Given today's subject matter, in the event I end up piling up typos in the feature as usual, you might argue it's mighty topical for our Discord server dwellers to come there and laugh at me...
Here Comes Char Mobile Suit Gundam
シャアが来る／横川理彦 feat.団地ノ宮弥子
| Game | Genre |
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| PTB |
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★2 (78) |
★4 (128) |
★5 (233) |
★7 (323) |
★8 (457) |
176
gdmchr (Gundam Char)We've already sunk our teeth twice into the Mobile Suit Gundam universe as part of our Song of the Week antics (respectively here and here) and for our third serving, we're going to return to the 1979 Anime series that started it all, due to the quirky inclusion of one of its episode-insert themes into the Pop Tap Beat family, albeit in cover form.
Char ga Kuru (lit. 'Char Is Coming'), romanized in official English localizations as 'Here Comes Char', made its debut as an insert song for the first Anime series' 40th episode, starring Koichiro Hori (堀光一路)'s vocals. The late duo of Takeo Watanabe (渡辺岳夫) and You-she Matsuyama (松山祐士) were respectively its composer and arranger, while the lyrics-penning duties fell onto Rin Iogi (井荻麟), an alias for longtime Gundam score contributor Yoshinori Tomino (富野由悠季).
The Char the song title refers to is the character of Char Aznable, a red-clad and helmet-donning mobile suit pilot of many names with exceptional combat/planning skills and a hard-to-carry family legacy, whose charismatic aura and character complexity made such a lasting impression on the series to mold an effective "Gundam rival/antagonist archetype" around his own character. Even his insert song, jolly-sounding as it may be, can actually be interpreted as a last-words collection of impressions of people being killed by Char himself, cursing his name before being blown to smithereens! Char ga Kuru received its first single release in vinyl form on December 5th, 1979, alongside another OG series insert song -Kirameki no Lalah (きらめきのララァ)- as its Side B. Such release would eventually get a physical CD release later on, always with King Record-related publishing label, on October 25th in 2006, alongside many a version of the iconic song appearing in later Gundam materials, from the later anime series to Gundam videogames, including select entries in the JP-crossover-focused series Super Robot Wars!
Be it with its Oni mode or its Ura counterpart, the charting signature gimmick of putting a capital 'C' on Char is the exact same, with faster-scrolling Big notes happening every time the Red Comet is namedropped in the song. Key difference between the two is that we've got a commonpace x0.5 scrolling speed setting on the regular Oni that returns to x1 for every fast-scrolling big note, while Ura Oni's take has x1 speed as commonplace and thrice the speed for each 'Char'. There also are some actual clusters in there to take care of in comparison, together with faster drumrolls and nastier fast-big-Don/slow-small-Kat portions to be potential eyesores for the uninitiated!
