For today's feature, chatbox user kathy tasked us to spotlight some of the hardest Muzukashii charts we could find around. Problem is, a lot of these 'usual suspects' have already been picked in the past between former SotW entries and song series, ruling out quite the wide roster of candidated for today.
We aren't airing reruns around here
Itadaki (頂) CHUBAY| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x5 (253) | x7 (341) | x8 (530) | x10 (881) |
Taiko 0 B, Taiko Switch, Taiko +
202
none
itadakAfter Sato Takafumi's Hayabusa and a_hisa's Rin, here's the third Namco Original whose title consists only of a single Japanese letter! This full-instrumental piece premiered in the arcade rooms in March's beginning last year as Blue Version's very last tune, predating the Green Version firmware's release of 12 days and effectively scoring the 'lowest-time-into-an-arcade-Taiko-songlist' feat ever registered, with the Yokai Watch-related Matsuribayashi de Geragerapo being a close second with 13 days before the next firmware's release.
Itadaki (lit. 'Summit') is also the music game debut piece of indie composer CHUBAY (Twitter; SoundCloud) from Japan's Kanagawa prefecture, affiliated to the Diverse System doujin circle. Little else is known about the artist, aside from his Comiket-published works as well as his more recent presence into music game song-submission contests; more specifically, one for Sega's CHUNITHM where he managed to score a win with the long-titled Ano Suihei-sen o Koe Boku wa Kimi to Mata Hashiri Tsudzukeru (あの水平線を越え僕は君とまた走り続ける) and one more for the Faith Creation's Taiko Nijiiro song contest, titled Vixtory.
This song's Muzukashii mode plays out as a balanced approach to both physical and (on the later end) handswitching prowess that gears up players to understand the song's basic structure for the harder trial that has yet to come; to that end, a lot of the quicker piano virtuosisms and irregular rhythms in general are uniformed into a pure 1/16 notecharting approach so that a greater focus is put on the player figuring out the 'main gist' of the song while harnessing how taxing a 200+ BPM can be for the track.
Switch up to Oni mode and it's easy to see how crazier can a chart for this song be, between longer clusters and a generous peppering of 1/24 spikes that fully commit to the song's more virtuoso portions! Just mind your energy and be ready for the last Go-Go Time's more handswitch-focused cluster formations and you're set. It's also nice to see how the rounded-up hits-per-second ratio chases the familiar Nam-Combo value on this one, with about 7.65 hits/s to count!
Eikyoku/Gyouan (郢曲／暁闇) Touhou Project × NAMCO SOUNDS - Linda AI-CUE| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All (promo only) | x3 (178) | x5 (217) | x8 (516) | x10 (999) |
| All | x3 (178) | x5 (217) | x8 (516) | x10 (993) |
Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko Taiko Wii U3, Taiko PS Vita, Taiko PS4, Taiko +, CD CC-5 140 Variety -> Game&Variety thnlndWith today's second pick, we're closing a couple of notable circles around here, as this track is not only the last 8-star Muzukashii from the now-merged Variety genre, but it's also the last out of the four Touhou Project arrangements from NAMCO SOUNDS musical talents that were crafted for the Taiko series' very first collaboration event with ZUN's danmaku series of flying games shooting at each other in color-blazing fashion.
Following SOUND HOLIC's Grip & Break down!! of former SotW days (link), what we have here is another remix of the first Touhou game for Windows's Extra Stage boss theme, the U.N.Owen Was Her? (U.N.オーエンは彼女なのか？) that is played in the fight against the youngling vampire Flandre Scarlet and that has climbed its way to the top of many fan-driven Touhou polls, time and time again. One of such polls was the one that the Taiko Team has issued to the fans for its four-piece collaboration, ultimately winning and calling 2000 series top dog Linda AI-CUE to make a playable arrangement of it. Its title puts together two concepts that seem at the opposite ends of each other, with 'Eikyoku' being used for songs in general composed in the late Heiyan and Kamakura eras with quite an aura of "magnificence" to it and 'Gyouan' referring to the brief time of the day before dawn where pure darkness is in the air, with the moon gone out of the horizion and the sun still not set up in the sky.
As per Linda AI-CUE tradition, we can't just have a song without hidden messages of sorts, can we?! Eikyoku/Gyouan's hidden lines lie beneath the oh-so-familiar usage of Morse Code inside the song's execution, played quite early in the track for a couple of lines referencing the source game's Extra Stage boss theme and its literary source of inspiration: Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None mystery novel and one of its characters, Mr. Owen/U.N.Owen. Between note stanzas 12-13, the word 'UNKOWN' is thyped through Morse messaging, playing on the wordplay between U.N. Owen and the pronounciation of the word 'Unknown'; shortly after that, stanzas 17-18 spell out 'ANDTTWN', which basically calls back to Agatha Christie's novel and its title's acronym. Before its public launch on Murasaki arcades, a prototype version of its Oni notechart was showcased, scoring 999 notes in total, which has been brushed up to the one that's publicly available in any other Taiko title ever since with 6 notes less.
Taiko-charted by Matsumoto (マツモト), this is a song whose hardest mode thrives into its irregular-rhythm nature with plenty of 1/12 and 1/16 cluster hybridations to the point that it's quite daunting to to a full-tempo-uniformation job like for songs in the likes of Itadaki, so for its Muzukashii chart there is the beginning portion where 1/12 clusters are singled out with generous breathing portion just so that players are accustomed to the idea that your average 1/16 fanfare won't be enough for that's up to come. As per Muzukashii tradition in general, the majority of the song, if note stanza copy-pasting action is not always applicable (or at least, not -that- often), mono-colored clusters are what its players will face, up until the ending's 8 stanzas which feature some commonplace hand-switching patterns that are not that rare to spot among 6* Oni songs in any genre. Scrolling speed changes that mimick the ones of the Oni mode are also present here but, unlike the norm where changes are slightly nerfed, the very same alterations are found in both modes. Hell, the last sped-up drumroll even flows faster on Muzukashii (x4.0) than on Oni (x3.5)!
Back to Oni mode tips, while the scrolling speed doesn't make things hard to visually read a-la DEBSTEP! or !!!Chaos Time!!!, doubling up the speed (or going by smaller increments, if you're playing this one on Nijiiro-and-upper arcades) might give you a better picture of how tackling each of the cluster hybridations should go like. We're still talking about an high hit ratio (7.85 hits/s), after all!
