Meet one of these today!
Challengers Marulon
まるろん
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACN (Y3) Taiko RC |
 |
★5 (208) |
★7 (291) |
★8 (415) |
★10 (753) |
- |
125-343.75
challe (Challenger)This ending week has saw the submission entry closure for the latest Taiko no Tatsujin music contest, one whose winners (or at least a selection of those) are planned to become competiton tunes for the next in-person TnT World Championship tournament, a mission that was also shared by the 2021 contest before shifting delivery plans due to the Sars-COV-2 pandemic's 2-ish years of worldwide events/venues shut-ins. Today's song was the last of this past contest's winners to being made playable across worldwide Nijiiro cabinets, which it makesdoubly the more amusic as with Rhythm Connect is also the first one among the contest winners to get additional ports away from game centers!
Challengers is the winning submission from independent composer Marulon (まるろん; Twxtter, SoundCloud, YouTube), an artist with affiliations to other Japanese indie music aggregates/event organizers like Nasu Summer City. Beyond securing a winning slot for the first Columbia Makes-endorsed competition, the Judge Remarks for it from Etou spurred quite the emotionally-waxing remarks from the Taiko Team leader, both on the song and the Taiko tournament scene as a whole! There's a Japanese figure of speech behind the expression known as 'Chitoase no Kessho' (血と汗の結晶) or "Crystal of Blood and Sweat", in the sense of something whose beauty lying on its orderly structure is being given form by not-orderly and hard-worked dedication into it, a foundation that is far from the ideal of 'beauty by order' that the resulting crystal gives out.
The juxtaposition of concepts and the strict dicothomy of moods into a song's hearing was what moved Etou the most, as a competitive scenario would ofter consider just a two-sided categorization between the victor/s and the losers, with no room in-between the two and the clashing of emotions coming out from the challengers as a result. The same Marulon would end up reaching the spectrum of both the winners and the losers on the Taiko-composing side, seeing as in 2022 he tried once again with a song for the next Taiko contest (Gyoten no Hayate) with not a single accolade to it, although such song eventually managed to have a playable second life of its own as part of a freely-available Friday Night Funkin' fan mod, VS Halo Beats!.
It's quite the unusual sight but, here we are: one of the few "honey rhythm" scores (ie: songs with multiple beat stanza legths) coming out in Taiko as a top-starred challenge to test (and on all difficulties, at that)! The cluster play is also one to match both the 12/12-1/16-1/24 charting with a scary 250 BPM average value that is sure to throw off many a first-timer out there.
