From an internal party having all sorts of in-house Bandai Namco collabs, down to being one to almost completely hit the drum gutter...
DiSCOVER THE FUTURE Idolish7 Second BEAT!
TVアニメ『アイドリッシュセブン Second BEAT!』より
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACN (Y1; Y2 removed) |
 |
★2 (79) |
★4 (144) |
★4 (219) |
★5 (293) |
- |
180
i7dscv (Idolish7 - DiSCOVER THE FUTURE)THE POLiCY Idolish7 Third BEAT!
TVアニメ『アイドリッシュセブン Third BEAT!』より
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACN (Y3; Y4 removed) |
|
★2 (83) |
★4 (145) |
★4 (256) |
★8 (366) |
- |
126 ???...let's face it- Bandai Namco (and by proxy, the people at work on Taiko games) never gave a solid damn about the Touhou Project scene across the years after their coveted in-house arrange event of so many years ago, sticking to their steady release of one new song per year ever since (unless exceptions occur, like with the Touhou Danmaku Kagura songs). To see how fan arranges from the series are starting to get the arcade (and series-general) boot is short but expected, something that is still quite hard to believe to be happening for Bandai Namco's female-oriented, in-house IP of Idolish7, going from yearly arcade collaboration events to song deletions year after year. If it wasn't for WiSH VOYAGE getting a Taiko Plus/STH port. Indeed, this is one of the few song series in Taiko to be born on arcades as well as to be permanently slain by them. We've already skirmed through the multimedia franchise's legacy in our past SotW about NO DOUBT (click here), so here we'll just be skim through the following Anime seasons' legacy that are tied to today's two songs instead.
As already mentioned in the past, the original Anime run by Troika was aired in 2018 with 8 episodes, with its opening theme WiSH VOYAGE being performed by the Idolish7 members' VAs: Toshiki Masuda, Yusuke Shirai, Tsubasa Yonaga, KENN, Atsushi Abe, Takuya Eguchi and Kensho Ono. Such a trend would be repeated for the following two Anime seasons's OPs on today's SotW spotlight, only with a different lyricist/composer combo for each: Aira Yuuki (結城アイラ)/kz for DiSCOVER THE FUTURE and Erika Masaki (真崎エリカ)/Ken Ito (伊藤賢) for THE POLiCY. The actual episode run for both seasons go nearly doule and quadruple the run of the 2018 series, both having to be split up into two different broadcasting windows from each other for different reasins: Second BEAT!'s episodes 5-15 had to be broadcast 6 months apart from episode 4 due to production complications brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, while by design we got two 15-episodes-long consecutive weekly broadcast for the Third BEAT! debut. After the end of all Anime runs, Idolish7 would go on to have a movie, going by the title of Gekijо̄ban IDOLiSH 7 LIVE 4bit BEYOND THE PERiOD (劇場版アイドリッシュセブン LIVE 4bit BEYOND THE PERiOD) and actually releasing in theaters in two different versions -Day 1 and Day 2-, each with its own different musical score from across the series.
To feature how the Idolish7 was treated in Taiko gaming across the series with these two different tunes on display is the easiest way to go around the literal night-and-day transition for its Taiko relevance! We went from 2020's inclusion of DiSCOVER THE FUTURE with its custom dancers set as inherited from the past years' Idolish7 x Taiko campaigns... down to the anonymous reception of THE POLiCY into Taikodom with your office-assigned visual flairs, just from last year! Both songs also happen to be removed from Nijiiro Version the year after and with no other Taiko console game starring them, they effectively became lost media like many other licensed songs from the past. What has already left us since mid-2021 is a streamlined 5* Oni experience with slight 2P notecharts for its Kantan and Futsuu modes, while what's about to be axed from the next month is arguably the hardest non-Ura Idolish7 Oni challenge to date, still laying around a more approchable BPM pace.
