Today's theme is suggested from the chatbox some time back; we're doing a feature on trains this week! Two J-Pop songs with references to trains in this one.
TRAIN-TRAIN The Blue Hearts --- Old ---| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taiko 4, 5 | x4 (237) | x3 (358) | x5 (439) | x7 (529) |
| Taiko 6, Taiko PS2 2 | x4 (237) | x4 (358) | x5 (439) | x7 (529) |
Taiko 4 to 6, Taiko PS2 2, CD Blue
166~195
none
train TRAIN-TRAIN The Blue Hearts --- New ---| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taiko 7 to 9 | x4 (237) | x4 (358) | x5 (439) | x6 (529) |
| Taiko PSP 1 | x2 (237) | x4 (358) | x5 (439) | x6 (529) |
| Taiko 10-14, Taiko PSP DX, Wii 1, iOS | x4 (237) | x5 (358) | x5 (439) | x6 (529) |
| Taiko 0 | x4 (237) | x5 (358) | x4 (439) | x5 (529) |
Taiko 7 to 14, Taiko 0 to 0 R, Taiko PSP 1, DX, Taiko Wii 1, Taiko iOS 166~195 none trainIt's The Blue Hearts once again on our Saturday feature! Released on November 23th, 1988, Train-Train was the fifth single of the 80's Japanese punk rock band, which is still an old-school favourite in jukeboxes and rhythm games, together with Linda Linda. Train-Train is also the name of their third album, released on the same day of the single, but both versions of the song are slightly different.
As we saw last time on Rinda Rinda's backstory, Japan loved the musical experiments done by The Blue Hearts, whose unconventional lyrics and behavior led to some amount of controversy, like using an old Japanese taboo word for 'crazy' in some of their songs and spitting on television cameras during an interview. Despite that, everyone loved it and their songs were features in a lot of TV shows; the drama show High School Rakugaki (はいすくーる落書), for example, featured Train-Train as one of their opening themes.
While The Blue Hearts' songs are still in everyone's hearts, not everyone knows what its main members did after the band dissolved in 1995. The band's main guitarist Masatoshi Mashima (真島昌利) has founded another punk rock band together with the vocalist Hiroto Komoto (甲本 ヒロ), named The High-Lows. This new band - which has lasted for ten years, from 1995 to 2005 - often featured bassist Mikio Shirai (白井幹夫) for the band's concerts, in memory of the Blue Hearts. On 2005, Mashima and Komoto came back to the scenes with another band, named The Cro-Magnons, which is still in activity.
Train-Train shows lots of similarities with Rinda Rinda, both in musical and gameplay terms in Taiko games. Both songs start off calm and slow then ramp up the BPM for the rest of the song, though Train-Train's BPM shift is nowhere near as drastic. Both songs are still in the arcade and continue to be popular songs in J-Pop, with regular inclusions in console Taiko. Even the pattern styles are pretty similar, with Train-Train's Oni mode more focused on d-k-d-k spacing and regular, single-color clusters. The only thing Rinda Rinda has that Train Train doesn't is a 2 player notechart.
The notecounts between the old and new versions are the same, so why separate them? Listen closely to both; the music is different, despite the patterns, difficulty and total notecount being exactly identical!
GALAXY EXPRESS 999 Ginga Tetsudou 999 movie| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (166) | x3 (210) | x3 (326) | x6 (539) |
Taiko 7, Taiko Anime2 143 none ginga Galaxy Express 999 (銀河鉄道999) EXILE| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taiko 12 to 14, Taiko Wii 1 | x4 (116) | x5 (168) | x6 (371,313,279) | x6 (403) |
| Taiko 0 onwards | x3 (116) | x5 (168) | x5 (371,313,279) | x6 (403) |
Taiko 12, 14, 0, Taiko 0, Taiko Wii 1 128 none gng999I'm sure everybody expected Galaxy Express 999 for the Train week, so today I'll feature both of them! But first, as usual, here's a rapid back-story of the anime which features these songs.
The 1978 anime Galaxy Express 999 (or Ginga Tetsudou 999, if you prefer) is based on the 1977 shōnen manga series written by Uchuu Senkan Yamato's creator, Reiji Matsumoto (松本零士). It has a space setting, in a high-tech future in which humans have learned how to transfer their minds (but not their emotions) into mechanical bodies, thus achieving practical immortality. Like for many other manga of this genre, Galaxy Express 999 deeply explores his characters' attitude and development. The series also featured some cameo characters from older manga series made by Matsumoto, like Captain Harlock.
A 12 year old human kid named Tetsuro Hoshino (鉄郎星野) desperately wants one of these indestructible machine bodies for himself, giving him the ability to live forever and have the freedom that the unmechanized don't have. While normally machine bodies are impossibly expensive, they are supposedly given away for free on Planet Prometheum in the Andromeda galaxy, the end of the line for the space train Galaxy Express 999 (pronounced 'three-nine', not 'nine nine nine'), which only comes to Earth once a year. Thanks to the unlimited use pass gifted by Maetel (メーテル) - a mysterious blonde woman and Tetsuro's travelmate - the boy is able to afford the trip and to fulfill his wish, exploring a lot of different worlds on the way.
Both the anime and the original manga were awarded with prestigious prizes, the former with the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize (1981) and the latter with the Shogakukan Manga Award (1978). Consequentially, several films and additional manga series and OVAs have been made. One of those films, Bonjour Galaxy Express 999, features the anime show's main theme (the movie version) by Japanese rock band Godiego. This version has been made playable in a few Taiko games. After Taiko 7, it was replaced with a cover by Japanese band EXILE, with completely different note patterns from the original.
On Taiko, both versions share the same chart style of dense cluster sections, dense enough to be rated as good 6* songs, with a kat stream being the main combobreaker in the beginning of the Exile version. While the Godiego cover is faster and mostly features 3-hit clusters, the one by EXILE has a slower pace and different cluster lengths.
