As macabre as this tradition may sound, we are called up (once again) to prepare the burial grounds to yet another licensed song that is going to be removed from its arcade grounds, with no other ports in other Taiko games to take the spoils after the White Version removal.
This time around, the trend is coupled with another returning feature: copyright-dodging audio distortion magic!
FUTURE FISH Free! -Eternal Summer-| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (133) | x5 (190) | x5 (271) | x6 (358) |
Taiko 0 K to 0 W
163
none
???Between the first Wii U game and Taiko Kimidori's launch, 3rd generation Taiko games' Anime genre has carefully started to feature themes from sports-related Anime series, a topic already digressed in many Japanese manga/animation series in the past decades but never really hitting the bulls-eye on rhythm game grounds. Among the first tracks we have FUTURE FISH, a quite fitting title considering that it comes from an Anime about swimming!
The Slice of Life Anime Free! is quite the rare breed of Japanese animation, as it's one of the few ones where the literary work from which it originates doesn't share the Anime's title! In fact, this is a series spawn from the 2011 light novel High Speed! (ハイ☆スピード!), written by the pen-named Kōji Ōji (おおじ こうじ). The light novel is about the story of four long-date classmates -Haruka, Makoto, Nagisa and Rin- who met each other upon winning a swimming tournament right before their elementary school graduation. Years later, the four boys are reunited around their high school period and decide to open a swimming club for the institute, with the group working day after day on the precarious balance between gaining fame for the club and clearing unsolved accounts between the boys.
After getting an honorable mention at the 2nd Kyoto Animation Award contest in 2011, the High Speed! novel became the source material of a couple of Anime series that ran between 2013 and 2014, with the original light novel being commercially available to buy on June 8th in 2013 (5 days before the first Anime series' premiere). Following the Anime's success (and North American localizations by the hands of 4 different companies!), the universe of Free! got expanded with an OVA and a movie in 2015, as well as a proper sequel to the High Speed! light novel.
FUTURE FISH is the ending theme of Free!'s 2nd season, Eternal Summer. Under the fictional name of STYLISH FIVE, the show's main characters are the actual singers of the song, featuring the dubbing talents of Nobunaga Shimazaki (島﨑信長), Tatsuhisa Suzuki (鈴木達央), Miyano Mamoru (宮野真守), Tsubasa Yonaga (代永翼) and Daisuke Hirakawa (平川大輔). Replacing the Japanese dubber of Gou Matsuoka in the show Akeno Watanabe (渡辺明乃) for this ending theme, Miyano Mamoru has also been heard on Taiko grounds as one of the main singers for Maji LOVE 2000%.
Diving into FUTURE FISH's Oni chart, the 6-star quota is fulfilled with an array of mono-color clusters and hit-balloons under a BPM dangerously lingering into high speed material, while still being fit enough to break note sections with no sweat. This is also one of the songs where the Go-Go Time portion outlasts the regularly-paced sections in time length!
