Aleph-0 LeaF
| Game | Genre |
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| AC Nijiiro (Y3) |
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★5 (154) |
★7 (244) |
★8 (380) |
★10 (579) |
- |
10-397.5
???Just like the regular performance of a song with any given instrument/ensemble, skillful rhythm gaming is mostly a matter of preparation into its execution, between building up the stamina/coordination physical finesse required to play accordingly the instrument of choice and a good musical ear so that the flow of the melody is properly executed, down to the finest detail. Regular music, however, is always played with a static sheet of instructions of execute, while music gaming every now and then throws us a visual curve ball whose shock impact might put a dent on mnemonic skills. Soflan has been a force to be reckoned with in many a shapes, and arguably nothing on the BMS sphere started dictating its 'unpredictability rules' in a more fiercely plain manner than this one...
Straight outta its BMS entry, this is the "music of a world without sound" as seen by LeaF, one whose equation-dictated hierarchy has managed to spring it beyond every other competitor and into the individual-entry winning slot of 2016's edition in the yearly BMS Of Fighters contest, subtitled Legendary Again. The title alone, Aleph-Zero/Aleph-Nought, dictates the cardinality of all natural numbers and acts as the smallest infinite cardinal in mathmatician George Cantor's eponymous set theory of orderably infinite cardinal sets, but the song's music video by recurring collaborator Optie also doubles down as a treasure trove of math-based fundamentals to better depict LeaF's vision of a music-less world where its complex order rules it all! A long version of the song does exist, as one of the tracks featured in LeaF's first solo album Doppelganger.
The commercial-games-playable version of Aleph-0 is a newly-recorded rendition made by LeaF herself for its planned simultaneous launch in Taiko no Tatsujin and the debuting CHUNITHM SUN firmware and for that reason, the repeated beeping halfaway the song is pitched a bit lower than the original, possibly by accident. Always on Twitter (link), LeaF also revealed how she has declined in the past several offers to port Aleph-0 in other music games beforehand, due to her strong desire of letting people experience the song via BMS first and foremost; after a number of unspecified events have happened, the author felt no more reluctant to grant commercial usage to his song in more broad music gaming. Apparently, among those once-rejected parties were both Sega and Bandai Namco for earlier Aleph-0 ports, which is why on the same tweet its creator wanted to express her thanks for the companies to still be willing to adopt her BMS classic after being rejected in the past.
After Demetori's arrangement of Necrofantasia, this is the 2nd Variety track in Taiko to sport a full-starred KFMO chart set, one whose endgame chart plays more on its low number of notes to be harder to reach the Normal Clear quote, much like Suuhaa and the same composer's Mopemope before it. The low-miss menace is especially taxing on this one, considering how the last 150 notes are all laid down to its most-dangerous final portion, where a really slow-flowing balloon is coasting by 250BPM-spaced patterns that juggle in both x1 and x2 scrolling speeds just to mess with players at the very end! Aleph-0 is also the first non-Ura official song to feature a 1-hit balloon in its chart (on all 4 modes, no less!), after the Uras for Soshina's Kaijuu Shoujo wa Hi o Fukanai and Daisuki na Taiko no Ne.
