The addition of rock-styled songs with a max-difficulty notechart seems like a rising trend since last year's Taiko no Tatsujin collaborative efforts involving the INSPION sound company's composers...
Why don't we have a look at the final addition from last year's streak?
Koi-kurenai (濃紅) Daisuke Kurosawa x Kanako Kotera| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (233) | x6 (375) | x7 (564) | x10 (950) |
Taiko 0 Y, CD CC-4
220
none
???While this year's August streak is receiving musical contributions from INSPION only for the final track of the weekly-additions month, we've had the sound company monopolizing the arcade scene on August last year for all the featured top-difficulty newcomers! The last one of the trio, in particular was brought to us by a couple of renowned artists: Daisuke Kurosawa (黒沢大佑) and Kanako Kotera (小寺可南子). While we've already talked about the song's composer in our 'no Ran' Song Series Showcase (link), it's time to further digress on the history of the song's singer.
Born on June 19th, 1982 and granddaughter of renowned Japanese novelist/literature teacher Shouzo Kotera, Kanako Kotera is one of the main vocal performers in games developer company FALCOM's inhouse sound unit: the jdk Band, whose foundation dates back to 2007 as the continuation to the former J.D.K. BAND act. Among her most known credited works as a jdk Band member is her vocal contribution to the songs in the The Legend of Heroes RPG videogame series, as well as the related Anime transpositions for which she was also a voice actress for the side character of Misshii (みっしい).
Taiko no Tatsujin gaming, in fact, can count former cameos by Kanako Kotera in the cumulative song loist record thanks to the collaborative efforts between the PS vita's V Version and FALCOM gaming, with the base-songlist track Ashita e No Kodou and the DLC song Senko no Yukue both starring Kanako as their vocalist. The latter song of this couple was also ported to bemani's now-defunct BeatStream series (link)! Together with Daisuke Kurosawa, Kanako Kotera also made some original songs for other music series under the bemani label: Jiyou -Turn the Page- (from beatmania IIDX), the jubeat/GITADORA tie-in track Just Believe and a trio of GITADORA-debut tracks: Tsuisou -SHINY DAYS-, My Way, My Life and Iro wa Nioedo Chirinuru o (not to be confused with the popular Touhou Project arrange by the same name).
The Oni notechart of Koi-kurenai (lit. 'Deep Red') is one of the few top-difficulty trials in the current rating standard not to feature any 1/24 note placing whatsoever, mostly relying on the naturally-high BPM value of the song and its really dense note sections with tons of small clusters to trick several players into fatigue-induced misses.
