After last week's feature from the very first arcade game, how about one from the very first console release to boot?
Osakana Tengoku ---Old---
おさかな天国
| Game | Genre |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PS2 1 | J-POP ( ) | ★1 83 | ★5 173 | ★2 306 | ★5 306 | - |
fish (Osakana Tengoku)Osakana Tengoku ---New---
おさかな天国
おさかな天国
| Game | Genre | | | |  / | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC4 | J-POP () | ★1 83 | ★5 173 | ★3 306 | ★4 318 | - |
| AC5 | Variety ( ) | ★1 83 | ★5 173 | ★4 306 | ★5 318 | - |
fish (Osakana Tengoku)We've started the 'long-running Taiko trends' talk last week and for this one there's another one that has stuck into the console installments since the very beginning! While the joys of the game center in your home has been a strong selling point for home console entries across the years, console Taikos more than often had their share of tracks that were released there for the first time, eventually bounding into later arcade Taiko entries. Session de Dodon ga Don, the first PlayStation 2 Taiko title, has had five songs to warrant such a treatment and with the other four being featured in other song features on our part for a long time (Anton Dvorak's From the New World, the Mojipittan Medley, Susume! Drill and STEPPING WIND from Klonoa 2), this is the only "og-console-debut" track for us to talk about!
Osakana Tengoku (lit. 'Fish Heaven') is a campaign song for the Central Seafood Center of the Japan Fisheries Cooperative Association (JF Zengyoren), bearing an underground popularity burst across the year. At first, it was released on cassette tape in 1991 and played only in the fresh fish sections of supermarkets and department stores nationwide as part of the campaign, with orders for the song for private users only being accepted as a mail-order-only-item, both on the original medium and -later on- as a CD single from 1996. However, between 1997-1998 the song had received a wider surge of popularity after being featured in a few choice broacastings, from Radio Kansai's Seishun Radiomania (青春ラジメニア) and TV Asahi's flagship variety show Detective! Knight Scoop (more about it here, for another song from such show) and eventually received a proper commercial maxi single release by Pony Canyon in 2002, reportedly selling about 400k copies statewide.
Another album release for this song (a cover version, that is) was made for one of the Taiko series' very first sondtrack albums (Taiko no Tatsujin Red) as its lone Variety-genre-labeled tune, profiling the original artists for it: Hiromi Shibaya (柴矢裕美) as the singer, her husband Toshikiko Shibaya (柴矢俊彦) as its composer, Teruhiko Inoue (井上輝彦) for lyrics and Tomoaki Ishigami (石上智明) for the overall arrangement. Charting the song for Taiko no Tatsujin means was the nick-named Kohara (こはらー), someone who hasn't been mentioned in Taiko Team-related media that much (only one time in fact, back at the old development blog days) but that also played a big role into Taiko games' inception, coming up with the original score calculations and the Soul gauge pace in performance play between games.
Being a console-first track, this was one of the first songs in Taiko gaming to have a fully-charted four difficulty set, although the original release on Session de Dodn ga Don has the same notechart for both Muzukashii and Oni modes. This was rectified in the later Taiko 4 and 5 releases, where a unique Oni/Donderful mode mas made by simply adding a few Kat notes and changing a few ending clusters with a final Kat at the end... okay there's not that much of a change, but there is a change the same!
