| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC12/12.5 AC12 Asia |
 |
★3 (67) |
★3 (97) |
★4 (175) |
★6 (276) |
- |
116
dancec (Happy Dance Collection)For today's song feature, I need to bring you back to the mindset of the mid-2000s gaming landscape. The Nintendo Wii was almost 2 years old and the simplistic approach to videogames that a motion-control-sensitive device resembling your average TV has wowed the world between both seasoned thumb blisterers and a newfound audience more in tune to mimicking real-world gestures into a number of intuitive scenarios to emulate. Among these, one of the most popular genres for the casual market was dancing games (you can tell, considering Ubisoft making games for it until 2020) and for a few years that meant everyone throwing their cent into tapping this gaming share... Pac-Man's house included!
It's in these fields that the Japan-exclusive Happy Dance Collection comes into play, releasing on October 23rd in 2008. Just like the aforementioned Just Dance series, the game is played by holding the movement-detecting controller (te Wii Remote, in our case) and mimick the idol-trainee's hand gestures on screen to score points, all the while collecting money to unlock new clothing and customization flairs for the in-screen idol to wear in stage plays. Happy Dance Collection included 25 different songs, most of which being J-Pop/Anime cover versions that were featured/would be featured into Taiko no Tatsujin games later on (to cite a few, Cutie Honey, a couple PreCure songs, Ai Uta and even GO MY WAY!! from the Idolm@ster series!).
The game also has four original songs on its own, each performed by the game's aspiring-idol protagonist Ai voiced by Nana Mizuki (水樹奈々). Shooting Star is one of those four originals alongside Yoni wa Hana - Yume ni Hoshi (世には花・夢に星), Brand New Heart (ブランニュー ハート) and Sky High! (スカイハイ！) but in a rather bizarre move, the song's arcade-only Taiko foray came with the song being translated in plain English instead of the Kana-friendly Japanese wording featured in its source game. It's even weirder considering how, at this point in time, both Happy Dance Collection and the Taiko titles hosting Shooting Star have never left Asia to begin with!
This rather-obscure music game transplant from inner fields comes with a 1/16-pure charting challenge for the just-initiated Oni players out there, with prenty of slow-flowing waggle room to have a tasting of more uncommon mid-length clusters as well as backbeat-based sequences alternating singles to couples to drum on. All of this with no big Don/Kat notes, no less!
