TENSEI -Kiyoshi ga Matsu Tsuwamono- Reincarnated Wada Kiyoshi prod. Licht Tsuboi (BNSI)
転生(TENSEI)-喜与志が待つ強者-(表譜面)／転生和田喜与志 prod.坪 井リヒト(BNSI)
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★3 (232) |
★5 (195) |
★6 (373) |
★8 (611) |
★10 (999) |
80-200
???Ever since the franchise's 20th anniversary, the Taiko no Tatsujin series has had an up-and-coming arcade tradition of marking such a milestone with a song making its debut on February 21st, the day the first arcade model was publicly relesed to Japanese game centers. First it was Todoroke! Taiko no Tatsujin in 2021 and while having a "leap year" or sorts, such trend came back with last year's Yell Ex Makina! and this here song. You'll see we're having a lot more parallels than just the shared composer between these two!
The 2023 arcade anniversary song was all for the arcade-spawn character Makina from the ongoing Nijiiro family line's AI Battle Performance mode, whereas this year's image song was for a long-recurring Taiko character inlore... as shown in quite the arcade-exclusive geddup! Always in 2023, the month-long Aoharu no Tatsujin event for April Fools has let people use one of five characters from the Taiko series as alternate-art drum avatar replacements, with one of those being the "Reincarnated Wada Kiyoshi", a younger-self version of everyone's favorite Taiko granpa. Come last February 21st, here's a high-speed metal enka playable tune to call his own, also courtesy of the 22th arcade anni song's maker Licht Tsuboi (坪 井リヒト)! No dice, as of now, for what concerns the true identity of the Wada Kiyoshi singer, so hopefully a future OST release credit mention might shed some lights about it in the future.
As revealed through an X post (yeah, they're finally getting rid of "Twitter" in the address bars for good, so we oughta adapt to the change), additional guitar and bass backing was supplied by one unregularly-recurring collaborator for original songs across the series: Takayuki Ikezawa (池澤孝之; X profile), sound designer and owner of his own studio, Nephono. Born in the Tokigi prefecture in 1976, he spent a number of years with jazz music sperimentation as an abroad musician in the United States from 1999, only to start his own original works upon returning in Japan for a number of fields with no genre-bounding commissions, from J-Pop to games, from movies to TV commercials and even online-based venues like web comics and the sorts. As a commissioned talent, we've mostly heard of Ikezawa as a backing-instrumentals artist for many a guitar-lead tunes (including Akuukan Yuuei ac12.5, Yumeiro Coaster, Ignis Danse and RIDGE RACER STEPS), but he's been picking up some actual vocal-powered jobs for Namco's long-running drumming games, starting from the launch of Donderful/Rhythm Festival (link) for which he lent his voice to the debuting Namco Original Kappa no Sara wa Konna ni mo.
By aping the bracketed portion of the song's own title, those who want themselves to be treated as "The Strong Man Waiting for Kiyoshi" have a choice of two different Oni-flavored trials to overcome: a taxing 1/16-dominnant 8-star romp or a more aggressive, three-digits-limited note bearer where 1/24 spikes and scrolling changes play an higher role than ever... both for tracks where 200 BPM is what you get to play around for the longest time!
