For those of you out there with the dream of climbing highter the soon-ending Year 2 Ranking Dojo main courses, here's an inspirational song that also dwells in the upper half of its difficult hurdles!
Kobukyoku "Enma" Maoki Yamamoto
鼓舞曲「閻魔」 山本真央樹
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro |
 |
★5 (208) |
★7 (367) |
★8 (546) |
★10 (979) |
- |
185-200
???If you jumped to the JP title of today's song on the spotlight and nothing else, let me clarify that no -this is not another Touhou song, as much as the name format would make someone recall the signature spell card name formatting formula instead. What it is, however, is the Taiko debut of one multi-field composer with quite the interesting portfolio to track down!
Meet Maoki Yamamoto (Twitter; official website), a composer and drummer from Saitama who is currently affiliated to the TRYTONELABO sound production team. Born on April in 1992, he's son of Kyouji Yamamoto (山本恭司), former member of Japanese rock band VOW WOW, with himself also getting involved into the musical act sphere, as the drummer of Dezolve. The bulk of his professional musical activity, however, lies in his involvment for many a project's overall score of varying grounds, from videogames (including Bayonetta, God Eater and more prominently the Idolm@ster series' Cinderella Girls branch) to filling the shoes of the songwriter for other singers/units, most notably the now-disbanded Wake Up, Girls! that briefly touched Taiko grounds with the Namco Original All In My Heart.
Maoki Yamamoto is also very proficient in rhythm gaming cameos thanks to multiple song contest victories scored under the alias winddrums for both SOUND VOLTEX (City Edge; Enchanté among many) and pop'n music (SYMPHONY FROM ZERO; FLOWER FLOWER WORLD), which were worth on the long run a recurring commissioned-artist status for the GITADORA series (EMPYREAL CATASTROPHE; LUCID NIGHTMARE), together with a numkber of one-off song deliveries for jubeat, MÚSECA and Nostalgia. Away from Konami/bemani and Bandai Namco, Maoki's prowess is also showcased among Sega's arcade rhythm games, between both maimai (Kaho Ginja no Sinfonietta) and Ongeki (GEOMETRIC DANCE).
The Inspirational Song "Enma" that bounced into Taiko gaming is what some might point as the 'natural progression' of playable songs with peppy 3/4 beat-based tunes a-la GERMINATION while also letting oneself away with the technical charting beyond the 1/16 commonplace signature! Although patterns tend to repeat themselves quite a bit, everything nearing 4-digit note counters with a decently-fast pace all throughout can prove themselves quite the unexpected challenger! In a faster fashion than today's Taiko-debuting Kill My Fortune coming in a trial in about a month from now, it only took less than a week for Enma's inspirational tune to join the Ranking Dojo ranks within a week of its playable debut, as the first course of Year 2's Expert course.
