After a calm news week on the Taiko front, it's time for another weekly review! Today the spotlight is on a very rare, yet new, Game Music song.
CHAOS RINGS| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (129) | x4 (178) | x6 (330) | x7 (465) |
Taiko +
108~143
none
chaosrTogether with the Sonic 4 medley, the special Game Music pack given out to Taiko iOS on April 2011 includes this little exclusive. Despite the title containing the word 'rings' though, don't be fooled, it's actually not another Sonic song!
The actual game, Chaos Rings (ケイオスリングス) was released a year prior to the song pack, and is a Role-Playing Game (RPG) developed by Media.Vision and published by Square Enix for Apple's multimedia devices and later for Android. The game takes place in a mysterious place known as Ark Arena, where participants face enemies in both dungeons and tournament-play to avoid death and gain immortality. This dungeon-crawler experience is undergone by up to four teams of two men each, who can perform unique co-op moves with the unique 'break' feature. A prequel, Chaos Rings Omega was released in 2011 and a sequel is currently on the works, proof of how well the game did on the mobile platform (and proof that there is a market for iPhone games not named Angry Birds).
Taiko +'s CHAOS RINGS is an extract of the portable RPG's main theme, and it's the first Square Enix-related song in Taiko that doesn't involve the Dragon Quest saga. Like every other BGM in the game, the main theme is composed by Noriyasu Agematsu (上松範康), the founding member of the Japanese group Elements Garden, known in Japan for composing anime and videogame tunes.
The song is powerful-sounding, which can easily call to mind the Soul Calibur songs. Chaos Rings is accompanied in Taiko by easy single-color clusters, and by Taiko 0's standard should be a 6* rather than its current Oni rating. But CHAOS RINGS's most remarkable feature lies in its speed: the song's BPM changes in nearly every beat stanza, reaching an impressive total of 79 times!
