Song of the Week! 5 December 2020

It's december once more! Let's greet it with a quick one for the day.

Just like last year around this time, be sure to stick around, after the end...

/ AIAIAI (feat. Yasutaka Nakata) (AIAIAI (feat.中田ヤスタカ)) Kizuna AI

Version
All	x3 (96)	x3 (122)	x4 (291)	x7 (392)

 Taiko 0 G, Taiko +
 128
J-Pop -> Pops/Anime
kzniii

 

If there's something sure about my online pastime habits, Let's Plays in any forms or shapes are definitely not my jam... but even I have caught wind of the big fuss some people are making online after some English-speaking Vtuber with shark teeth had a streaming session about the freshly-released Dokodon RPG Da-Don adventures, culminating with Bandai Namco EN's YT account managers themselves swearing to send her some complimentary tatacons! A Vtuber song feature seems about right for such a 'chapeau moment', and we just right happen to have one more in store.

Released on Green Version in the same day as Hello, Morning, AIAIAI is the other Taiko song that features Kizuna AI as its singer, and her 11th single release overall. Its coming was foreshadowed by the digital persona on early December 2018, stating how Kizuna AI would make a collaboration song with renowned Ishikawa prefecture DJ/songwriter Yasutaka Nakata (中田ヤスタカ), the same artist behind J-Pop band Perfume and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's discography. Some weeks later, on December 29th, the peppy AIAIAI made its debut during Kizuna AI's first live concert (hello, world), with its official digital release on March 22nd of the following year as well as its official YouTube MV being uploaded one week later.

 

Both digital debuts garnered a huge success, with a 1st place peak in iTunes' techno charts and over 14 million views on the music video; not to mention that the song was also picked up as the opening theme of the 12-episodes, Vtuber-focused Anime series Virtualsan Looking (バーチャルさんはみている), talling over 30 Vtubers between regulars and cameos no less! AIAIAI also got a playable version elsewhere as part of the Nintendo Switch entry of the Groove Coaster series' starting song list (link).

 

The BPM mood might be low, but there's little to no idle time with this song's Oni chart! Mostly-small and monocolor clusters make their way to a couple of similarly-charted Go-Go Time stanzas with DKD-KDK clusters to warm up rookies' handswitching skills under safe grounds.

 

------------------------------------------------------ 

Now that our usual weekly business is dealt with, time to dream big and high once more!

 

Since the last month, I gathered enough candidates to repeat the Song of the Week Wish List December feature once more; from our readers to Taiko Time contributors and Discord moderators, have another wave of songs we'd like to see in official Taiko gaming in the future, with a feature-length presentation just like for any other SotW candidate we've had thus far. Off we go!

Bowser's Castle From Mario Kart Double Dash!!/DanceDanceRevolution: Mario Mix

 180

Kicking things off is one song request from HerbietheLoveBug4Ever, or should I say, 'one of the many'...

 

With so many song ideas being posted as a comment, I had to apply once more that bullet-proof method of "putting every option on a darts board and see which one I'm gonna hit", and my dard shot landed into the 'All the songs from Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix' slot. As we're picking one song per user, I'll just go ahead and pick what arguably is the game's hardest song; after all, Bowser himself is donning an Xmas gettup this year, for another ongoing Mario title no less!

Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix is one of two dancing games released for the Nintendo GameCube, fruit of a partnership within one of Nintendo's internal studios -Nintendo SPD Group No.2-, Mario Party series veteran Hudson and Konami, upon whose always-popular DanceDanceRevolution music game series gravitates around. The game released worldwide in 2005 at different times: July 14th in Japan (as Dance Dance Revolution with Mario), October 24th in the US (28th in EU, as Dancing Stage: Mario Mix) and November 24th in Australia. Springing of the game's story starring the Mario brothers in their quest to retrieve the Music Keys stolen by Waluigi and Wario, the game features your standard DDR action with a dedicated Dance Mat peripheral across a bountiful selection of track remixes from former Nintendo games, all made by other inhouse Nintendo composers, with a spoonful of minigames that also can be controlled with the Mat.

Right at the tail end of Story mode is this fierce remix of Bowser's Castle theme from the same console's Mario Kart series entry, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! by Kenta "gon" Nagata (永田権太) and Shinobu Tanaka (田中しのぶ), with the former being also responsible for this funkier remix version. Just like nearly every other song in the game, the Japansese version had a different name for the song as Wagahai wa Boss de Aru! (ワガハイはボスである!; lit. 'This is the Evil Boss!'), and the "final boss" vibes can be palpable not only by the sheer amont of notes trampling the rest of the game's tracks individual count, but also by the fact that some step markers are effectively replaced by commands that can be used to attack Bowser himself as the fight goes along!

Sambaland (サンバランド) SAMBA MASTER Sato -SATOH-

 128

Courtesy of sehun from the Discord moderation team, samba shenanigans are back in our menu! This quirky piece comes from the prolific BMS artist/charter Lime/Kankitsu (Twitter; SoundCloud; personal BMS works website) as his 13th original track/chart combo he made for Be-Music Sim players in the likes of Lunatic Rave 2 and similar. Born on September 1995, this artist likes to experiment with several music genres for his BMS works, mostly favoring club music among other genres. Some of his BMS works also made it to selected music games, such as the made-for-BOFU2016 Chronomia (available in Muse Dash and MUSYNX) and this very song!

Classed under the 'GENRE-SHUFFLE' genre label, this is a song for which Lime himself (under a different alias, as seen on top of the title) is posing for its music video and doing squats with assorted silly shenanigans, a tradition that went on with time with Sambaland's own sequels... that's right- this is actually the first piece in a SAMBA MASTER Sato -SATOH- song quadrilogy, where each of the subsequent entries came out to be by remixing the immediately-preceeding samba tune. The other samba songs from this artist -all BMS contest submissions, no less- are BMS OF FIGHTERS 13's Dark Sambaland (ダークサンバランド), GO BACK 2 YOUR RAVE 2014's Holy Sambaland (ホーリーサンバランド) and BMS OF FIGHTERS ULTIMATE 2015's Hurdle Samba (ハードルネッサンバ), all geared with some Last Boss-tier devilish difficulties from the composer himself!

 

While the original Sambaland had no business in any of the BMS-focused contest, it got ported into Sega's maimai music game series for some old-times shenanigans... BMS music video included!

Seaside Labyrinth Dirty Androids/beatmania IIDX

 136

Our last stop for today is a peek into one of Taiko Time contributor crystalsuicune's favorite artists from the beatmania IIDX series with arguably one of said artist's most popular tracks being presented in recent memory. Born on January 23rd, Daisuke Akitsu (秋津大祐) (Twitter; SoundCloud; website) -more commonly known as Dirty Androids- is one of the many recurring bemani-commissioned composers that plays his personal-life cards up close tightly, as little no information has been divulged on the Internet and in live events in general, as currently no public appearance to even perform his music live was ever made. 

 

What we know about Dirty Androids so far is that he comes from Yokohama, has been a beatmania IIDX regular ever since 2009's beatmania IIDX 17 SIRIUS thanks to his unique Western-approaching music and has been dabbling in the independent music release scene as well, being a reccurring affiliate to both Diverse Direct and S2TB Recordings labels as well as the owner of his own label as well (D/A Recordings). Born as a nu disco producer, Dirty Androids' preference to musical trends' edge lead him to also dabble into house and drum'n'bass genre winds from time to time, always with a unique tuning with Western music's composing style.

Seaside Labyrinth was made for beatmania IIDX 24 SINOBUZ's launch batch, starring a unique MV about the eponymous Labyrinth prepping herself for a groove beach dancy party and a... slight audio bug that muted the music's background for a brief amont of time, which got released a few months later. In the Song Comment section of the IIDX title's website, Daisuke Akitsu as Dirty Androids stated how he got commissioned to make a song about "Japan viewed from overseas", something that would seemingly block his work into either Vaporware or Future Funk genres. Once the born-from-scratch idea of making a beach-styled song with the concept of 'Neo-Tokyo' took concrete form into the artist's head, he managed after many hurdles to mold from scratch a mixture of several genres' elements into the commissioned idea's boundaries. Between 80's Arena Rock, disco, funk, fusion and game sounds, it's truly a labyrinth to lose yourself into!

The song got an extended version in both one of IIDX SINOBUZ's official soundtracks and Daisuke Akitsu's third solo album Destination from 2019, which also includes a remix version of it from Snail's House of Kokorobo/Pixel Galaxy fame.