Made By You: Date A Live and more

First Made By You of the year and we're clearing some backlog from last year's unfeatured maps! Rest assured, we notice (almost) every submission, and if you find yours not on this space, feel free to remind us at the end.

Today's first feature is by Dary16 from our blog's chatbox, who has made a Taiko chart for the opening of the Date A Live anime, simply titled 'Date A Live'. The anime began as a light novel series and is about the world being threatened by a series of mysterious disasters called "spacequakes" caused by beings called Spirits. A schoolboy finds one such Spirit at the site of a spacequake and learns that in order to stop their power, he has to kiss the Spirit after making her fall in love with him. Hence the title of the story!

The opening song is bleak and tense, performed by a group named Sweet Arms, a union of four different Japanese female vocalists. The first half of this Taiko chart adaptation may seem easy at the beginning, and resembles a 7* Oni in the newer standard instead of 8*, but the ending is sufficiently busy enough to earn it that star. The notes are simple and intuitive, with repeating patterns typical of something the authentic charts would be like.



This next one was just placed on our chatbox casually; TensaiKashou didn't even expect this to be featured, and there isn't even a download link to play it, but here it is anyway. This is not Taikojiro, by the way; it's a different software which pops up every now and then but we have not elicited its name yet.

The song is a self-made chiptune song just named 'Be', with crazy high speed and even crazier note patterns, almost to the point of being completely unplayable yet make sense when you listen to it. Scroll troll is everywhere, along with note streams so dense you swear they were all 1/32 notes. Sort of a 'proof of concept' chart, but if you do ever get to play this, it isn't for the faint of heart.



Back in Taikojiro, we got another one of Lee Jia Yi's many Madoka Magica charts, this time from the Japan-exclusive MMO game based on the anime, Madoka Magica Online. It's a 4 minute long BGM for the boss battle of Walpurgisnacht, the final, most powerful witch in almost all Madoka Magica storylines, including both anime and game. It starts extremely slow, then speeds up to a high BPM with tense music and loads of note clusters and streams. There isn't much rest in the song; the challenging pace is maintained for the whole four minutes and there are more than 1000 notes in it. Are you up for it?



Two months ago we briefly mentioned the Project 4 Awesome in which osu!taiko mapper tetsutaro was taking part in by making a whole bunch of charts. And made them he did; this is just one of many, using a song composed by Packer, no less. Terminal 110 is a slow-paced piano solo, and the discrete piano notes transfer very well into long note streams in Taiko, like several authentic Classic genre charts before it (La Campanella comes to mind).

There are tons of long note streams which demand a lot of concentration to fully comprehend and hit, especially because of their erratic nature, which follows the high/low notes of the piano. A lot of handswitch technique is required, but the speed is low enough for most people to keep one finger on Don and the other on Kat all the way through!



Lastly, crystalsuicune returns with another Taiko chart made for a godtier-level difficulty Bemani song from beatmania IIDX. This time it's Ganymede, another one of the four Cardinal Gate songs on beatmania IIDX 13. We've featured one of them before (Kachoufuusetsu), also charted by crystal. Ganymede's artist is Genbu (alias for Jun Wakita). Ganymede can refer to several things; it is the name of the most beautiful mortal ever in Greek mythology, the name of one of Jupiter's moons, and the song is extremely slow, lonely and sad. Genbu is the name of a turtle Chinese god, and the slowness of the song reflects that.

The composer intended for this to be an extremely difficult song even though it's slow, and it succeeds at challenging players to read notes through the excruciatingly slow scroll. Even in Taiko, slow scroll can be a problem (as shown in DEBSTEP!) and this is about as hard to read, except without the crazy rhythm shifts. However, the scroll is still sufficiently fast enough and the notes dense enough to put a lot of pressure on sightreading players. It gets worse with stream after stream past the midpoint, and to rub it in even more, the scroll speed goes even lower. Quite a grand experiment, if you ask me.