Namco has been known to relay secret messages through songs and games (mostly through Soroban 2000), but Mata Saitama 2000 is taking it to a whole new level. It's like The Da Vinci Code in musical form and reduced to three minutes long.
Mata Saitama 2000 is a celebration of the entire line of 2000 songs featuring 'Saitama' in their names, and have multiple references to them, not in the least all the familiar note patterns from the previous songs, but at a higher speed. And that's just for fanservice. For the downright obsessed, there are tons of hidden messages to wade through. Because all this stuff would be really lengthy if put on the series page, I've decided to relegate Mata Saitama 2000's hidden messages to a separate page. There are three secrets in the song (discovered so far), and I'll arrange them in order of difficulty to crack. The last one is seriously a kicker.
1. Phone conversation
In the middle of the song, while the trademark notes of Saitama and Kita Saitama 2000 are being played, a person can be heard talking over the phone. The person introduces himself as Linda AI-CUE, who was going on a trip to Saitama. Again.
えー ワタクシー
正直、今回のお仕事をいただくまで 川越が埼玉県だということをうっかり失念しておりました。
Linda AI-CUEです。
埼玉県の三代銘菓といえば、草加のお煎餅、熊谷の五家宝、そして川越の芋菓子
When translated to English:
"Hey, it's me.
Frankly, my job this time was to go to Kawagoe City in Saitama but then, I totally forgot about it.
I'm Linda AI-CUE by the way.
The three special snacks of Saitama Prefecture are, rice cookies from Souka City, gokabou sweets from Kumaya City, and yam candy from Kawagoe City."
This and a few lines from the (still unofficial) lyrics also make it obvious that the focus in Mata Saitama's jumble of different sounds are the special food items that can be found in the prefecture, instead of simply its geographical structure and location like in Kita Saitama. Linda AI-CUE being on the line also gives away the fact that he had a hand in making the song, even though he said he would abstain from the series after Hataraku 2000.
2. Note pattern
The row of clusters right after the second rest of Mata Saitama is very very frustrating to clear, isn't it? 7 don notes, 4 don notes, 6, 2, 5. Makes for some frantic hand-switching, or rather, button mashing. At first it may not seem like much, but what if we were to change the order a little? This was a keen observation by Japanese players at 2chan and found by crystalsuicune.
Put the numbers side by side. Try as you might, you won't be able to spell anything out of it.
Na Shi/Yo Mu/Ro Ni Go/Ko
7 4 6 2 5
Now alternate them between two different rows...
7 6 5
4 2
....and suddenly it makes sense. 765 is obviously Namco (ナムコ), while 42 is spelled out as 'Shi ni' (死に). 'ナムコ死に' to put it bluntly, means 'Death to Namco'. Say what? A death threat against the publisher/developer in a song from a game it made? It doesn't make any sense, but that doesn't make it any less eerie. Ojima (the notecharter), what are you thinking up there?
This is the second note cluster message Namco has made after Joubutsu 2000 (37564), and both are similarly death-related.
EDIT: After confirmation, the streams are actually 7 4 2 6 2 5, with a 2 in the middle invading on an otherwise perfect alignment of letters. Oh well.
3. Phone dialing sounds
This is the kicker I was talking about. While the phone conversation above is going on and for a little while longer, you can also clearly hear the sound of someone frantically dialing numbers on a phone keypad. You might not be able to hear them on today's smartphones, but each time you press a number on an older model cellphone or a home telephone, you can hear a characteristic sound, differing by pitch horizontally and by intensity vertically, creating twelve different sounds from 1 to #.
A Taiwanese gamer managed to pick out exactly which numbers were being dialed (which is no mean feat as they were being dialed so quickly) and put his decoded results on forums and Nicovideo. It turns out that the numbers weren't just random sounds added to the song for the sake of creating rhythm, but had actual messages behind them, believe it or not.
During Saitama notes
0421 0404 0431 0462
0531 0557 0575 0542
0406 0462 0404 0466 0446
Kita Saitama notes
0421 0404 0431 0462
0462 0428 0475 0442
0462 0412 0404 0466 0446
After slight break
*76 *105 *110 *100 *97 0447
0413 0471 0406 0466
0428 0435 0419 0406 0433 0471 0406
0462 0431 0421 0404 0431 0462 *50 *48 *48 *48
All the numbers are separated into units of 3 and 4 and each unit is a letter using GB2312 encoding, which is mainly used for Chinese letters in software to maintain compatibility with the universal ASCII but also have Japanese hiragana, katakana, English letters and numbers.
I'm not a master of hex values and I don't know what every bit means from 0 to F, but according to the code:
Spoiler:
Therefore, the messages are:
0421 0404 0431 0462 さいたま (Saitama)
0531 0557 0575 0542 タベルナ (Taberuna- Don't eat)
0406 0462 0404 0466 0446 うまいもの (Umaimono- Delicious things)
0421 0404 0431 0462 さいたま (Saitama)
0462 0428 0475 0442 まぜるな (Mazeruna- Don't confuse with)
0462 0412 0404 0466 0446 まがいもの (Magaimono- Counterfeits)
*76 *105 *110 *100 *97 0447 Lindaは (Linda wa)
0413 0471 0406 0466 きょうも (Kyou mo)
0428 0435 0419 0406 0433 0471 0406 ぜっこうちょ (Zekkouchou)
^ Linda wa Kyou mo Zekkouchou is the name of the nerdy Namco Original song from Taiko 10 and revived in PSP DX.
0462 0431 0421 0404 0431 0462 *50 *48 *48 *48 またさいたま2000 (Mata Saitama 2000)
Seems pretty random, however. Personally I think these are there for the hardcore to find out for themselves and nothing more. Still, the fact that so many tiny details within the 3 minutes of the song actually bear meaning....it gets me excited for what else Namco will come up with in the future.
