This is quite the first for our weekly feature corner, as it's the first time we're going to have two versions of this Song of the Week entry!
If you happen to be an arcade Taiko player from general Asia areas, click here for our special version of this feature; the regular-format article is after the jump, as usual.
Sword Battlers (ソードバトラーズ)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (142) | x6 (203) | x6 (313) | x7 (414) |
Taiko 0.5, Taiko Wii 5, Taiko +, CD CC-2
150
none
chinas...yeah yeah, I couldn't restrain myself from un-earthing Internet vintage memes for this particular song feature's introduction, but how could I? After all, general Asia Taiko players have already got used to get Rickroll'd by this song on Taiko HD firmwares for quite a long time by now!
Premiered under the Codename KATSU-DON arcade firmware as the second Don Challenge-debuting song, the full-instrumental Sword Battlers has become quite infamous due to the fact of being the only Don Challenge song that didn't make it to be distributed to non-Japanese Taiko HD arcades, a trend that still lives on to this day with the ongoing Blue Version. Thanks to its album release on 2018's Yaki-toumokoroshi soundtrack, we finally know who made this song!
Sword Battlers's composer is the nick-named Mitchie M (short for 'Mitchiell Mitchie'), a Vocaloid song producer in activity since July 2011. Also known as Tucada, his musical career started in high school as a member of a song cover-making band, an experience that lead him over the years on the creation of Vocaloid songs with a distinctive flair: the realistic tuning of the chosen digital singer's voice (mostly Hatsune Miku). Most of Mitchie M's songs made it to the Hall of Fame with over 200k views on video streaming websites, including his 2011 hit Freely Connection which was also his first Hall of Legend song. With this very post being a Taiko blog feature, it's extra topical to talk about Freely Connection some more, as we've already spotted its lyrics co-writer (the nick-named ЯIRE) in another Namco Original of which we talked about last month (link)!
Aside from the 1/12 note clusters punctuating key points before the chorus, Sword Battlers's Oni chart is primarily a regular 4-beats-tempo affair with small note clusters and generous pause portions scattered all over the way to the song's end, with some special drumroll-affine note markers in the mix.
Sword Battlers (ソードバトラーズ)| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | - | - | - | x9 (604) |
Taiko 0.5, Taiko Wii 5, Taiko + 150 none ???Available since its debut, Sword Battlers's Ura Oni variant is more akin to the spirit of modern medium-to-hard Oni trials, with several note cluster hybrids of different timing signatures to add that burst of note density in focal points of a chart that could be otherwise labeled as a slower alternative to Metal Police's Ura Oni mode.
