Today's guest star on our weekly feature set is t+pazolite! Find out with us the artist's rhythm gaming origins with his first transplanted-to-Taiko hit as well as his most popular Namco Original to date.
Garakuta Doll Play t+pazolite / maimai| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (190) | x6 (419) | x8 (570) | x9 (750) |
Taiko 0 K
256
none
???The coming of the works by Tomoyuki 't+pazolite' Hamada (浜田知幸) into Taiko no Tatsujin titles has started by the modern Holy Grail of music game cross-over arcade events: the first edition of the Tenkaichi Otogesai, whose Area Qualification phase has seen the sharing of one proprietary boss song with the arcade music games of the other 3 participating companies, and t+pazolite's Garakuta (Japanese wording ガラク; stands for crap/trashy) filled up the slot for Sega's maimai music series.
Originally released on July 11th, 2012, this music arcade series is played with a vertical cockpit, highlighted by a circular touchscreen and six physical buttons by its sides; according to the markers coming from the center to the sides, the player has to tap/slide across either the touchscreen or the buttons to properly hit said markers. Over 10 versions of the game have been released as different firmwares to play with across its lifespan, the latest of which (maimai MiLK) was launched on December 7th last year. Across the years, the arcade series has also been localized in Chinese (for mainland China) and English (for Indonesia and Singapore), with location test being proposed for arcade-related circuits in the USA as well.
Since its debut on maimai GreeN, the Sega series' third main firmware, Garakuta Doll Play's legacy has expanded as a result to its involvment to the Tenkaichi Otogesai tournament series, being ported for its first edition in the Taiko, Groove Coaster and jubeat series, debuting in the Synchronica and SOUND VOLTEX series the year after and finally appearing in Sega's CHUNITHM with the 4th edition of the yearly tournament. Additional difficulty levels were also added to the song as years-later updates, with SOUND VOLTEX's Heaven mode treatment (link) and five different Utage mode variants for maimai, as part of last year's April Fools Day pranks for the series. Years pass by, and Garakuta Doll Play got a port to the iOS game NeonFM (link), as well as the kinda-sorta sequel song QZKago Requiem for the 1st-line maimai series' very last firmware version.
The song got a full version release in 2015's Ponko2 Girlish album, which also featured a remix of the same song by famed Vocaloid producer sasakure.UK, resulting in the so-dubbed 'sasakure.UK clutter remix'. Said track arrangement was also featured in the CHUNITHM series as a playable track (link), actually predating the series debut of the original Garakuta Doll Play in this series!
Notechart-wise, the Taiko venture of Garakuta Doll Play can be best described as the Game Music take on the Swan Lake classic arrangement, as the main difficulty treat is given by the aggressive base BPM value, making precise hits on its single note/cluster formation quite a challenge for the uninitiated. Being mostly a single-note blend, though, it's still possible to run through with no weary hurdles.
Garakuta Doll Play t+pazolite / maimai| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | - | - | - | x10 (715) |
| All (2P) | - | - | - | x10 (526/516) (video) |
Taiko 0 K 256 none ???Just like the original boss-song transplant trio from the first Tenkaichi Otogesai, Garakuta Doll Play comes in town with an additional difficulty setting to boot, courtesy of the same Notechart Sentai that handled the base KFMO set: Shika@ni～sanし(か@に～さん). Clusters are now a more frequent and relevant threat to face, combined with the more intricate hand-switching note formations overall and the same scrolling speed variations that are also featured in the main modes. Don't forget all these special notes, too!
This is also the only one of the original Tenkaichi Otogesai transplants to come with custom 2-player notecharts, accessible by selecting Garakuta Doll Play's Ura Oni with another fellow donder.
!!!Chaos Time!!! (!!!カオスタイム!!! ) t+pazolite| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x5 (266) | x7 (342) | x8 (612) | x10 (987) |
Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko PS4 155-290 none ???When Youtube recordings of a music game song manage to surpass the 1-million-view milestone (such as the embedded video above), you just know that a song has made it into high-series popularity. That is the very case of t+pazolite's second Namco Original song, bringing all sorts of shenanigans and hilarity after its coming!
The infamous final Namco Original addition to the Murasaki Version firmware, !!!Chaos Time!!! has made quite a legacy of its own that mainly lies to two factors that go beyond the song alone as-it-is: its visually-mindscrewing Oni mode and the song's many uses after its playable debut. In fact, crazy improv dances from the Taiko Team have become quite a staple ending to the more recent Taiko Team livestreams, with the hosts and the (eventual) guests raving with either the original song or some kind of variation of it, like the so-dubbed 'Super Chaos Time' (スーパーカオスタイム) by Masubuchi Yuji, which later on got referenced as one of the unlockable titles for the arcade Taiko branch.
Always from Bandai Namco, there's also an 'official' choreography of !!!Chaos Time!!! on Youtube (link), performed by members of the COJIRASE the trip UNIT. This also happens to be one of the most recent Namco Original songs to be featured in a Bandai Namco-published album, with the event-limited AkeOme!!!+SotsuOme album from 2016.
From its creator, however, !!!Chaos Time!!! was recently extended as the 'Uncut Ed!t!on' by t+pazolite himself, for his late-2017 album Good Evening, HOLLOWood. The same album release also features a song remix by HARDCORE TANO*C label newcomer artist Rei 'Kobaryo' Furuba (古葉玲), birthing the so-dubbed 'Kobaryo's FTN-Remix'. Also in 2017, the original song got its first playable console porting in the series, as part of Session de Dodon ga Don's DLC plans.
If your Donkama 2000 Oni flashbacks still give you troubles having a nice and sound sleep at night, Chaos Time's Oni trial will make sure that your reading skills are awake in a never-ending nightmare! The multiple BPM and scrolling shifts crafted by Etou, the current Taiko Team leader, are the show-stealer on the difficulty spectrum for obvious reasons (especially for the song's first half), but the average intricacy of the notechart itself will pave its way to a quite difficult execution on arcades, even for those who'll learn by heart each and every note placement.
