Gather around for the last Ura Oni feature of the year! Be sure to stick around for a little further, today.
Pan vs Gohan! Dai-kessen! (パン vs ごはん！大決戦！) Yuuya Kobayashi (IOSYS) feat. miko & Momiji Yamamoto| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x5 (211) | x7 (294) | x7 (365) | x10 (824/480) |
Taiko 0 B
240-260
none
???Normal Notes chart
Straight outta Blue Version's Winter Rewards Shop outlet, here's a Namco Original that echoes back to many a facet in Namco Original history, down to the recurring artists from Namco Originals of yore: IOSYS composer Yuuya Kobayashi (コバヤシユウヤ) and vocalist Yamamoto Momiji (山本椛) as well as doujin circle Alternative ending's miko as co-vocalist.
As the song's English title translation may hint by, the song's main topic is to establish which edible food between Gohan (=rice) and Pan (=bread) will lead to the most delicious of meals, as the 'decisive battle' from the title is played out in song form by Taiko players to the very last alliteration, a trait that is played out on each of the game modes by placing Kat notes every time 'Pan' is mentioned and Don notes for every 'Gohan' in the lyrics.
The song's Oni mode adds an extra layer of uniqueness to the song, which also echoes back to the series' original score of yester-year. Much like with the Butou songs, there's only a branching point at the start of the song, whose routing outcome is linked on whether or not the player will hit the very first drumroll at all (Master chart) or not (Normal chart). In the latter case, plenty of mono-color clusters and special note markers are to be found; in the former, players will face almost double the amount of notes in a same-color-streak cluster barrage that winks to Koibumi 2000's Oni chart while implementing some nasty tempo changes between 1/16 cluster passages, especially in the dreaded portion right after the 2nd Go-Go Time segment. In either case, be wary of its average speed- 240+ BPM on average is no laughing matter!
Pan vs Gohan! Dai-kessen! (パン vs ごはん！大決戦！) Yuuya Kobayashi (IOSYS) feat. miko & Momiji Yamamoto| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | - | - | - | x10 (824/480) |
Taiko 0 B 240-260 none ???Normal Notes chart
The two-faced Oni challenge has its Ura Oni twin brother, sharing much more than the simultaneous release on the song's launch... Not only they both are 10-star Oni with the forked-paths gameplay gimmick, but both their respective routes' Max Combo values match with their counterpart on the other Oni setting, too!
And so, we're faced with yet another, Butou-flavored small drumroll that seals the notecharting fate of the player; by hitting nothing, the Normal route will lead players in a mixed sea of big notes and small clusters, while drumroll-holic players heading to the Master route will have to deal with 2 and 4-note clusters with 1/24 Don cluster spikes a-la Yozakura Shanikusai Ura, while stayin within the same note total count of the regular Oni for both routes' case.
------------------------------------------------------
Now that we're done with today's regular entry, let's flip the script in favor of... a nice diversion!
In the past days, I've gathered the Taiko Time blog contributors over on our Discord server, asking them for the one tune they'd like the most to see it in official Taiko gaming in the future, assembling quite the "Wish List" that trascends multiple fields in media! For the next few weeks, expect our Saturday corner to have a spoonful of these dearly-desired tunes after our regularly scheduled Taiko pick, talked in great lengths as per Song of the Week tradition.
Let's kick things off with...
MUSIC TO YOUR HEAD SLAKE/beatmania IIDX 144One of earliest followers in our core blog ensemble, Crystalsuicune's wish pick takes us to one of Konami music gaming's crown jewels with bemani's beatmania IIDX series and one of its most prolific artists in its early years: Takehiko 'SLAKE' Fujii (藤井岳彦).
Born July 13th, 1969 in the Kanagawa prefecture's Yokohama, this artist is often reveered as the electro musician who succeeded beatmania series co-creator Reo Nagumo, due to its humble beginnings as a charter to the undying IIDX series's predecessor. Since beatmania 4thMix, he started to make music for some of Konami's oldest series as well under a variety of different aliases (mostly SLAKE) and genres, from techno to trance and R&B. By the artist's own admission, the BPM value of 130 for music-making means is "a comfortable one" for his taste and Native Instruments software has been the most used for his works, applying a more Western-tuned approach to music creation that made him popular overseas as well as lead him to 'never create a song with a name', thus deciding one only once the target work has been finalized. For beatmania IIDX 9th style and 10th style, SLAKE was designed as their sound director, but it's also around that time (end 2003/start 2004) that he left Konami, while still supplying its music series with new works and remixes as an external artist for a number of years. While still being in the music scene as an affiliated artist of of Music Airport Inc., SLAKE's non-musical ambition in life is to study furniture in order to become a furniture artisan himself!
For a quick portfolio of Takeiko Fujii's music gaming works, we can re-iterate his origins for the beatmania line as a composer (SODA, CYCLE among others), following suit to his most-known IIDX music production with many a memorable hit in franchise history, including the infamous GAMBOL which was victim of faulty note recognition programming, for the longest time! We can also count a few tracks of his for the now-defunct KEYBOARDMANIA series (THE 24TH D and Motion), as well as a handful of original pop'n music songs (including SUMMER TIME and MARS WARS 3) and playable remixes of other pre-existing songs in both beatmania and pop'n music series. SLAKE was also called in for a handful of tracks in Capcom's CROSSxBEATS series, including Freak With Me and The Signs Of The Last Day.
It's a long-established habit among bemani music series to spotlight the artist's comments for their own works on the related installment's website, which is where we could hear of SLAKE's impressions while making MUSIC FOR YOUR HEAD for 8th style, its launch version. Starved from techno songs in his portfolio for a few years before making this track, the artist wanted to convey in sound the conglomeration of all the noises that come into your head while walking through the city and are played by your brain without permission, which is also why SLAKE associated techno music with the busy streets of Tokyo. Be it while listening the song alone or together with the IIDX movie made by the nicknamed HES for it, try imagine the frenetic rhythms of a busy street and the quick succession of urban scenarios at high speed in order to enhance your hearing speed: SLAKE himself recommends to do so for this piece! Along the years, the song received an extended version -the 'ANOTHER DAY REMIX'- and a spiritual successor by the name of Piano To Your Head from the 2012 album THE INVISIBLE FORCE, while MUSIC FOR YOUR HEAD itself was also ported to the DanceDanceRevolution series with the ULTRAMIX3 console game (link).
Daisuke Y&Co./beatmania IIDX 157For our blog founder aquabluu/pikaby, we don't change source material realm but instead go up to a couple of notches with beatmania IIDX 10th style, which happens to be the home of his own song request. A song from a couple of recurring external artists... that happened to be all about the individual who energically dances for its own video!
Y&Co. is the unit made of Tetsuya 'REMO-CON' Tamura (田村哲也; Twitter, website, SoundCloud) and Akira 'DJ BOSS' Yokota (横田聡; Twitter), in activity since 1993 and supportive to the IIDX line for the score in every single installment since their debut on 8th style with their many dance and eurobeat tracks, collaborating with a number of different singers across the years! With the vocal support of Kahori from the indie unit 1 LOVE, this is a song that has made the rounds in multiple bemani series, novering in later years cameos in jubeat, DanceEvolution Arcade and BeatStream. Memorizing the iconic dance from the IIDX video might come in handy for these external forays as well, as replicating the moves is a feature of most of their hardest mode settings!
Indeed, before even being a song with whoever made it as its flag-bearer, Daisuke is prominently one piece that better celebrates his visual performer, the video's dancer who also happens to be called Daisuke (Twitter)! Born in Oita, Japan on November 11th, 1978 and most commonly known by the stage name Dai. (大○), this man is mostly contributing to the IIDX lore as an occasional dancer for IIDX song videos (most of which involving songs from the nicknamed Ryu☆) and sometimes penning lyrics for select original pieces. For the song Daisuke, the story of how he got the performing part falls on quite the silly side; by admission of REMO-CON of Y&Co. (link), the original final line was supposed to be Daisuki, but that was changed as the composer felt that change fit better and in turn would have made the track more memorable. Soon after that, as recalled by Daisuke himself, visual jockey GYO contacted him in a day of December, just saying if he could perform for a song named after him and just like that, a music video that predates the modern dance
Nowadays, Daisuke has left the dancefloor in order to pursuit the DJ career alongside his lyrics-writing occasional commissions, but before that and aside all the bemani songs he could energically perform for, he has a couple of distinctive extra perks to his portfolio at Bemani's, being one of the DanceEvolution Arcade games' choreographers (together with Yossy) as well as turning himself into a playable character in the pop'n music series, in association with the song Ignited Fire. Of course, Daisuke himself supervised his animation to be as accurate to the source model as possible!
GreensleevesThe wish pick from ngitrox, one of our most prolific readers-tuned-into-contributors staffers, takes us back to the 16th Century, exploring the many and one renditions of an English folk tune that originated from an humble printed publication and managed to survive to this very day.
The first registered work that included what it's commonly referred to as the first rendition of the song was a broadside ballad titled A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves, or "A New Northern Ditty of the Lady Green Sleeves" by Richard Jones, registered at the London Stationer's Company in September 1580. Six more ballads with varying musical variations by different authors were written and registered by different authors with the same name-bearing of Lady Green Sleeves, proceeding to both solidify the tune's nomenclature as well as the most known structural variations for the Greensleves song. Its ground of the form, in fact, is the result of a musical interpretation of the melody under different progression forms between the romanesca from Spain -more prone to freestyle with its linear structure of four chords and a repeating bass-, the passamezzo antico from the Italian Renaissance and the Andalusian progression, often found in Flamenco music. The heavy influx of Mediterranean musical vibes lead historians to discharge the common believe that the original Greensleeves song was composed by English monarch Henry VIII for his queen consort Anne Boleyn, as the Italian composing style only reached Britain after Henry's death, pointing to a more plausible Elizabethian-era origin.
It's widely accepted nowadays to pinpoint Greensleeves' nice inthe public's awareness around the end of the 16th century, due to the ditty being namedropped and popularized in several plays of that time, including William Shakespear's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ever since, many interpretations were made to the original source ballad's meaning, leading to modern liricized versions of it that diverge from its roots in many cases, such as Christmas carols with the more known What Child Is This? (1895) by William Chatterton Dix. In more contemporary times, the folk tune was used by the London Trained Bands as the slow march theme (16th-17th centuries) and in World War I by the 7th Battalion London Regimen as the quick march one. Post-world conflict civilians may have heard of it in many countries as the jingle of ice cream vans and the background music for end-of-listening-paper sections in some of Hong Kong's public exams (namely Secondary Education, the Advanced Level and the Certificate of Education). Hell, even the main theme for the 1954 television series Lassie was based on the Greensleeves song!
Mimic Ace Combat 7Last in line for today is the wish pick from CoroQuetz, which acts both as an additional videogame-sourced dream song as well as the immortal reminder that I (Lokamp) to this day have failed to remember to update the Ace Combat song series showcase with the latest of the officially-released Ace Combat songs in Taiko (...sorry about that). Might as well pick up the slack from here, considering that both this tune and Roca Roja come from the same Ace Combat game!
Ace Combat 7 came out on January 18th 2019 for PlayStation 4 and xBox One, with a PC port following suit a few weeks later (February 1st). Winner at the CEDEC Awards (Best Sound) and PlayStation Awards (Gold Award and Best VR support for its dedicated side missions) in the same year, this game retained the same gameplay structure of its predecessors while also having its story-related content expanded over the course of the year, with the gradual release of DLC content containing both customization flairs and DLC missions that expanded on the world's lore.
The first two of the three extra missions -Unexpected Visitor and Anchorhead Raid- featured a mysterious unit of two deadly aircrafts, going by the name of Mimic. Their noxious mark on the skies is marked by a series of tracks that were composed by Mitsuhiro Kitadani (北谷光浩), a more recent NAMCO SOUNDS musician who previously worked on music for the first PAC-MAN CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION game, iDOLM@STER titles and the Nintendo Switch's Daemon x Machina. Alongside the "base" vaersion of the song being displayed above, there also are slight variations of the same theme: two for the Mimic unit's callsigns -Rage and Scream- and a 'Drums Mix', all from the same composer.
