Often times it's quite easy to figure out what's in and what's out, but for some the demarcation line might be a little bit murkier...
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| AC Nijiiro (Y3) NS2 (MP) Plus/STH RC |
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★5 (236) |
★7 (373) |
★8 (522) |
★10 (819) |
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dobakb (Denonbu - Akiba 20XX)Time and again, if you hear from a Taiko fan about what kind of original songs they'd be asking for, chances are 'a new 2000 song' is going to be one of the most vouched options. While making new entries for Linda AI-CUE's iconic boss song lineage is not necessarily of a yearly happestance, every now and then we get songs from the same author (or songs heavilly involving pre-released 2000 songs) whose relation with the father series is put in question. Sure, you can have a fiendishly-difficult song in ≠MM whose title is a direct outlier for it NOT being part of the series, but you also have entries heavilly involving past songs like this ending year's Saitama 2000 mashup with Beat Mario's Help me, ERINNNNNN!!, which you can read about in our recently-updated 2000 Namco Original Showcase page. Other times, like with this here song, we have some lip service on both its title and song beginning, out to then become something completely on its own... while also being from the same 2000 series' driving force!
Originally announced on the March 2023 Taiko Team livestream session, this was the first song to come out of the second collaboration with Bandai Namco's DEN-ON-BU (電音部) multimedia project, premiering as a single release the month prior with separate instrumentals-only and acappella on toe. The song is performed by the Akiba district's girls from its Sotokanda Literature High School Club: Reina Hidaka (日高零奈), Kazune Shinonome (東雲和音) and Futaba Kayano (茅野ふたば), the same trio behind the song Hand Over which was our first SotW-based look into the crossing-over franchise (see here!).
While the '20XX' in the title and starting the song with a "All-In Carnival, Da-Don!" might lead one to think "it's just another Saitama 2000 all over again!", the reference network doesn't stop on that alone! For the song's chorus, in fact, a notable cancelled Bandai Namco game is namedropped at its very end: New Space Order, a title beginning development in 2004 and including the same Akihiko "Linda AI-CUE" Ishikawa (石川哲彦) as one of its few known staffers involved in its making. Using the general series-unifier of the United Galaxy Space Force franchise as the background frame to unite the timeline of several BanNam-developed videogame series across the ages (from Galaxian to Ridge Racer and even Ace Combat, just to name a few!), New Space Order was set up to be a real-time strategy title involving tank battles across the galaxy between four separate faction, the backstory of which being kickstarted in 2006/2007 via the game presentation at the '06 Tokyo Game Show and a dedicated web novel, only for the project to lay dormant ever since and getting officially canceled somewhere in 2009. Akiba 20XX also includes in its lyrics 'Starline' as a nod to the canned game's development team collective name -Project Starline- and elements of the same New Space Order's logo were also used to forge the Denonbu song's jacket art (namely the concentric circles on top of the smiling face at the center).
A rare feat for the Variety genre, here's one of three max-difficulty tracks for the genre for all of its available modes... and even rarer for modern Taiko gaming, a song whose 10-star Oni doesn't touch any other tempos beyond the conventional 1/16 stanza division! The one and only thing to be mindful about (aside from the -you know- frantic 200+ BPM cluster play near the end) are the jumpscare big notes appearing at double the regular scrolling speed throughout the play. The final speed crescendo can be a FC-breaker too, but with the gradual speed increases to set the mood, i'd be mostly for the final cluster intricacy moments!
