Future song time! Our first sneak peek into Momoiro's new songs comes in the form of one of the newest Anime licenses.
Maji LOVE 2000% (マジLOVE 2000%) Uta no Prince-sama: Maji Love 2000%| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (109) | x5 (144) | x5 (225) | x8 (426) |
Taiko 0 M to 0 R
141
none
mlov2k(video processed to bypass muting)
It may sound strange for a lot of Westerners here, but a lot of Anime shows are adapted from visual novels, whose stories are told either in a book or a videogame. This particular one came from a game.
Uta no Prince-sama (うたの☆プリンスさまっ♪, lit. 'Princes of Song'), began its life released for PSP on June 2010. The story revolves around Haruka Nanami (七海 春歌), fresh-woman of a prestigious performing arts called Saotome Academy. In order to graduate and begin her musical career under the Shining Agency, she has to pass both the exams and the final test, where she is paired up with a male student of said academy in order to perform a newly-made song, where the female is the idol and the male is the composer.
That's where the player comes in; by following one of the many plot lines of the game, Haruka has to choose one of the seven boys through several choices and minigames, while avoiding being romantically involved with any of them as it's strictly forbidden by the academy's rules. Of course, every choice made and score during the minigames will result in multiple endings,a pattern for most visual novels.
This first game's success quickly resulted in the creation of a proper franchise, spawning seven other games to date, with the latest one -Uta no☆Prince-sama♪ MUSIC 2 (うたの☆プリンスさまっ♪ MUSIC 2)- being released on September this year. Drama/Music CDs, fanbooks and three manga series shortly followed the first PSP game's success, as well as the creation of the aforementioned anime show, currently counting two seasons (Maji Love 1000% and Maji Love 2000%), with the third one being announced for the year 2015.
All of the anime's music was made by a Japanese group of composers called Elements Garder, with Noriyasu Agematsu (上松範康) as the main composer and five other people working on the single songs' lyrics and overall arrangement. In particular, today's song was composed and lyricized by Noriyasu, while Hoshimi Iwahashi is the song's arranger. Like many of the series' songs, Maji LOVE 2000% is sung by actual voice actors from the show, in this case by the seven boys of the ST☆RISH group.
Before its debut to the Taiko scene, this song has been featured in other Bemani-related arcade games earlier in the year, from jubeat saucer to DanceEvolution Arcade and pop'n music sunny park. All these versions and the Taiko cut of the ED share one big difference from the original song: all the shouting and screaming included into Maji LOVE 2000%'s original version have been cut in order to make the song playable and enjoyable to play in the various rhythm games, while still keeping the original lyrics and main singers intact.
On Taiko grounds, this is one of the many many new 8-and-upper Oni challenges that have been introduced on the Momoiro Version of the current arcade brand, featuring some of the newest gimmick staples that lablel the modern 8* range: a good mix between 1/16 and 1/24 note clusters, in order to make the whole experience a little bit spicer than usual.
It's also interesting to notice how the notecharter of this song really loved to enphasize the rtrack several times with a peculiar usage of Go-Go Time sections! Much like with the equally-new Vocaloid tune Yi-er Fanclub, Maji LOVE 2000% features a lot of very short Go-Go Time sections all along the song, rather having some long sections as usual. Hell, some of the Go-Go Time fragments even start or end in the middle of a time stanza, instead of its beginning!
