The results are in! Just like last year for 2021, we have held on Twitter a small popularity poll in order to hear from our readers what's the most popular track in Taiko being released in 2022.
While we're publishing the full end results soon enough, here's the most voted song for today's feature!
SUPERNOVA
USAO
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro (Y3) |
 |
★5 (263) |
★7 (407) |
★8 (500) |
★10 (937) |
★10 (1103) |
212
spnova (SUPERNOVA)Fan-made popularity poll aside, another event was repeated between 2021 and 2022 from the people behind the Taiko arcade branch: having the solo debut of one of the HARDCORE TANO*C label artists with an original song of theirs specifically heading to the Ranking Dojo's latter-end trials. We've had Laur a year ago and while being well receivied from you guys, its "TANO*C follow-up" for last year was so warmly welcomed to almost double the distance from the 2nd-placed track in our poll!
The star-shattering SUPERNOVA comes from the hands of the nicknamed USAO (Twitter; personal website; SoundCloud), a seasoned hardstyle composer making his moves amidst the doujin scene since early 2006. Owner of the UOM RECORDS label, his first print in music gaming lies with bemani's beatmania IIDX series, for which he penned new songs for every version since his debut (among those, Devil's Gear and Dynamite), up until the infamous "Konami pettiness incident" with BATTLE NO.1 that eventually led Konami to outright stop commissioning any of the TANO*C artists for future songs afterwards (see more here).
Despite the prickly behavior from that company, USAO found a nice rebound in the later years across external franchises, from Bushiroad's gacha music game D4DJ to Sega's CHUNITHM and -of course- the now-gone WACCA series. Curiously enough, the composer has had the habit of styling some of his tracks' titles after ghoulish entities from H.P.Lovecraft's mythos, which lead to the creation of REFLEC BEAT's Hastur, Muse Dash's Cthugha and Arcaea's Cyageha.
The unlock title for a Full Combo of the regular Oni setting is 'SN taiko 2022', which quite nicely spoofs the actual naming convention for supernovas with the prefix and the year of discovery tacked in, though slightly disappointing is the Ura Full Combo title, the more plain 'SUPERNOVA EXpert'
USAO's debut Namco Original was one of three songs last year to make its debut as a Weekend Warrior first with the Ura-less KFMO set, only for the extra difficulty layer to make its debut with the release of the final main Nijiiro Ranking Dojo trials in 2022. It's already a given how the 10-star status is warranded from a 210+ BPM track with quite the taxing hit/time average (6.80 hits/s) and the frequent 1/24 spikes spliced in, but the heavyweight Ura Oni after it brings in much more than the about-200-songs facet; quite the scary-looking scrolling trickery might fool some for the song actually going faster than that, but a good read on the general mood might ease the energy-draining pain a little (it still is a 210+ BPM song, after all!).
It is also a chart that is very specifically designed for the Ranking Dojo, which reflects from its drumroll requirements in 2022's Kurouto course. The drumroll hits in Supernova Ura consists of many short balloon notes of 3 hits each, one long one with 39 hits, and two very short normal drumrolls; so short that the absolute maximum you can get on each one is 3 hits. This totals up to an effective maximum of 72 drumroll hits on Nijiiro, and the requirement for a simple Kurouto clear is 70 hits, meaning getting anything less than 2 hits on those drumrolls, or missing a single balloon note, will fail the entire course. This drumroll requirement has often been compared to gacha, as it is often quite luck-based.
Supernova Ura is also a chart homage to every single Kurouto course 3rd song boss that has come before it; the homogenous nature of the song's chorus melody allows almost any note patterns to fit into it just fine. Each chart pattern reference is placed around the aforementioned short balloon notes and within the Go-Go Times. See if you can recognize each of them when playing! (listed are the songs used in Supernova Ura and the Taiko version in which each of them served as the 3rd song of Kurouto)
- Black Rose Apostle (Ura) - Murasaki
- Kita Saitama 2000 - White
- Ghost Mask - Red
- FUJIN Rumble - Yellow
- Toon Town's Toys Tune - Blue
- Kien Banjou Kagura - Green
- Stick Trick ShowTime!! - Nijiiro 2020
- Kokuryu - Nijiiro 2021
