More on that later...
Cotton Candy Ei-Ei-Oh! Ruby Kurosawa (CV: Ai Furihata) from Aquors/Love Live! Sunshine!!
コットンキャンディえいえいおー！／黒澤ルビィ(CV:降幡 愛) from Aqours「ラブライブ！サンシャイン!!」より
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro (Y4) |
 |
★3 (137) |
★5 (250) |
★6 (453) |
★8 (695) |
- |
168-169
lleiei (Love Live - Cotton Candy Ei-Ei-Oh!)It's been an eternity since we've had some talk about the Love Live! franchise around here... and the Taiko landscape in general- about 3000 days since the mainstay series got some arcade-exclusive representation with Snow halation and Angelic Angel, both perma-removed on arcade grounds to boot!
This additional foray into the multimedia franchise comes in form of a very popular tracks sung by one of the idols coming from one of the main series's branches: Love Live! Sunshine!! (ラブライブ！サンシャイン!!), originating from the eponyumous Anime show of the same name by animation studio Sunrise, airing in two seasons between the years 2016-2017. The premise of the show is the same one as the original anime's of which we've already talked about during former SotW duty shifts: a private high school is about to be shut down and a group of its girls decide to band together as an idol group in order to raise funds and thus preventing its closure. This time around, the push to get things started is the popularity of the same-universe idol unit μ's from the original Love Live! series, leading to the formation of the 9-girls unit Aquours (read as 'aqua'), of which the red-haired Ruby Kurosawa is one of its members.
Cotton Candy Ei-Ei-Oh! is one of Ruby Kurosawa's image songs, with longtime Love Live! lyricist Aki Hata (畑亜貴) penning its words and the nicknamed TAKAROT singlehandedly composing and arranging the track, fashioning it after the quirky denpa music style. The song's popularity is not to be underestimated: the original MV release of September 21st, 2020 (coinciding with the same Ruby's in-universe birthday) has piled up over a million views in its first 10 days of online availability alone, and look at how high does it fare now! On the same day, it was also released the solo album including the song for the first time: Kurosawa Ruby First Solo Concert Album, listing it as its final song. This was also the only solo song in LL franchise to be played live for the cross-franchise live collaboration with the iDOLM@STER series, with end-2023's Ijigen Fes IDOLM@STER★♥Love Live! Uta Gassen (異次元フェス アイドルマスター★♥ラブライブ！歌合戦) concert.
Now that we're done with the core music trivia, let's address the elephant in the room that made me push this very feature a bit further down the year, something that it's closely tied with the live-service side of companion media for the Love Live! franchise as a whole. The year 2023 has seen the closure of many a long-running music gacha game around the series, most prominent of which being the original Love Live! School idol festival from 2013 and its semi-follow-up ALL STARS from 2019, all in anticipation for the coming of the original game's full sequel Love Live! School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! (ラブライブ！スクールアイドルフェスティバル2), debuting on April 2023 in Japan after several delays and planned for a Global release in early 2024, including the same Cotton Candy Ei-Ei-Oh! among its playable songs (link). The game's original server run was shut down with a planned end-March 2024 end-of-service window, leading most to believe that its Global release was pre-emptively axed altogether... until this one tweet was posted online, infamously making the rounds online for simultaneoulsy announcing a gacha game's release date together with its end-of-service day, set to roughly three months later. Seven days after said tweet, we got the Taiko Team blog entry announcement of a really popular Love Live-related song debuting alongside an arrangement of music from one of the most popular gacha games out there in recent memory and can you see why I've waited THIS long to talk about this?!
Difficulty-wise, this is an Oni challenge most equatable to the one of the iconic Bad Apple!! arrangement from Touhou shores, both mainly-1/16 songs that rely on longer clusters half-away through and small bits of 1/12 charting near the end, with today's pick getting a slight edge over the more generous Max Combo count.
