Among other things, this ending week has seen the first steps of official Taiko SNS towards the release of the 2025 main Ranking Dojo's final steps, with the usual multi-song teaser grid for potential candidates on the pre-Tatsujin courses.
Let's welcome this course of action with one of the songs from last year's final stretch! This one was the final hurdle to overcome 2024's Meijin course.
| Game | Genre |
|
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC Nijiiro (Y5) |  |
★5 262 |
★7 406 |
★8 615 |
★9 905 |
★10 1159 |
135-270
???Ryo 'siromaru' Sakata (酒田遼; X account/SoundCloud)'s Namco Original debut came in grand style as one of last year's upper-echelon Dojo Ranking new demons to face, roughly eight years after the Taiko franchise getting intertwined in a desperate conflict with a ruthless enemy, for the first time.
We've already given quite the insight on the author in question for that hyperlinked feature, but today's inclusion lets us dig into the works made under another of his aliases: INNOCENT NOIZE. This is most-commonly spotted for music game works outside the collaborational SOUND VOLTEX endeavors of his and mostly for solo works, touching both arcade grounds with CHUNITHM (Devastating Blaster) and the long-dead crossbeats series from Capcom (Hervor) as well as the mobile-affine scene, most prominently on Arcaea with the song Metallic Punisher, also transplanted to Taito's Groove Coaster mobile/Switch entries later on. This same Irregular Clock is a work spawn out of other Clock-related songs signed as INNOCENT NOIZE: the also-on-crossbeats 14th Clock and Reverse Clock, the latter staying as a doujin-album-exclusive from 2018, as the first track and title-giver of siromaru's Comiket 94 album release. Much like the fellow Ranking-Dojo-Original-debuttant Chroma, siromaru is working as a side activity on game development, with a puzzle-platformer title in the works since 2022. Wonder of all wonders, this is also titled after some sort of clock -Rebirth Clock- and had its own space at the just-ended Comiket 106 (link), in playable form no less!
Author's impressions of Irregular Clock were delivered and read out as part of last year's Taiko World Championship finals broadcast, in anticipation of its release on Nijiiro cabs a couple of months later. For the occasion, siromaru pens how this song is to be treated as "the genealogy of some of the songs done in the past", something reflected both in its irregular rhythms and in the unique blend of aliases for its crediting. It's also via these notes that we come to know how the guitar lead is played by another performer: the nicknamed Zero (零 -zero-), already on its own behind a fistul of music-game-affine songs in foreign soil, mostly for bemani music games in conjunction with one or more extra artists (Scarlet Pinheel; Kakuen among many) but also for solo works, every now and then (Knights Assault).
Chart-wise, the easiest way to compare Irregular Clock's difficulty potential is to pit it next to Namco Original Tabaneito, another BPM speed deemon mostly made of fast 1/16 charting whose scroll-bar pace gets accordingly adjusted across the play. Oni and Ura Oni can be directly seen as the younger and bigger brothers to Tabaneito's Oni chart, with a pure 1/16 charting approach for the former and more-eclectic cluster mixtures for the latter, peppered with quick Kat doubles to mirror the quick Don couples from easier Oni picks like the Theme of Alexander. Despite the relatively-lower note density due to the playing time's duration, it is still a beyond-1100-notes chart, so a trained drum-hitting energy management is advised!
