The Summer season has just begun, with some promising title releases for the Japanese music gaming scene coming in a few weeks for now! Have a double feature to celebrate such a heated climate.
Negai wa Esperanto (願いはエスペラント)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (180) | x6 (292) | x6 (378) | x7 (507) |
Taiko 0 Y, Taiko Switch, Taiko +, CD CC-1
170
none
esperaFor us curating a Taiko blog, it's an imperative to start with a track that is related to the incoming Taiko game for the Nintendo Switch, seeing as we got quite the juicy content leaks from World Hobby Fair attenders in the last weekend. Among those, this very song pops up as well!
One of Yellow Version's very first seasonal Rewards Shop debut tracks, Negai wa Esperanto (lit. 'Wish is Esperanto') is the latest (credited to date) Namco Original in the series to co-star people from the Silver Forest doujin circle. JBG Music Academy artist and Chiheisen no Aeolia co-composer Nozomi Iwase (岩瀬望) is the song's composer/arranger, with the nick-named Aki (アキ) of Yami no Mahou Shoujo fame being the singer. According to a Silver Forest tweet reply to the song's official announcement (link), it appears that Negai wa Esperanto was sent to the Bandai Namco headquarters on November last year, much to the tension of Aki herself as November is also her birthday month!
While not getting any song-subtitle mentions for this Namco Original, Aki is credited with the monicker of 'Aki-tan and Funny Companions' (アキたんと愉快な仲間たち) in Negai wa Esperanto's first official soundtrack release. With the Silver Forest singer having undergone a nickname change on March this year as Nekomori Aki (猫森アキ), who knows if we're going to see this artist again on Taiko grounds with even more nickname changes!
Negai wa Esperanto fares in the average 7* Oni ballpark on the difficulty side, sporting mono-color clusters in a pure 1/16 notechart.
OK I'm blue rat E.G.G.| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (115) | x6 (192) | x8 (411) | x10 (816) |
Taiko 0 Y 128 none ???From Yellow Version's seasonal Rewards Shop lineup down to its very last, our second song feature was picked due to the fact that the Groove Coaster series is going to have a new game for non-arcade players, set to be released worldwide on Steam roughly at the same time of Taiko Switch's launch. Seeing as anything Taito-related on our drumming series has been documented by us in its own song series showcase, the only Groove Coaster-related track we can talk about is a Namco Original from one of its former series directors!
The meta-rhythm-happy OK I'm blue rat is composed by the now-freelance artist Hirokazu 'COSIO' Koshio (小塩広和), signed under the infamous E.G.G. alias (abbreviative for 'Everything Get Groove') which is used in the Groove Coaster series to sign a currently-running 'Got' series of boss songs in Taito's music game. This very Namco Original, in fact, has inherited quite a lot of elements from the song series that started with Got more raves?, from the irregular rhythm structure down to the song itself's English title, whose letters can be scrambled into another sentence that is related to the music game premiering such songs. With the 'Got' songs from Groove Coaster providing anagrams starring the word 'groove', the "OK I'm blue rat" sentence can be scrambled out as 'Taiko rumble', a 2-word label which is also an unlockable title in arcade Taiko gaming, achievable by performing an Oni Full Combo on this very song.
What you're looking at is the current-day 10* Oni song with the lowest base BPM value ever recorded, playing the challenge more akin to the "low-flowing note salad" approach of the Taiko series' roots, splicing in multiple time signatures to make the song a bit tricky to Full Combo in the first attempts, while not being that difficult to be cleared in comparison to other modern top-difficulty charts.
