVAHHHH" propaganda. Let's be crystal fucking clear- the majority of people that have done one of these videos, from the local news to the pay-per-view fat cats, from the small to the big Youtuber, have done it for one reason alone: either they did not like the final results of the U.S. elections or the Brexit polls, and have tried to amass as many pejoratives and personal negative events in life as possible to make their stance un-equatable. I -despise- to the core such people! Do you think that being emotionally manipulative is enough to buy your viewer's trust alongside with their human empathy for your political agenda?!? As a non-American, non-British person, I couldn't care less of the politics of such countries (before marveling at the egregious political shitshow I'm used to see in my nation for many years), so here's my late-in-the-game advice for you: take your political agenda soapbox pieces and the sappy personal stories of how your relative/dog/cat/other animal's death or any other unrelated event affected you, shove it up your ass, let 'em climb the whole rectum, make them travel all the way across the whole intestine and up to the duodenum, so that you can use them to block your biliar ducts and make your entire body progressively green, as my face went on after witnessing the latest sensationalist piece for the nth fucking time about how 2016 is the first sign of the Apocalypse or something.
You. Make. Me. Sick.
...*whew*, that felt good. It doesn't happen too often for me to have a space like this to shout some frustrating topics to talk about, but I guess I have to counter-weight it with more positive topics. After all, your patience to sit through all that grumpiness has to be rewarded somehow...
...
So, ... oh, I got it- do you remember last year's April Fools joke I pulled here on Taiko Time? Those three pages shouting the unfiltered appreciation I have for the freelance composer Tsugumi Kataoka and his works? Well, it turns out that the man himself has actually fell for the joke last year! Unfortunately, you'll have to take my word for it as the Butapunch tweet falling for the joke was deleted ever since and I did non take a screencap of it (le sigh), but I have to thank the part-time blog contributor CoroQuetz for that one find! It was him who replied in Japanese to tell the man that he fell for a prank, after all. Even if that piece has been deleted, I'm still happy that it caught his attention, yay!
More about April Fools in general, here's a random trivia for you: did you know that the next April Fools Day that falls on Easter is going to happen in 11 years, on 2029? The same-day Easter Fools conjunction will also happen 11 years from that last year, in 2040. Feel free to use this piece to break the ice if you happen to find yourself on a meeting with unfamiliar people to keep that conversation ball going, you're welcome!
Truth to be told, my original intentions to be having another April 1st feature was so that I could move on from the Idolm@ster features; as I was making this past month's features I realized that one thing I learned during the first themed month: a full month being stuck on a single IP in Taiko songs did not make it to be a very followed topic, and by looking at the analytics of these past days, I suppose that trend hasn't changed that much since then. Just like for that hidden Cirno song feature, however, when is ever going to happen again to have the very same days of the month for another themed song feature month on the same topic?
One thing I'm surprised to be changed in me is my view on the Idolm@ster series. I remember that I found it really bland and same-y in my first Taiko Time staff interview, but flashforward to today and I'm playing a music gacha game from the franchise-how crazy of a turnabout is that? I guess it's all because of that one girl I met during a train ride some months ago whose casual clothing and natural apparel almost matched point-by-point the one of one of the idols in the music gacha game I'm playing, an-
...aw shucks, I gotta go and still haven't talked about the song in hand. Oh well, might as well claim this was my April Fools all along and go back edit the page some time later; how simple is that?! (...surely, it would be more effective if I did not make aware you, the reader, of the situation, but whatevs).
Take care.
-L
P.S.: It goes without saying, but don't bother commenting on this page right now; I might move this stuff somewhere else after the day's end...
