In light of the unfortunate news, today's feature will pick up the remaining Taiko-transplanted songs from Toriyama-inspired works we've yet to talk about, be it with Song Series Showcase posts or former SotW entries. There's also room for something extra on my side, so to quote one of iconic lines from its involved work,
"You're gonna love this. Trust me..."
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC8 PS2 6 |
 |
★3 (87) |
★4 (136) |
★6 (249/224/202) |
★7 (336) |
- |
| Plus/STH (iOS only) |
|
★3 (87) |
★4 (136) |
★5 (249/224/202) |
★7 (336) |
- |
132
arare (Arale)Over the years, we've seen plenty of tracks from Akira Toriyama's better-known works and contributions to the shonen manga and videogaming sphere, respectively with Dragon Ball media and Dragon Quest videogames. None of that, however, would have come to fruition if it wasn't for an earlier work of his own, garnering the same an unprecedented following and helping to shape the medium from the early 80ies and going forward. One series that -even back then- has managed to amass over 35 million sales across all printed media... 20 of which were in its first year alone, with no complementing animated series to support it!
Debuting on Weekly Shonen Jump from February 1980 and running for four years straight, the Dr. Slump (Dr.スランプ) manga series was greenlit after a relatively- popular one-shot story from the year before and having faced nothing but comic pitches rejections from his editor Kazuhiko Torishima, for a year and a half. The greenlit idea was about having a story of a doctor with a robot companion of his making, the latter eventually becoming the actual main character over time. What ultimately came out of it is a science-fiction comedy series set in the fictional Penguin Village, among whose residents we find the inventor Senbei Norimaki and Arale, an energetic robot girl of his creation with a naive attitude and superhuman strength. The series plays out in a slice-of-life fashion with the other Penguin Village residents, with scenery/characters looks and apparels being based out of either Western culture parodies or the manga run's own staffers (the same Senbei being written as a caricature of Toriyama himself!).
From April 1981 up until February 1986, Toei Animation has produced a popular 240+-episodes Anime transposition of the series by the title of Dr. Slump Arale-Chan, with a remake/remastered one being made in the 90ies' tail end by the same animation studio, simply called Dr. Slump. The series has received a sizeable amount of material after its original manga run's end between light novels, a series of videogame entries/cameos and 11 different movies (most of these well before the 2000s!), but the most noteable facets about its run were about its comclusion, with the mangaka wanting to end its run in 6 months despite the huge popularity, due to the restrictions of the comedy-gag setups; his editor Torishima eventually persuaded him to go on with the series, promising to let another of his manga ideas to be greenlit if Dr.Slump production would still go strong and the next idea would have proven to be more interesting. With such clauses set in stone, Toriyama notoriously went to write Dr.Slump chapters from 7 down to 5 days each and it only took 3 months after his beloved Arale-centric story's conclusion for his next idea to be produced and guaranteed a seat for a later Shonen Jump serialization. You know, a certain Something-Ball series...
Opening the vast majority of the first Dr. Slump Anime's episodes (1-194 and the final four) is Wai Wai World, performed by renowned anisong singer Ado Mizumori (水森亜土) and Koorogi'73 (こおろぎ'73), a former unit notorious for vocal backing on Super Robot and Super Sentai/Kamen Rider songs. While the Taiko-ported version is based on a cover, we got the same original musical base by Shunsuke Kikuchi (菊池俊輔), originally arranged by Akihiko Takashima (たかしまあきひこ) and lyricized by Asa Kawagishi (河岸亜砂). No matter if you pick the singluar arcade bearing the song, the lone PS2 game to host it or the "Dai Hitto! Mune-Atsu Pack" for the soon-discontinued Taiko Plus app (only on its former iOS version), you'll still be greeted with an upbeat 1/16 pure chart, with no special markers or other funky gimmick of sorts to keep you busy, only with a slight rerating for its mobile playable port.
Genkai Toppa x Survivor Dragon Ball Super
限界突破×サバイバー／「ドラゴンボール超」より
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC0 Y PS4 NS2 (MP) xBox (DL) Plus/STH RC |
  (ACN only) |
★3 (198) |
★3 (94) |
★3 (182) |
★3 (198) |
★8 (523/513) |
187.5 dbcgen (Dragon Ball-Cho - Genkai Toppa)From the first work in Taiko-chronological order of release of its source material... down to the very last one! What we have here is the second opening theme to 2015-2018's Dragon Ball Super run, succeeding Chouzetsu☆Dynamic! from episodes 77 to 130. As we've already digressed upon this series about 5 years ago with the first OP theme's own SotW entry, here we'll be looking more at the song at hand instead.
Genkai Toppa (lit. 'Limit Break') x Survivor is the first anisong release from enka singer Kiyoshi Hikawa (氷川きよし), the artist known as the "Prince of Enka" whose other Taiko song contribution -Hatsukoi Ressha (初恋列車)- is still a 7th-Taiko-arcade exclusive to this very day! The track was composed by Takafumi Iwasaki (岩崎貴文) -already maker of Dragon Ball Kai's Dragon Soul- with arrangling and lyricizing duties belonging to Hiromasa Kagoshima (籠島裕昌) and Yukinujo Mori (森雪之丞), the latter of which also worked on the lyrics sheet for the other Dragon Ball Super OP.
With the single garnering a Gold status and peaking 3rd at weekly Oriconcharts, this track's Taiko legacy is just as robust with more active song ports down the line for the Prince of Enka's second foray into the series. While the eye-catching pecularity of the KFMO set is the shared 3* rating across the whole board, one could argue labeling its oni to just 3 stars might be lowballing a bit, consideing the energetic pace and the too-close-for-comfort 1/16 charting for single note strings than what the rating would normally lead others to believe. Of course, no issues on rating with thrice the amount of notes are to be leveled for its Ura Oni chart!
As revealed in some of the earliest Taiko Team blog entries of the currently-active branch (link), BNSI Taiko charter Yamaguchi (ヤマグチ) has built a dedicated branched-paths gameplay that would let players reach its Master Route only if its players will manage to "collect 7 magical balls", true-and-tried to the popular franchise's reoccurring way of summoning a magical wish-granting dragon. With the lone branching path being the Go-Go Time portion's start, the unique branching condition is clear: to perfectly hit (no 'Good' hits) all 7 giant Don notes that appear in the note stanzas right before it- nothing else matters! Because of the peculiar setup to this branching condition, no Advanced Route is to be found here.
-------------------------------------------------
Hikari no Tabi Dragon Ball Z: Bardock - The Father of Goku光の旅
At... this point, we've ran out of Taiko-linked Toriyama content to do. No, really- between other features on the website, we've covered it up all to this day, so to "go even further beyond" on Taiko-related stuff can't be done. However, considering the magnitude of the mangaka's works on personal-bias-unrelated levels (and ESPECIALLY in light of its place across Bandai Namco-related media as a whole), I still wanna close out with a "Wish List"-like feature with a track from the more popular Dragon Ball Z generation of content, one than given the circumstances might be doubly fitting the same to read along as the whole music plays out. Really, this is also how the idea of the 'Song of the Week' articles came to be: to absorb trivia while being absorbed by the music as one listens along. What better moment to do something like that on a more somber note, I say?
What we have here is the ending theme to the first TV special of the wildly-popular Dragon Ball Z Anime run, going by the rather-long original title of Dragon Ball Z: A Lonesome, Final Battle – The Father of Z Warrior Kakarot, who Challenged Frieza. Originally aired on October 17th, 1990, this special acts as a prequel to the entire series as we follow the final days of Planet Vegeta and its resident race en large -the Saiyans- under the point of view of Bardock, a low-level solider who attempts to rebel against the foreign Saiyan race overseer Frieza once he finds out his ultimate aim of actually wiping out the same whole race, due to a received premonition of a 'Super Saiyan' being the one to kill Frieza in the future. The special's success has lead to the creation of a single-tankobon acting as a sequel to this story -Episode of Bardock- followed by an OVA by the same name in 2011.
Performed by the iconic CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA singer Hironobu Kageyama (影山ヒロノブ) with backing from the nicknamed KŪKO (Waffle), Hikari no Tabi (lit. 'Journey of Light') is one of the DBZ songs to receive an English cover from non-English/American sources, when the Bardock TV special came in general English-speaking Asian (somewhat), thanks to the English dub from the Philippines-based Creative Products Corporation. Despite the actual TV special never made it to receive a dub in the Philippines, the same base music from Chiho Kiyooka (清岡千穂) ended up receiving an original English-based cover performed by the Age of Wonders act, with Edith Gallardo and Moy Ortiz handling composing and re-arranging duties for this one version. What follows in this next paragraph goes into the movie's ending spoilers as a way to explain why I did pick up this one song for the occasion, but even without being familiar with the source material, I'd suggest to give it a peep anyway, as one could draw parallels of some kind to Akira Toriyama's death and what has left to his fans all over the world.
----------------------------------------------------
Hikari no Tabi (an abridged version of it, that is) is played shortly after the destruction of Planet Vegeta and its inhabitants, as the same Bardock disintegrates with it and a "future sight" curse of his being contracted earlier in the movie's events kicks in. In this vision, implanted as a way to punish him by making him look at "his race's death" when he's about to die, Bardock instead finds the only figment of solace he's ever felt in the movie's events, as he can actually see his own son Kakarot (or Son Goku, as he goes by on Earth), actually making it out from Planet Vegeta's destruction, growing up and ending up with a faceoff against the villain who wants to eradicate his whole race, possibly gunning for an indirect revenge.
Sure thing, I don't claim to know what's inside people's heads in the event similar near-death situations happen in real life (let alone about people I have never met in my life!), but for whose who truly feel saddened by the loss of such an influencial individual, I hope Akira Toriyama could have had a similar mental flash of "what will become" of his legacy moments before leaving this world, be it with the franchise's integrity, how existing or future fans will look at it with the desrved respect, and not just Dragon Ball-related media. Coming from Italy myself and from the same generation Toriyama's works were starting to get popularized via cable TV, I can confidently tell you how his works' animated ports have been my country's most-influential introduction to Japanese animation in general of my own generation -possibly elsewhere, too!-, so there's really no fear on whether those "legacy future sights" to be good-spirited or not- option 2 is clearly out of the table!
To those profoundly saddened by Mr. Toriyama's death, I extend my wishes for you keep your chin up and try enduring the loss over time. As portrayed several times in the flagship Dragon Ball series, reoccurring characters being left at death's door who manage to endure critical situations, no matter how low the odds are at recovering, will end up steeled-up and more resolute in the aftermath. There's some truth in that logic to real-life happenings as well, not limited by strength-related capabilities either- time's passage works the same for everyone else, so to take heed of the fondness of a departed one and their exploits is sure to bear more fruit as opposed to laying down forever in the dumps of sadness.
See you later.
