We're back with our monthly Ura Oni feature, once again touching upon the soon-to-be-pruned pool of songs from the modern arcade legacy.
Considering that we're dealing with quite the popular tune in Taiko shores, so much so that some of its former versions are also playable in older games... why don't just feature them all today?
DANZEN! Futari wa Precure (DANZEN!ふたりはプリキュア)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (96) | x3 (139) | x3 (206) | x6 (309) |
Taiko 6, Taiko PS2 4
167
none
puri9 DANZEN! Futari wa Precure (Ver.Max Heart) (DANZEN!ふたりはプリキュア (Ver.Max Heart))| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x3 (97) | x3 (143) | x3 (205) | x6 (314) |
Taiko 7, Taiko PS2 Anime 2, Taiko PSP 1 167 none pri9m DANZEN! Futari wa Precure ~Yuiitsumuni no Hikari-tachi~ (DANZEN!ふたりはプリキュア ～唯一無二の光たち～) HUGtto! PreCure♡Futari wa PreCure: All Stars Memories| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x1 (30) | x2 (57) | x4 (165) | x6 (361) |
Taiko 0 B to Taiko N 168 none pr9all 
DANZEN! Futari wa Precure ~Yuiitsumuni no Hikari-tachi~ (DANZEN!ふたりはプリキュア ～唯一無二の光たち～) HUGtto! PreCure♡Futari wa PreCure: All Stars Memories| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | - | - | - | x5 (331) |
Taiko 0 B to Taiko N 168 none ???Before that jolly Beat Mario would flood the Taiko gates with several variations of singing for help to Lunarian pharmacists, there was one tune among the many available Anime licenses the got so popular to appear in all of its distinct variations into drumming-playable form, at some point! It's also from the progenitor series to Izumi Todo (東堂いづみ)'s fortunate Pretty Cure (or PreCure) metaseries, no less.
Originally aired between February 2004 and January 2005 for a total of 49 episodes, Futari wa Pretty Cure (ふたりはプリキュア; lit. 'We Are Pretty Cure') is the story of a couple of regular girls -Nagisa Misumi and Honoka Yukishiro- who are granted to turn into magical heroines by a couple of creatures from the Garden of Light, as a means to ward off the sinister creatures from the Dark World who have already engulfed the Garder of Light and that are now aiming to planet Earth as well, the 'Garden of Rainbow'. Transforming respectively as Cure Black and Cure White, the two heroines will eventually collect the pieces to a magical artifact that they'll let them travel to the Garden of Light in order to settle the score with the menacing Dark King once and for all... That is, until the follow-up Anime series Futari wa PreCure Max Heart (ふたりはプリキュア Max Heart) where Nagisa and Honoka are on a quest to aid the power recovery of the blonde Hikari Kujo, the human vessel of the Garden of Light's queen whose powers were scattered away into twelve 'Heartlets', all while a certain boy with the human facets of the former Dark King schemes from afar.
Both Anime series were warmly received to the point of being concurrently sustained in Japan by a couple of manga runs penned by the Futago Kamikita (上北ふたご) twin duo for Kodansha's Nagayoshi magazine as the series' original run aired, a tradition that would go on for all subsequent PreCure series to date. This was also one of the few PreCure series not only to receive a subbed English release but a few dubs as well, most notably the early-adoption Italian one and the 2009 English one by the Canadia-based Ocean Productions and their off-branch Blue Water studio (of DBZ Eng dub fame), the latter porting the series with no cuts but with some 4kids-esque localization changes to the spotlighted names and tropes. While the first Pretty Cure series' heroines would find several videocame cameos in future PreCure titles, the original two series only had a quartet of them on their belt, one for the educational Sega Pico system and three spread between Nintendo's portable systems of the early 2000s.
Danzen! Futari wa PreCure is the opening theme to the very first Pretty Cure series, one that would be later remixed twice in order to be used respectively as the Max Heart sequel series's OP and an insert song for the Pretty Cure franchise's 15th Anniversary crossover movie: HUGtto! PreCure♡Futari wa PreCure: All Stars Memories (HUGっと！プリキュア♡ふたりはプリキュア オールスターズメモリーズ), each with a slightly-different lyrics set and base line arrangement. For all three istances, the same creative team is behind each version's creation: Mayumi Gojo (五條 真由美) from the Ibaraki prefecture is the singer, Kumiko Aoki (青木久美子) is the lyricist while the composing/arranging taska were left to Yasuo Kosugi (小杉保夫) and Naoki Sato (佐藤直紀) respectively. The original Danzen! Futari wa PreCure, while not peaking incredibly high on selling charts (#160 at Oricon, with the Max Heart version sitting at #157), managed to win the Theme Song Award at the 9th Animation Kobe on November 14th, 2004. October 2018's 'Yuiitsumuni no Hikari-tachi' version (lit. 'The One and Only Twin Lights') fared way better on the single sales figure peaking as #35 on Oricon's charts; subsequently its insert-song movie premiere, it was also used as the ending theme for the then-starting HUGtto PreCure series as well.
The earliest versions of the song's Taiko ports both share a similar charting style where a mix of the lyrics and the base song are punctuated with 1/16 notecharts, with a slight focus on Don/Kat clusters for the former and some shy Kat note peppering on the latter. The tables are turned for the soon-departing 2018 remix of the original song, where mono-color clusters are the norm and the lyrics backing serves as the predominant charting style of the song as per modern standards... that is, unless you're in for a round on its Ura Oni setting, in which case you'll get a notechart most resempling the original Oni charts for Futari wa PreCure and the Max Heart version, making it a sort of 'old chart compendium' just like select Idolm@ster Ura Oni songs on the arcade versions have been treated in the past few years.
