This ending March's Ura feature is less for the faint of heart... and moreso for the faint of belly! It's also the often-unsung hero of one sound company's collaborative efforts with Taiko no Tatsujin's arcade branch from the "Taiko 0" generation's latter end.
Hito no Okane de Yakiniku o Shokushitai! INSPION Special Collaboration
人のお金で焼肉を食したい！／INSPIONスペシャルコラボ
| Game | Genre |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC0 B RC |  | ★3 80 | ★5 246 | ★6 408 | ★7 498 | ★10 829 |
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insp29 (INSPION - Yakiniku, with 29='niku')Music video
We've heard plenty of Japanese barbecue parties thanks to the infamous IOSYS doujin circle across the years, specifically in 2014 and ten years later (more on that here). Little known fact, however, is that we could enjoy some yakiniku action across original songs inbetween the two years, out of a collaborative effort between Bandai Namco's musicians and the talents from the then-emerging sound unit INSPION, alongside a few external actors lending a helping hand via contest means...
Indeed, shortly after the release of the company-name-bearer song and the rock-styled remix of Yuugen no Ran, a particular song audition was held as a two-party joint project, known as the '2017 Special Autumn Audition'; contestants were given an instrumental track from both BNSI and INSPION artists and people all over the Web were called to give their most unique spin as a YouTube video within the application video, be it with singing on their own or by creating an original music video montage, making up the open audition's "Best Vocal" and "Best Creative" submission categories. The instrumental song given bears the same name as what we can find on ongoing Taiko arcades nowadays: Hito no Okane de Yakiniku o Shokushitai (lit. 'I Want to Eat Yakiniku with Someone Else's Money!') and the selected top winners -alongside the "Best Vocal" awards who would sing the final song- were all invited in Tokyo to have a luxurious grilled meat eating party with all people making the song on both INSPION and BNSI's isles. Said dinner was all billed on the tab of Inspion's very own CEO Kuramochi Takeshi (倉持武志), so you could REALLY say the lucky winners could fulfill the wish that is this very song's title! Photos from said yakiniku dinner also made it to the official MV you can watch on YouTube as well.
In the end, despite the initial promise of one Best Vocals winner in the original audition page, two different people were ultimately picked out as vocalists for the song: Kuwamura Takuro (桑村拓朗) and the nicknamed Okaka (おかか). The lyricist role, on the other hand, went to the winner of the "Best Creative" category Desaku (デ作), thanks to the same contest entry that was also worth Okaka's winning vocalist seat! The same video's lyrics body was adopted as a result, minus the 'MEET' typos that were also jokingly highlighted in the finished collaboration song's MV! Desaku themself took advantage of the celebratory yakiniku dinner in order to relay what one could call "Donder public service duties", by directly telling to Etou and Takeuchi about the occurrence of a nasty visual bug that was affecting 3rd-gen Taiko arcades at the time.
On to the main music-making body, now! Composition and arrangement duties were relayed to INSPION's Yuichi Tsuchiya (土屋裕一), formerly a Konami inhouse composer behind the music of several console-exclusive songs for bemani rhythm games (mainly beatmania IIDX and pop'n music) as well as the earlier entries in the company's long-running Winning Eleven soccer games series. Most of the sound-backing talents were from Bandai Namco itself, barring the guest-drummer Tamu Murata (むらたたむ); Linda AI-CUE at the flexatone, Taku Inoue as the DJ, Torine with theremin backing and the sound engineering left to Yuji Masubuchi (credited under the 'Professor Marvy' alias from the inside-jokey Audio Deka minidrama series), with Taiko Team lead Etou directing the whole process and recording.
Back as an arcade exclusive after RHYTHM CONNECT bit the dust, this song's difficulty between upper charts shapeshifts from a 1/16-pure challenge with note couples a-plenty, up to an averagely-paced accuracy gauntlet with a few 1/24 killer streams at the start and near the end, courtesy of notecharter sentai member Emukepi (えむけぴ). It's arguably one of the easier-side 10-star challenges you're to clear from that era, but the accuracy-mining 1/24 cluster action was deemed spicy enough to be che challenge starter for a couple of Ranking Dojo challenges across the years: once in the Emukepi-chart-gauntlet from Green Version's Gaiden trials ("Challenge from the Taiko Team! ②") and another time in 2022, as the Meijin main course's first song.
