Today's song is one of the latest entries that both Switch veterans and the 120 FPS-nauts of today can enjoy!
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DF (MP) PTB |
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★3 (77) |
★4 (143) |
★5 (256) |
★7 (388) |
- |
166
kouka9 [based on the JP reading of 'Ghost in the Shell' (Koukaku Kidoutai, with 'ku':9)]Starting with today's Song of the Week piece, we're replacing the 'NS2' abbreviation for later entries with the more-general 'DF' to group every version of Donderful Festival out there for song-crediting means, leaving notes on the few songs that are exclusive to either the original Nintendo Switch version of the game or the multiplatform release that made its debut in this ending week. And we're making such changes while spotlighting a returning song from an Apple-device-exclusive title, of all places!!
What we have here is the first opening theme to the early-2000s Anime transposition based on mangaka Masamune Shirow (士郎正宗, art name for Masanori Ota)'s seinen cyberpunk magnum opus: Ghost in the Shell. The original manga chapters were collected from 1989 to 1997 across Kodansha's editions of Young Magazine, telling stroes of a distant year 2029 where the use of body prosthetics has become a common-place practice, focusing on the investigations of the fictional Public Security Section 9 of the Niihama prefecture, employing a number of former police detectives and military soliders shedding lights in such an evolving world. Most of the stories follow the point of view of its commanding figure: Major Motoko Kusanagi, voiced in most media by the renowned and beloved voice actress Atsuko Tanaka (田中敦子), who sadly passed away earlier this year.
Rather than rethreding the story from the original manga chapters and the 1995 GitS movie, Production I.G's two-seasons Ghost in the Shell Anime series of 2002-2005 tell an alternate story starring the same cast Public Security Section 9 cast behind its related investigations, now set in the year 2030. The first 26-episodes season's focal point lies on an underlying pharmaceutical conspiracy across Japan, as a skilled hacktivist known as the "Laughing Man" reveals to Major Kusanagi the personal discovery of the Japanese government collusing with micromachine-manufacturing companies to suppress the information spread of a cure to the ongoing cyberization disease due to the use of body prosthetics, so that the same micromachines companies could highly profit by selling their more expensive treatments on its stead. The Laughing Man would spring the story in motion by kidnapping one of those companies' owners to coerce a reveal on such a plot on live television, inspiring countless people to start emulating his antics to uncover conspiratorial secrets laying dormant, thus causing the "Stand Alone Complex" phenomenon the Anime series as a whole is titled after. Much like the original manga run's stories, the Stand Alone Complex universe has rooted the seeds for a few lucky transpositions and direct followups, including a few OVAs, a few Bandai-endorsed videogames for PS2/PSP and a rather-lackluster MMORPG from Nexon -subtitled First Assault Online- which only lasted from 2015 to 2017.
The Stand Alone Complex first season's opening theme was one of the few tracks not to be composed by the Cowboy Bebop-renowned Yoko Kanno, but instead handled by Russian vocaloist/pianist Olga "Origa" Vitalevna Yakovleva in conjunction with Japanese lyricist Shanti Snyder, giving life to a unique piece with vocals in both languages (not to mention Latin, too!). That doesn't necessarily translate into something that is brought over in some symbolic way to its Taiko charts, ultimately making of inner universe one of the many Oni challenges being pushy for the average Anime-tunes-enjoyer while still not going beyond the 3-note, monocolor cluster approach.
