The whimsy of Disney is at out whims with our latest double-header... or is it?
Doko Made Mo ～How Far I’ll Go～. (どこまでも～How Far I’ll Go～) Moana| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x2 (55) | x3 (76) | x5 (144) | x6 (213) |
Taiko 0 Y, Taiko Switch
84
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moanaThe second Disney song in Taiko gaming with a double Japanese-English title credit, How Far I'll Go is an insert song for Disney's 56th animated picture film: November 2016's Moana. Today falls the 4th anniversary since the movie's very first official screening at AFI Fest, so what better occasion to talk about it than today?
Directed by the duo Ron Clemens/John Musker of The Princess and the Frog (2009) fame, this is a story about the strong-willed Moana, daughter of a Polynesian village's chief, tasked by the ocean itself to reunite a mystical relit to the goddess Te Fiti in order to save her village from an incombent ruination menace.
The movie's idea came to be from the dead-end idea of making an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's fantasy novel Mort, which didn't come to fruition due to right acquiral issues, setting the duo to brainstorm a trio of original ideas, among which was the one oriented about Polynesian culture and mythology the movie is based on; cultural fidelity was so important that Moana became the 2nd Disney movie after The Lion King to receive an official dubbing in the affected culture's language, which in this case is Tahitian. In certain countries over Europe, the movie upheld different names due to the word 'Moana' being either a registered trademark in several countries, including Spain (where the movie was titled 'Vaiana' instead) or due to it being more controversial due to it also being the name of a nation-famed... pornstar, which was the case of Italy who saw the flick titled 'Oceania' instead.
Grossing over 690 million dollars worldwide, the movie received a couple of nominations at the 89th Academy Awards: one for Best Animated Feature and the other for Best Original Song, which is the very one that got ported into Taiko gaming! The song, composed by American singer Lin-Manuel Miranda, is performed by the movie's titular heroine, voiced by Auliʻi Cravalho in the English version and Tomona Yabiku (屋比久知奈) in the Japanese one. Despite losing both the aforementioned Academy Awards nomination and a Golden Globe one (74th version) to the very same song ('City of Stars' from La La Land), How Far I'll go managed to win at the 60th Grammy awards in the Best Song Written for Visual Media category
While this may be classed as a 'power ballad' song, the slow-flowing cadence makes it for a lulling melody to drum with... at quite the low hit-per-length ratio. So low, in fact, that this is actually the Taiko song with the lowest value on this front, clocking at 1,953 hits/s and railing only behind to all-time classic Mori no Kuma-San Oni's flat 1,93 hits/s in the current modern arcade housing. When drumrolls and hitballoons barge in, however, players sure can put the 'power' in this power ballade by themselves!
Wish upon a shooting star SUi / Deemo| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (180) | x5 (283) | x6 (428) | x9 (618) |
Taiko N, Taiko Switch 128 none demwisWalt Disney himself held dear to his heart the song When Yiou Wish Upon a Star from his company's very first movie Pinocchio as a herald of the Disney founder's meritocratic approach to life: as long as you work really hard for something in your lifetime, the possibility of achieving it is always there. Problem is, however, that Taiko gaming only picked up Disney songs in very recent times and about the very latest movies too... so a song with a similar name for today it is!
Wish upon a shooting star comes to Taiko gaming thanks to the renewed collaborative efforts with Taiwanese company Rayark and its 2013 mobile piano rhythm game Deemo. The track is composed by the nicknamed SUi and was added in the original game as a piece of purchasable DLC, one of 5 included in Version 2.4's RAC Collection #4. The acronym RAC stands for 'Rayark's Artist Collaboration', the company's recurring series of yearly music-making competitions for song adoptions in their music games... that's right, this has been a contest winner! So much so, in fact, that Deemo was not the only home for the song at Rayark's, jumping shortly after the Deemo inclusion to the mobile music game VOEZ (link) as well. Despite both music gaming inclusions are dated back to about 4 years ago, let it be known that the artist himself has uploaded this piano piece on his SoundCloud profile even earlier... two more years back, to be exact (link)!
On Taiko shores, this is one of the few Oni modes where fully committing to a full-on music notation for the charting job arguably leads to a difficulty overrating, where the more virtuoso parts are fully converted into tricky 1/24 clusters and some deathstreams near the end, sure, but that still breezes along a quite plain 1/16 sequence of notes beforehand as a 1-on-1 conversion to the piano melody into Taiko notes.
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Having a song feature about wishes in the title is quite the segue into a brief announcement we're making as today's post-scriptum zone! Seeing the positive reception we got from last year's series of SofW Wish List picks for December, we've decided to run an encore for 2020!
If you want to hear us talk about a song you'd really like to get ported into the Taiko no Tatsujin series sometime in the future, here's another chance! Comment here or in the next SotW entries for November if you got an idea, or even hit us on the TnT Discord by pinging your idea to @Taiko Time Staff. Considering the amount of entries we might get, it's going to be one song per user; if multiple songs are suggested by someone, we'll pick one of the lot in order to let more people join the fun.
