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FREEDOM DiVE↓ xi| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (267) | x6 (316) | x7 (453) | x10 (1024) |
Taiko PS4
222.22
none
???...ok, here's the deal.
Over the past few years, this weekly corner has seen a wide variety of songs, with the musical preferences of whoever writes the weekly features/song series (usually me, Lokamp) not going in the way of supplying an informative background about the featured tracks, its artists' history and its connection(s) with music gaming in general. We are still holding true to this principle until the end of this blog's days, but it wouldn't be fair for our readers to start today without a disclaimer from myself: now that this song has hit the Taiko scene, it has become my most hated inclusion in the entire Taiko no Tatsujin collective tracklist. Bar none. Move over, Tsundere Café whatever song; you're still ear-bleedingly bad to me, but you're out of the hook!
The infamous FREEDOM DiVE↓ was made in 2008 by Daisuke 'xi' Ishiwata, an independent composer of which we've already talked about a couple of years ago, thanks to a four-hands composition that made it into Taiko gaming as a CreoFUGA contest winner (link). This song was the artist's very first made-for-contest track as a BMS (Be-Music Source) submission for 2008's MAXBEAT BMS competition. Later on, the song received a long version for 2011's Parousia -xi's first solo album- as well as a couple of remixed versions of the original: t+pazolite's 'tpz Overcute Remix', released in his 2015 album Don't Waste Me! E.P. and Cosmo@BouSouP's [METAL†DIMENSIONS] remix, headed to xi's 5th solo album (Quietus Ray) in 2018's end.
Freedom Dive's original contest entry (available here) holds record of some insights from the author himself about its creation, reporting how it wasn't actually made for the MAXBEAT contest per-se but was completed for it (as the submission times were really close to the song's completion) and what has led xi to join with this song in particular, as a means to bring up a fast and bright piece to contrast the earlier contest submissions' darker tones. Years later, xi also talked a bit about the BGA video's poster girl -Kurante (くらんて, lit. 'Current')- and her naming scheme ties with the song, as reversing the Japanese spelling will give out 'Tenraku' (てんらく), which means 'Falling' in tone with the song's title.
Freedom Dive is one of the earlier cases in Oriental music gaming of a BMS song's success story through its early porting in later commercial games, leading to mass recognition and even more playable song ports in other music game series. The song's stairway to success started with Rayark's Cytus (link), where the song was featured in one of the last freely-unlocked chapters, gaining up an even more brutal difficulty setting around the game's life span end (link). Always in Rayark fields, the song was ported in VOEZ (link), leading the way to the song's first ports in arcade gaming, with Sega's CHUNITHM and Bemani's SOUND VOLTEX.
Freedom Dive also had some remixed/reworked renditions along the years, with some of these making their way into official music gaming, no less! From xi himself, we got the arranged/alternative version known as Glorious Crown, made for Sega's maimai series (link), while the aforementioned 'tpz Overcute Remix' based on the original FREEDOM DiVE↓ made it to be playable in the same Sega music series (link). Hell, another t+pazolite remix of the just-title-dropped Glorious Crown -here dubbed the 'tpz over-Over-OVERCUTE REMIX'- also made it to become playable song material for Sega music gaming, this time for CHUNITHM (link)! Finally, due to being one of the most voted tracks for the Session de Dodon ga Don/Drum Session DLC survey, the original song made it to become a playable tune in the PS4 game's 17th Donder Pack.
Running under the same BPM value of Namco Original Shiny Kung-fu Revival, FREEDOM DiVE's Taiko Oni mode bears the same stamina aggressiveness of cluster-heavy songs like Sotsu Omeshiki, but with a focus on smaller, mono-color clusters rather than employing more intricate patterns. Across music gaming, the song hasn't failed to bear some reference to the number 2s in its BPM as a total note counter inside joke, and Taiko joins such fray with its 10-star Oni note counter forming a specific power of 2 (1024 = 2^10).
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And with that, I won't have the displeasure to talk about this song ever again here... huh? What's that? A longass white space in the bottom? With a hidden rant? Ptch, what do you mean, there was never such thing!
Of course I've not hid it elsewhere on the blog like I did last year with the April Fools rant to evade the other blog writers' wrath... don't be ridicul-*runs*
