Unwelcome School (MRM REMIX)
Mitsukiyo Remixed by Morimori Atsushi/Blue Archive
ミツキヨ Remixed by モリモリあつし
モバイルゲーム「ブルーアーカイブ」より
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro (Y4) |
 |
★5 (277) |
★7 (468) |
★8 (676) |
★9 (985) |
★10 (1244) |
190
???Well, this sure is a shocker to see, considering how it's not even a week since I penned a certain shared sentiment across Taiko Time editors about the low variety in the Game Music department as of late... Doubly so to me, considering how I myself have started playing its source game just last month and here it is- joining the Taiko no Tatsujin fanfare from the front door! As usual, no bias of sorts has to be wielded while reporting on the source of things across these lines, so let's go with a quick overview to get things started.
Originally released on February 2021 in Japan with gacha developer Yostar as its publisher, Blue Archive (ブルーアーカイブ) is a RTS gacha game from the gaming branch of South Korean development company Nexon, which self-published the game for its later releases in the Americas/Europe/Korea (November 2021) and in China on August last year. The game is set in the academic city of Kivotos, where the player has been summoned by the president of its General Student Council as a teacher and lone advisor of Schale, an extrajuridical organization founded with the aim of leading to conflict resolutions across the many schools of the city. With the sudden disappearance of the same General Student Council's president and the hike of criminal activities all across Kivotos, Schale's advisor is called to ask help to the city's many students for battles and impart them orders from afar with a unique tablet-looking artifact known as the (please don't laugh) Shittim Chest, with which they can activate the skills of the same on-field students in real time, as well as ranged-combat-versed ones that are helping from afar.
In tone with many other games in the gacha-based scenario a-la Puzzle & Dragons (or even the early year of music gaming series like Groove Coaster), the entirety of the Blue Archive score has been shouldered by a small handful of people since the very beginning, the musical bulk of which is made of character themes that are also used in different story-reading scenarios as the situation calls for it. This also happens to be the case for the nicknamed music director Mitsukiyo (ミツキヨ; Twxtter)'s Unwelcome School, which is generally employed for the rise of wacky/chaotic story scenarios but actually starts out as the theme song of Rikuhachima Aru, a 16-aged student who defected the regular courses of the Gehenna Academy with her closest friends in order to run a freelance Fixer office for underhanded gunslinging ops, under the name of Handyman/Problem Solver 68. The four girls of Problem Solver 68 -Aru, Haruka, Kayoko and Mutsuki- also appear on Taiko-related promotional materials with one establishing shot coming straight out of the source game, with the girls-lead Fixer office being introduced during the game's first main story chapter with that same snapshot.
Rather than by virtue of the neo-released game's popularity alone, a good chunk of what made Unwelcome School among the most popular tracks from Blue Archive is the song itself aiding to the online resurgeance of one Internet meme from 2018, by playing a song's beginning on a stylophone only to blast out the original piece after a blunt "LET'S GO!" shout. This currently-9+ million-views clip from a Japanese YT user not only did the heavy-lifting in bringing back such a meme in style for a foreign audience, but by proxy it positively impacted on the source game's popularity reach in return, with many a composer online trying their mettle in rearranging the bombastic tune (most of the time paying tribute to the Western meme with "Let's go!" shouts of sorts, too!). Even Asian music-game-familiar artists couldn't help themselves these past two years, from Tanchiky (Diving Drive in Taiko) to t+pazolite! This is also the unique frame where Morimori Atsushi's take on Unwelcome School fits in, with the original video upload's posting date going as back as November 2022.
Taiko's greeting to such an unwelcoming track's arrangement is with notes-loaded charts leaning on the 1/16 beat dominance and capping the star limit on anything but the regular Oni mode. Musical-notation charting is at its finest on this song with none of these wacky custom-scrolling shenanigans so dear to modern top-dog Oni/Ura charts, so to figure out in advance the xilophone-lead and disc-scratching portions of the song is part on solving the riddle that is to perform the Ura Oni's hardest sections... With those nasty 24ths cluster hybrids, however, clearing them is another matter altogether! Although it was originally advertised to be coming to Asian Nijiiro cabinets as a same-day launch (link), user reports are instead novering how the song is not available outside of Japan just yet, perhaps due to some update-related issue or something of the likes. Eventually, general Asia players managed to have the song playable the day later, on February 8th, so... I guess they got a little bit extra time to study the latest Ura demon in advance!
