With our Nijiiro-related pages nearing their completion, we are faced with all sorts of maintenance-related facets that would take some extra measures from us, one of these being the new genre categorization that will require our hand in making new genre icons when addressing such songs in the future.
That said, however, there's still ground to make some good use out of our nearing-discontinuation genre icons, the main field of which being event-limited songs that are not going to be publicly available to play (at least, as of now)! Here's a couple of them.
Tanoshiki Tokimeki (楽しきトキメキ) Girl Friend (Beta)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (???) | x4 (???) | x6 (279) | - |
Taiko 0 K (promo only)
186
none
???Tanoshiki Tokimeki (lit. 'Fun Excitement') is the opening theme for the Anime series of developer CyberAgent and publisher Ameda's dating sim/card mobile game Girl Friend (Beta) (ガールフレンド(仮)). Despite being an Anime-only song at the time of its (video-only) debut, the Taiko Team cheated their way into fitting the song for the Game Music genre due to the source game's popularity, so that genre labeling still counts!
The original JP-exclusive freemium game started operations on October 29th, 2012 and has the player as a character of an high-school setting, with the possibility to meet and date over a hundred different girls like your usual dating sim, each having by her own voice actress to back the role up. The (Beta) part of the series'name is an inside joke for the player's perpetual "work-in-progress" relationship status with any of the girls, as if's a perpetual test drive! Each girl has cards of varying rarity that can be raised with routinary jobs and are used for several battle minigames. To get a scope of how successful was the game at the time, over 5.3 million users could be counted playing the game as of March 2014, while earning over 1.8 billion Yen within the same time span!
Aside from the aforementioned 12-episodes Anime series, produced by Silver Link and broadcast within the year 2014's last few years, Girl Friend (Beta) novers a handful of side projects, including multiple manga series that revolve around one specific girl of the series (starring in order of publishing: Kokomi Shiina, Murakami Fumio, Chloe Lemarie, Sakurai Akane and Seio Gakuen), a GFB magazine, by ASCII Media Works, the BanNam-published 2015 PS vita spin-off Girl Friend Beta: Summer Vacation Spent With You (ガールフレンド（仮） きみと過ごす夏休み), an Internet radio show since 2013 and a girl-aimed mobile spinoff called Boy Friend (Beta). Not to mention that the series could also boster a mobile music game as well: Girl Friend Note (ガールフレンド（♪）) from end-2015!
The series-related Anime's opening theme, Tanoshiki Tokimeki, is performed by an ensemble of girls that are collectively known as the Neuron★Creamsoft (にゅーろん★くりぃむそふと), with Haruka Kazemachi (CV: Saori Hayami/早見沙織) as the vocal lead with four other backing girls: Asahina Momoko (CV: Yui Ogura/小倉唯), Kurokawa Nagiko (CV: Saori Gotou/後藤沙緒里), Yomogida Sumire (CV: Hiromi Igarashi/五十嵐裕美) and Etou Kurumi (Aya Suzaki/洲崎綾), with the latter of the girls'VA also contributing, among other things to the Assassination Classroom OP Seishun Satsubatsu-ron that is also playable in Taiko gaming. The composer for the song is Yutaka Shinya (新屋豊), formerly known for his works in other Anime series, from HUNTERxHUNTER to Ai Tenchi Muyo! While debuting as an Anime-only song, this track eventually joined the ranks of music gaming thanks to the aforementioned Girl Friend Note, in 2016 (link).
Tanoshiki Tokimeki was one of the five songs that were recorded for arcade Taiko gaming just as a one-off deal for the hosts of a Nicovideo New Year broadcast for 2014's end, with Taiko Team leader Yuhei Etou challenging different people on Muzukashii and a handful of never-playable-before videogame-related hits of the time. Watch him go while staring at another dude on the side!
Hanatsukiyo (花月夜) Touhou Project Arrange - Yonder Voice| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (???) | x4 (???) | x4 (???) | x5 (???) |
Taiko 0 K (promo only) 145 none ???Kimidori Version sure was a bountiful trove for limited-venue-only song additions, with the latter pick of today drawing from the evergrowing pool of song arrangements from the Touhou Project games. Hanatsukiyo (lit. 'Flowery Moonlit Night') is a track from the 2010 coterie doujin circle Yonder Voice (website), making its album debut in the same year (and event!) it was made playable in official Taiko cabinets. The song is a female-lead vocal arrangement of Saigetsu (砕月, lit. 'Breaking Month'), the insert song of the the fighting game spinoff Immaterial and Missing Power that introduces players in its Story Mode to the final fight against Suika Ibuki (伊吹萃香).
This child-sized youkai is a powerful oni, donned with an astounding physical prowess as well as number of peculiar abilities and trinkets, including shapeshifting into a mist (or multiple smaller copies of herself) and using an everlasting special gourd that is capable to pour out an infinite amount of sake over time, which often times is barely capable to satiate this jolly youkai's heavy drinking habits. Due to its abilities and the many references to other oni youkai and the Japanese Mt. Ooe, it's granted knowledge how Suika's character was based on the folklore legends about Shuten-douji, a man who lived as a half-youkai by pillaging the land with his subordinates. After her debut, Suika Ibuki has often appeared in the Touhou series' side games, from the fighters to the spellcard-capture-focused photography titles (Shoot The Bullet/Double Spoiler) and the amanojaku-holic Impossible Spell Card, with her only appearance in the mainline games in 2008's Subterranean Animism, as one of the three youkai that is willing to aid Hakurei Reimu's journey in the Underworld by enhancing her shot type.
The Yonder Voice doujin circle never made it big into Japanese music gaming, but its mark was left for sure with the second of the King of Touhou contests in 2014, which lead its then-debuting Hanatsukiyo to be one of the two Touhou Taiko Prize winners; as a result, the song was made playable as an Autumn Reitaisai-exclusive treat. Since the November 2014 event was the only occasion the song was ever made officially playable, we can't comment much longer about this elusive Touhou arrange piece, aside from pointing out how this has one of the lowest Oni star ratings among all playable arrange pieces from the danmaku-fueled series... quite the feat too, considering it's for a song that is associated to such a powerful entity in the games' lore!
