For the coming weeks worth of Saturday features, we were hoping for a certain information about Yellow Version to be announced in the latest Taiko Team broadcast, but due to said detail not being revealed yet, I'm forced to delay this set of features for the time being...
So, for our quick replacement... Another big worldwide mobile gaming release has taken place a few days ago, right? Let's pick a track who gained huge smartphone popularity, then.
Anzu no Uta (あんずのうた) THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (163) | x5 (276) | x6 (376/410) | x7 (484/526) |
Taiko 0 R
195
none
???Advanted route Oni video
Over the last years, we've seen songs from mobile games of different genres: puzzle/RPGs, checkered-boards RPG, physics-based action title... these definitions sound exciting enough on paper, but what about something that is based upon being lazy? Surprisingly enough, that has been the motif behind the porting of one of the first boss tracks in a game of the iDOLM@STER series!
Originally launched on April 18th, 2012 for Columbia's THE IDOLM@STER CINDERELLA MASTER 002 Futaba Anzu mini-album, Anzu no Uta (lit. Anzu's Song) is the image track of the Cute-typed idol that gives the name to the song itself: Anzu Futaba, a 17-years old slacking idol who doesn't believe in work. Her image song alone is enough to get the blonde girl's aspiration, as Anzu hopes to live off the idol royalty gains alone so that she can live her happy, work-less NEET life with Anime series, videogames and candy a-plenty! Anzu is dubbed by voice actress Hiromi Igarashi (五十嵐裕美), while her image song is composed and arranged by Sato Takafumi (佐藤貴文), who also wrote its lyrics together with recurring iM@S series contributor Yuta Yashiro (八城雄太).
From the mini-album's debut, Anzu no Uta has been made playable in the PS3 title THE iDOLM@STER ONE FOR ALL as a rival-only DLC song with Anzu, but the real kicker for the track in iM@S lore has been its appearance in Starlight Stage (one of the Cinderella Girls sub-series's smartphone-oriented music game), where it became one of the game's earliest unlockable PRO boss tracks (link). For such a difficulty pedigree from Starlight Stage, however, its porting into the Taiko series goes for the average-difficulty road, as notecharter Arihotto (アリーホット) relied more on repeated single notes/cluster note triplets to better convey Anzu's uneasiness while telling her latest lazy dream in song form. Don't forget those Big Note-activated Go-Go Time bursts, too!
It's also a charting first for the GM genre, however, as Anzu no Uta is the first Taiko track of the genre (and 5th overall, right behind Mada Saitama 2000) to feature forked paths in all the difficulties! While this is one of the fixed-path chart families in the series for the most part, not hitting anything during the very last drumroll will fix the rest of the play into the Advanced notechart portion, where the otherwise-silent track has now Kat notes for every stanza-defining white bar and the final portion's clusters are slightly more aggressive than the regular Advanced route's. According to Arihotto himself for his Notecharter Interview blog entry, his original plan was to have a chart where all notes just vanished out of thin air as the white bars came closer, but due to another Taiko Team member opposing to the idea due to technical limitations, he settled down into splitting the original project into the two different forked entries.
----------------------------------------------
We're done for this week, but don't forget to check out our revisited Song of the Week feature about Donko's First Date, now geared with additional trivia for its newly-made Ura Oni. We also added the Inscrutable Battle bits of trivia in this previously-released Song of the Week page.
