The couple on our spotlight, aside from sharing the same native grounds and the same fate as unplayable-tune-from-former-mobile-release status, has a little something extra to set them apart from other playable tunes that were lost to the sands of time...
Minna de Taisen! Asamade Puyopuyo Puyo Puyo Fever
みんなで対戦！朝までぷよぷよ／ ぷよぷよフィーバー
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Android STH |
 |
★2 (89) |
★4 (180) |
★6 (262) |
★7 (369) |
- |
150
puyot3 (Puyopuyo Touch - Battle BGM 3)Tanoshii Puyopuyo Jigoku! Puyo Puyo Fever
たのしいぷよぷよ地獄！／ ぷよぷよフィーバー
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Android STH |
|
★3 (104) |
★5 (163) |
★5 (295) |
★8 (479) |
- |
180 puyot2 (Puyopuyo Touch - Battle BGM 2)This time around, our leap back to the past sets us back to the year 2012, where the only Taiko no Tatsujin apps available on mobile devices were just a couple: the DS3-models-inheriting AR Yokai Battle and the ever-elusive Taiko no Tatsujin★Shinkyoku Tori Houdai (太鼓の達人★新曲取り放題！), available only for members of the au/docomo subscription plans of the time. Being a Japanese-provider-only subscription title, the latter has always been the hardest to gather record and post-release intel about, and its barebones official web page on Bandai Namco's website going down a few years later didn't help that much either (earliest web snapshot available on BanNam's website and the au provider, via TheWaybackMachine); however, one choice collaboration campaign making the rounds of the Web did manage to become one of the most known events surrounding the game, bringing not one but two tunes from the up-and-rising Puyo Puyo series, in a tie-in with the pre-existing mobile port of one of the series' entries that has been available since 2009. Yes, some of you might remember we've already talked about this (in part), but the need of a 'renewal' SotW of sorts is duly required, due to some recently-discovered interesting development behind it...
The franchise's history has always been a rather frantic one, but its core gameplay and mechanics remain the same: they're "well puzzle games" like Tetris and Dr.Mario where players have to pile up the puyo jelly-like creatures and match them in groups of 4+ elements of the same color next to each other in order to make them disappear, before your own well's contents go over the top. By playing against another player or CPU opponents, the more puyos are cleared in a row via puyo-falldown chain reactions, the bigger will be the amound of "obstacle" colorless puyos being sent to the opponent in order to fill up his or her own well before the attacker's. The series was started in 1991 by the now-defunct software house Compile as a labor of love from company founder Masamitsu "Moo" Niitani and features characters from the software house's Madou Monogatari (魔導物語) first-person dungeon crawler games, down to the recurring protagonist Arle Nadja and her ingame opponents.
Shortly before Compile's bankrupcy in the early 2000s, this Japanese-only series made its jump into Western territories with different titles thanks to Sega (as 'Puyo Pop', at first), which would acquire the full IP rights and develop its future games shortly after. One of the acts of the Blue Blur's house for bringing more life to the franchise was the release of a 'reboot' of sorts with 2003's Puyo Puyo Fever (ぷよぷよフィーバー), featuring a whole new cast of characters framed in a general 'magic school' setting and new gameplay mechanics such as the board-changing Fever Time that triggers after a set number of successful puyo machups/chains. Sega both developed and published all its versions in Japan, including the exclusive Dreamcast version (effectively Sonic Team's last game developed for the Sega-forged system) and many of its European ports, but the United States only ever managed to get the arcade/PlayStation 2/Nintendo DS ports of it.
Puyo Puyo Fever also boasted a number of mobile ports across the years, thanks to its 2009 mobile remake by the title of Puyo Puyo Fever Touch (ぷよぷよフィーバー), originally released on February 1st for both iOS and Android platforms. Being a popular mobile release for quite a long time (hell, it even came preloaded with 2012's Sony NWZ-E470 Walkman music player, of all things!), in 2013 it was tied with the au/docomo-friendly Taiko game as a 2-parter collaboration campaign (archived collaboration page), ultimately landing two songs from Fever/Fever Touch as well as a slew of cosmetic fanciness for the STH-subscribed donders' eyes.
The two songs in question were -as quoted by their original OST release in 2007's Puyopuyo Fever 1&2 Sound Track (ぷよぷよフィーバー1&2サウンドトラック)- the third and second Battle BGM themes from the original Fever: Minna de Taisen! Asamade Puyopuyo (lit. "Play Against Each Other! Puyopuyo Until Morning") and Tanoshii Puyopuyo Jigoku (lit. "Fun Puyopuyo Hell!"), localized respectively for the English-rooted Western releases as 'Puyo Puyo All Night Fight!' and 'Puyo Puyo FUNderworld!'. Both tracks were arranged and composed by Sega's Hideki Abe (安倍栄基), but Tanoshii Puyo Puyo Jigoku/FUNderworld! is actually based on the first battle BGM from 1994's Puyo Puyo Tsu (ぷよぷよ通), by the translated title of 'Battle at the Tower of Magic' (魔導の塔で対戦だ) ans starring Compile's Takeshi Matsushima (松島剛史) as its composer.
Unfortunately, being old-mobile-only songs attached to regional subscription services means that the available footage for it is so miniscule that all we got are the fan-input notecharts which were shared online, images of which you can also browse yourself by ckicling at the star ratings above (courtesy of users from Wikihouse/Wikiwiki). Follow along with the attached song videos above to try getting a taste on how could it feel like to play these ever-elusive Taiko charts!
One last thing that bears mentioning, however, is the available chart set for both songs, in of itself. The Shinkyoku Tori Houdai app from 2012 only features Kantan and Futsuu charts on a regular basis for each of its applicable songs; however, both Puyo Puyo Fever tracks come with playable Muzukashii charts which were available to try during the campaign's period, before both songs' removal! Not only that, it was also found out by Japanese dataminers how both songs actually came in with fully-coded-in Oni mode notecharts for both songs, which have always been unavailable to experience in regular play but were shipped in with the publicly-available KFM notechart set nonetheless. One thing is having a time-limited song cameo on a platform, but another is having notecharts that only the most avid of hackers could figure out its existence of, at the time!
