Song of the Week! 21 September 2019

It's future song peek time.
Boy, how nice it is to have some low-hanging fruit to talk about, from time to time! *wink*

 MEGALOVANIA UNDERTALE

Version
All	x4 (183)	x5 (225)	x7 (390)	x9 (664)

 Taiko 0 PS4, Taiko Switch
 240
 none
 udtmgl


While we are used to cover some of the more Japan-spread media and artists under our Saturday feature, often times the series' catalogue branches to works that are easily far more widespread in the Western countries. The latest DLC announcements for both current console Taiko games is a testament to that sentiment, with the porting of tracks from the indie RPG game UNDERTALE.

Originally launched on PC on September 15th, 2015 as the result of a succesfully-crowdfunded Kickstarter campaign, this is an RPG game where players take the control of a child who falls into the Underground, a land inhabitated by monsters and separated from Earth's surface through a magic barrier. On his quest to return to the surface, the player's choices -mainly, the choice of defeating or sparing the lingering opponents- will affect the turn of the story, with the bulk of the combat mechanics mixing regular RPG menu navigation and reactionary battle commands, with timed inputs for damage-dealing purposes and defensive passages where the player's heart-shaped cursor has to be moved on a field in order to dodge the enemies' attacks. Since its release, the game has been ported to Mac OS X and Linux, as well as modern consoles (PS4, PS Vita and Nintendo Switch), with a sequel game -titled Deltarune- being currently in the works.

With the exception of the sprite/art work, which was mainly created by a slew of external artists, UNDERTALE is a one-man gig for what concerns the game's creation, coding and music. Its main creator, going under the art name of Toby Fox, has used his appreciation for selected videogame series for the creation of this game, primarily including the SNES cold hit RPG Earthbound, for which he started making custom rom hacks as an active member of the fan-driven Earthbound online website Starmen.net. The origins of the song MEGALOVANIA, the boss theme for the jacket-wearing skeleton Sans, are rooted in one of these rom hacks: "Radiation's Halloween Hack", made in 2008 for an Halloween fun hack contest on Starmen.net. By admission of the author himself, the boss theme song Megalomania from the JP-exclusive Square RPG Live-A-Live was originally planned for the hack's final boss theme, which was ultimately scrapped in favor of yelling "whatever [he] felt like into a microphone and copied it down" into an original theme. As a part-time contributor of the web comic series Homestuck, Toby Fox has re-released the song as a guitar-lead piece under the title wording of MeGaLoVania and years later, it came back as the 100th track of his own game's score.

UNDERTALE's reception on the Web has been balloning up over the years, with 2019 being a particularly bountiful one for its content to be crossed over into different gaming outlets, always showcasing the MEGALOVANIA song as its crowning jewel. By now it's no obscure notion to everyone the fact that the song -alongside a Sans full outfit for the Mii Gunner fighter- was released as part of a paid DLC pack for the Nintendo Switch's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but Taiko gaming's inclusion of the iconic song is being seconded by Taito's Groove Coaster series, porting several songs from the game all throughout the past two years. Hell, if you take a look at this video recording of MEGALOVANIA from the arcade line, you'll notice how UNDERTALE elements have been adopted as customizable options for the game... even with Sans as a navigator!

MEGALOVANIA on Taiko has the highest-rated Oni mode among the DLC song lot from the same origin game, but that is not enough to push it into 10-star territory, with a music-notation chart that mostly lends itself to be guided by the song's beats into single-note sections and small clusters. The high BPM speed and a special notes-littered section are definitely something for the player's eye-candy, though!